This looks like a solution in search of a problem.
A boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.
Coding is a creative process which requires a certain sense of craftsmanship, and a resume is like a buisseness card. It's an opportunity to express yourself and show of some of your skills and also your personal style and flavour.
Sending me a Latex, ASCII Art, Minimalist HMTL, Fancy HTML, JSON Chunk, tells me a lot about you as a dev and person already.
Defining a standard for resumes and then sending me a resume in said standard would also be impressive and cool for an individual resume that I receive. But once you take somebody elses standard and send it to me you'll just come across as boring.
But unless requested no one will send it as JSON. Rather they'll export to pdf/html utilizing one of hundred themes (https://jsonresume.org/themes/). Essentially the same thing everyone is doing when using LaTeX but now even easier to do.
Is “uses novel resume format” really a criteria for the role you’re hiring for? Will the candidate be designing novel resumes throughout their time in the role?
If not, disregarding candidates who just put their experience on a “plain” resume is cutting out a massive chunk of viable candidates so you can signal that you think your roles are above “plain” resumes.
No promotions, we all get paid the same. Everybody is doing their best, and it's a small company, hierarchies and different salaries add unnecessary overhead and friction.
If you have completely arbitrary hiring restrictions which have absolutely nothing to do with your ability to do the job then what other requirements will be hoisted on you?
I left it simple in the original comment so people could fill in the blank with their own witty ‘job requirements’.
If a job description says “must have custom designed resume”, that’s a hint not to apply. If I submit a standard resume and get rejected because “must have custom designed resume” is an undisclosed bar I was expected to clear, I just dodged a bullet.
I prefer jobs where the hiring focus is on hiring people who are good at the job, and using weird side challenges like “is your resume formatted uniquely enough” is a new variant of “not a culture fit” that I hadn’t heard before.
The meritocracy argument is usually brought up by people that are shitty colleagues. Personality is more important than being "good at your job", the latter improves with time and mentoring, the former usually doesn't.
I have the absolute opposite reaction when filtering resumes. I just want something plainly written on 1 page so I can get a feeling for your career. Why do I care if you can format a document in a pretty way? Has literally nothing to do with what a resume is which is explaining your experience and why you would be a good fit. Filtering by style seems like a great way to filter out great candidates
> A boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.
I could see the point of that approach for a creativity-driven position such as designers, advertisement, marketing, or even front-end development.
For hard technical roles, where substante over style is a mandatory and very basic competence, seems to be a sure way for you to filter out all the candidates you'd be looking for.
If you do backend and don't have any personal opinions about tooling, be it troff, man, pandoc, markdown, plaintext, or whatever,
then there's plenty of enterprise opportunity for you, but I personally don't want to work with you. So I think that it's actually a great filter. Maybe it's slightly biased towards candidates with high confidence in their own choices and opinions, but that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
A resume, for me, is used to communicate as clearly and as accessibly to as many people as possible about your work history and qualifications. We use them as a front line mechanism to filter candidates.
The problem with these approaches is they’re harmful to the goal of resumes while giving minimal signal for filtering. Oh, you know what JSON, HTML, or markdown happen to be? That’s a very limited signal you’re sending for your resume not being clear and accessible (to people and systems).
I also think your attitude may have been sensible in another market, but this one where demand outstrips engineering supply greatly? I could write my resume on crayons and still have people reach out.
Edit: You may also want to look into cover letters? It sounds like that’s what would solve your desire to get a unique, creative response from the candidate while they still maintain an accessible resume. This problem has been solved in other industries.
> A boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.
maybe i misunderstood, are you saying you judge candidates on the appearance of their resume, as opposed to the contents??
i always took the opposite view. the more effort in a resume the more desperate it seems. i keep a very basic resume , not even 1 full page and i base it around my current role, so experience is foremost.
It's not the apperance per se but the "spirit".
A very functional minimalistic resume is as good as a fancy design, what matter is that there is a underlying method/idea/attitude.
Of course the contents are just as important, but a candidate that provides a markdown file with the most important points in their career and their hobbies, is much more interesting to me than a word resume template that lists ever side job, languange, micro skill, scrum certificate and letter of recommendation.
Let's go one step further. Why send me a resume in English? Just be creative and use an elvish language. Or invent your own language. Don't just take a standard and try to use it to convey information.
Unless the role has a strong design component just use something simple and plain to present your skills and experience. Make it easy to understand what you can do for us. Thats the important part of the resume.
All those lists of skills and experiences are easily embellished.
Lists of dozens of programming languages, work experiences, and qualifications are a lot of noise that even the worst candidates can just add without any meaningful experience.
The document itself however tells a lot more about the person. It's impossible to fake, and the only truly objectively quantifiable metric of the whole resume.
An applicant that has a deep interest in ConLangs and wants to show that off in their resume sounds super awesome and would definitely get my approval for a fully paid trial run.
Pretty cool, though a bit biased because was already doing something similar myself using YAML instead. It allows you to have your resume in one easy-to-work-with format and then export it to whatever format you want (be it pdf or web or even plain text).
This has worked well for me. Having a big and diverse range of experiences in tech development and now applying for many different kinds of job this allows me to quickly make variations that emphasize some areas of experience and minimize or skip over skills and experiences that are not relevant to a particular job.
JSON standards for general-purpose data about real-world entities should really be based on JSON-LD and use meaningful properties as defined by well-known shared standards such as schema.org. Then there might actually be some chance for, say, a "JSON-LD resume format" to be useful for automated, programmatic analysis.
I love this. It makes editing so much easier because I can use VS Code as a schema-aware editor instead of having to deal with a word processor.
It also lets me use Git so I can keep track of changes. Plus, it allows me to personalize the visual style via CSS and HTML before I export it to PDF for submission.
A few commenters seem to think that JSON Resume is meant as a file format that one would submit to potential employers as-is. It’s not! It’s a source format, which scratches the itch of people like me who like semantic text-based formats.
If JSON Resume didn’t exist already, I’d have ended up building something similar myself.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 85.6 ms ] threadA boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.
Coding is a creative process which requires a certain sense of craftsmanship, and a resume is like a buisseness card. It's an opportunity to express yourself and show of some of your skills and also your personal style and flavour.
Sending me a Latex, ASCII Art, Minimalist HMTL, Fancy HTML, JSON Chunk, tells me a lot about you as a dev and person already.
Defining a standard for resumes and then sending me a resume in said standard would also be impressive and cool for an individual resume that I receive. But once you take somebody elses standard and send it to me you'll just come across as boring.
But unless requested no one will send it as JSON. Rather they'll export to pdf/html utilizing one of hundred themes (https://jsonresume.org/themes/). Essentially the same thing everyone is doing when using LaTeX but now even easier to do.
The candidates that are interesting to me have diverse and interesting lives, their resumes should reflect that.
If not, disregarding candidates who just put their experience on a “plain” resume is cutting out a massive chunk of viable candidates so you can signal that you think your roles are above “plain” resumes.
Probably once they find out what criteria is used to get promoted…
If you have completely arbitrary hiring restrictions which have absolutely nothing to do with your ability to do the job then what other requirements will be hoisted on you?
I left it simple in the original comment so people could fill in the blank with their own witty ‘job requirements’.
If a job description says “must have custom designed resume”, that’s a hint not to apply. If I submit a standard resume and get rejected because “must have custom designed resume” is an undisclosed bar I was expected to clear, I just dodged a bullet.
I prefer jobs where the hiring focus is on hiring people who are good at the job, and using weird side challenges like “is your resume formatted uniquely enough” is a new variant of “not a culture fit” that I hadn’t heard before.
The meritocracy argument is usually brought up by people that are shitty colleagues. Personality is more important than being "good at your job", the latter improves with time and mentoring, the former usually doesn't.
We hire the person first and the skillset second.
I know not to apply for jobs looking for “friendly, outgoing people” and it saves everyone a bunch of time.
Doesn't your resume reflect that if it has that written down somewhere?
Why would a CV be picked over any other if a candidate, say, paid a service to pimp out it's styling?
But there needs to be a sense of personality behind it. Some reflection on their personal approach to life and problems.
I don't want to hire a set of milestones and qualifications, I want to hire a person.
I could see the point of that approach for a creativity-driven position such as designers, advertisement, marketing, or even front-end development.
For hard technical roles, where substante over style is a mandatory and very basic competence, seems to be a sure way for you to filter out all the candidates you'd be looking for.
The problem with these approaches is they’re harmful to the goal of resumes while giving minimal signal for filtering. Oh, you know what JSON, HTML, or markdown happen to be? That’s a very limited signal you’re sending for your resume not being clear and accessible (to people and systems).
I also think your attitude may have been sensible in another market, but this one where demand outstrips engineering supply greatly? I could write my resume on crayons and still have people reach out.
Edit: You may also want to look into cover letters? It sounds like that’s what would solve your desire to get a unique, creative response from the candidate while they still maintain an accessible resume. This problem has been solved in other industries.
Any company that does automatic resume analysis is already lost in terms of engineering quality.
maybe i misunderstood, are you saying you judge candidates on the appearance of their resume, as opposed to the contents??
i always took the opposite view. the more effort in a resume the more desperate it seems. i keep a very basic resume , not even 1 full page and i base it around my current role, so experience is foremost.
It's not the apperance per se but the "spirit". A very functional minimalistic resume is as good as a fancy design, what matter is that there is a underlying method/idea/attitude.
Of course the contents are just as important, but a candidate that provides a markdown file with the most important points in their career and their hobbies, is much more interesting to me than a word resume template that lists ever side job, languange, micro skill, scrum certificate and letter of recommendation.
Unless the role has a strong design component just use something simple and plain to present your skills and experience. Make it easy to understand what you can do for us. Thats the important part of the resume.
Lists of dozens of programming languages, work experiences, and qualifications are a lot of noise that even the worst candidates can just add without any meaningful experience.
The document itself however tells a lot more about the person. It's impossible to fake, and the only truly objectively quantifiable metric of the whole resume.
An applicant that has a deep interest in ConLangs and wants to show that off in their resume sounds super awesome and would definitely get my approval for a fully paid trial run.
Having worked on a few ATS projects, most just parse the resume files they receive in the arbitrary formats and output to HR-XML.
https://www.rchilli.com/solutions/resumeparser-api
https://www.sovren.com/products/parser/
It also lets me use Git so I can keep track of changes. Plus, it allows me to personalize the visual style via CSS and HTML before I export it to PDF for submission.
A few commenters seem to think that JSON Resume is meant as a file format that one would submit to potential employers as-is. It’s not! It’s a source format, which scratches the itch of people like me who like semantic text-based formats.
If JSON Resume didn’t exist already, I’d have ended up building something similar myself.