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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Apparently we have very different opinions as to what constitutes elegant. I would call the example messy and confusing.

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Echoing what a lot of other folks are saying the design of the resume isn't great. Note I don't work hiring programmers but a portion of my job is in recruiting.

- It is hard to scan. Often times a recruiter will be scanning through 100+ resumes. The fact that it doesn't follow the 'standard' format of resumes makes me have to break out of my usual pattern of how I'd scan a resume.

- I don't care about what you're reading. Sorry but it's true. I kind of don't care about your blog posts. I'm not going to click on the links though. I might if you make it past the initial screen.

- I do like the skill sets under each job. That's handy. I don't care for 'favorites'. Just tell me what you know how to do preferably in a more concise manner.

- Don't give me three emails on how to contact you. I'm a tired stressed out recruiter I don't wanna play a game on which email I think you'll respond to.

"Don't make me think" is just as valid as it is for hiring as it is for web design. Help the recruiter make the case as to why you're a great hire. I don't think that the non-standard formatting helps with that.

Sorry this reply screams "I don't care, I'm tired, I'm stressed, don't make me think." What exactly is your value here? All you're doing is fitting a cog in the machinery.

Since my impression is that a good developer can deal with any situation necessary, I never understood the laundry list of technologies way of fitting a candidate to a "good hire."

We know this is the reality of recruiters. Maybe on HN do a better job of selling the industry of tired, stressed, people that don't care working to fill a slot.

>Sorry this reply screams "I don't care, I'm tired, I'm stressed, don't make me think."

Well, if you're expecting anything else from a recruiter being send your resume you'll be in for a hard surprise.

The inverse is "I couldn't put in the time to make my CV tidy and intuitive, but you'll have to soldier thru it, because I have the mistaken opinion that I'm a unique snowflake and you don't get hundreds of them".

In fact, "don't make me think" is a GREAT advice for anything you want others to read/try/adopt/buy.

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/032134...

>Since my impression is that a good developer can deal with any situation necessary, I never understood the laundry list of technologies way of fitting a candidate to a "good hire."

Even if a good C++ game developer could switch to Javascript front-end development if needed (to give an extreme example), the time it takes to have them familiar with the relevant stack is better spent hiring someone already familiar. And, it's kind of obvious -- both can be just as good. It's just the second is also ready to hit the ground running on the stack a company uses.

And, of course, just because someone "can deal with any situation necessary" doesn't mean they'd like to. Some programmers like to program in X or Y languages (or language families), others like building Z or K kind of programs.

Just because someone could switch from Haskell to Ruby or from scientific programming to CRUDs doesn't mean they'd also like to. In this case the "laundry list" serves as a way to match hires that are interested in the specific things the company works with.

agreed, plus if you hire someone that already uses and likes your stack you don't get the constant whining about "if we were using Y it would be sooo much better"

Agreed. I've put out a lot of fires in badly-written Ruby code, and at least 2 in badly-written Python code, but I couldn't stand working 8 hours a day with either of those languages.

So while my knowing them is definitely valuable, I need some way to convey, "hey I know Ruby, but no I don't like Ruby and I wouldn't accept a position that was primarily Ruby." ("Favorite" isn't a good word for that, but that's the intent I'm needing to convey.)

Obviously it depends on the job, but if you can't be bothered to make the recruiter's job easy and not make them think, you probably won't be motivated to make customers' life easy either.

The real question is why did you end up in a pile of 250 resumes in the first place. Why didn't you stand out enough that you can go around this queue?

Have you ever had to sift through 250 resumes to narrow them down to a shortlist of five??

If you haven't, it is very very hard. You simply don't have time to dive deep, figure out a person's unique value, and determine whether they could be a good fit.

Therefore, usability becomes very important. The candidates who give a recruiter the information he/she needs in the shortest amount of time possible will rise to the top.

Reviewing resumes is mind numbing work predicated on an already broken model. That's by there is so much opportunity in recruiting and why we are starting to see startups that are changing the recruiting industry. Since the skill involved in crafting the perfect resume is a poor predictor of the skill involved in writing software, we are seeing initial screenings based more on job tasks.

Internal recruiters(which is what I'm talking about) often times are stuck between a variety of competing interests in the company. Being sympathetic to this is only going to help you land a position. Recruiting in general is a more complex issue then just fitting a square plug into a square hole. This complexity combined with the internal politics that are at any company make for a stressed person.

Regarding the technologies other folks answered this already. If you have a candidate that can hit the group running rather then having to get up to speed that can be very valuable. I'd imagine even more so due with a startup where you have a limited runway and a need for agility.

Too much prose generally hurts you, because words mean things.

Example:

What inference should I draw when you say "I know X, Y and Z, but my favorite is Z"? I need someone who is good at X.

Q: Should I call you? A: I have enough drama, next.

Example:

You point out that you're reading Donald Trump's autobiography. I'm a member of one of the many tribes the Donald has a problem with.

Q: Will I associate you with him? A: Probably.

Example:

You give me three emails. I need to contact you.

Q: Which one should I pick? A: "None of the Above"

As a recruiter, do you prefer to see technologies listed under each job, or in a separate "technologies/skills" section?

Writing that "list of words that constitute all the things I know" has always been the most difficult for me, and I'm never quite sure what people are looking for, or what kind of assumptions they're making about it (e.g. I should hope it's obvious, given my resume, that I can use the command line. Do I really need to say that? Should I break out 'tangentially-related programming skills' into a separate list? I have no idea!)

So I'm not really a 'recruiter' but I play one on TV so to speak. My answer is going to be wicked unhelpful: both.

Put the skill you used in the description of the job:

- Developed integrated reporting tool using CouchDB.

then in you list what your proficient at. I hate the skills section too, but its definitely helpful.

That's because you're a recruiter. As someone who interviews, I absolutely care what you're reading, and I often ask what the last technical book you read was.

And you should care about my favorite technologies, else you're going to call me for a job in Flex or Struts because I worked on it a few years ago and waste your time.

Now, it's worth me pointing out my PL/SQL experience because some places are working on old and new technology, and my fluency with diverse technologies is a competitive advantage, but favorites should matter to you.

That's a totally valid counter point about the reading. Also as I said the recruiting work I do(which is about 30% of my job) isn't hiring programmers. In the field I'm in I doubt the last book you read question comes up too much.

To be honest I'd have favorites go either in an executive summary in the top or a cover letter, not a resume. I'd mention like I'm really excited to work at XYZ because of your use of a React.JS combined with your Fortran to JS transpiler, in fact I worked on this project that uses that Fortran->JS program when I was at ABC company.

You bring up an interesting point how the needs of a recruiter(internal or external) are different from a hiring manager in terms of detail/information.

I've never had a cover letter sent to me behind the scenes, but other companies may be different. Tech resumes have moved away from executive summaries.

Yeah I think it's due to the (mis)use of quoted text to indent some paragraphs, which means there are vertical bars all over the place. The additional horizontal lines don't help much either. I think if he removes that it would look relatively clean, like a README.md on GitHub. Here's the source of the example by the way: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/awalGarg/a8e97b27b249f2c9...

Those look absolutely terrible. If someone sent me that, I'd just throw it away. I'd think it was interesting, but totally unreadable.

> I'd just throw it away

Do check your local laws for retention of resumes / applications before throwing it away.

Where is this a thing?

Agreed. Plus the source is an even bigger mess, which negates one of the biggest benefits of using markdown in the first place (ie, if you can't easily parse it in Notepad then you might as well just create the document in HTML, ODF, DOCX or, better yet, send it in as a PDF.

I think even the joke JSON resume was easily to parse and the JSON format wasn't intended to be human readable / editable.

Why JSON resume is a joke?

"the JSON format wasn't intended to be human readable / editable"

Recruiters, not developers, generally read resumes. They are not used to reading JSON and it is hard for them.

You realize the idea of JSON resume isn't "Write your CV in json and send that to your employer"... right?

It's actually quite sound: JSON Resume wants to standardize CV fields to improve compatibility between tools, ease conversion, ease theming and such.

It's a joke because it sounds good on paper but the execution is awful. I tried it out and the resulting CVs are look completely unprofessional, except they took three times as much effort.

You can render it any way you want to. The example themes aren't the point.

Yeah I still think its a good idea, its nice to have all that information stored somewhere. If its in json then I can use it in a program or if I want to do it manually then I can read the json file directly. Definitely better then the scribbles in my notebook.

I don't really understand what part of it constitutes a "joke".

I was on about a specific resume that featured on HN about a year back (give or take). I wasn't aware of jsonresume.org when I made my comment. Sorry for the confusion.

This was my experience with JSON Resumes as well. I tried it out and eventually went back to MS Word.

I got all my data in there, although I found the schema to be very limiting. Then I went through 50-70 themes and none of them actually looked good when exported as a PDF or something you can email to someone else. Note to theme creators: 30px padding everywhere does not look good and makes things harder to read.

I could have customized a theme to fit what I wanted, but the schema was garbage. At that point, I might as well toss the schema and generator and implement my own resume template using something like Underscore, but it was a lot simpler to use Word.

I actually... didn't realize that.

Hmm, well, noted :) If you could point out some specific elements in the rendered version though, like "not enough spacing" or "that h3 should be an h2", that'd be extremely helpful!

It's not really that simple. I'm not trying to be dick about, because I do think that resumes from markdown is a good idea.

The grey borders/lines, they need to go. They serve no purpose.

Contact information goes on top, not buried under the profile.

Technologies, can go after the "job description". It makes sense to list them in relation to the jobs though.

Know one cares how many time your project was stars or forks your project has. If that was relevant they would have contacted you :) Just link to your GitHub/Bitbucket/whatever- page.

Writing and favourites can go, unless you a famous blogger, but then I would just list it as a job.

The entire resume takes up to much space. It's country specific, I know, but I think it needs to fit on one A4 page.

Personally, I just don't like the layout, sorry.

> The grey borders/lines, they need to go. They serve no purpose.

Completely agree. While I think it is fair to put a bit of blame of Github's bad rendering (the same markdown looks much better in stackedit's rendering, for instance [1]), but I'd still see how can I preserve the grouping without blockquoting things.

I can see the reasoning for rest of the points as well, but to each his own :)

[1]: https://stackedit.io/viewer#!url=https://gist.githubusercont...

Rather than creating the markdown for a specific renderer, I think you should focus on creating markdown that can be easily read and edited - so no "######" headings, no quoted text or horizontal lines, basically no clutter. Then how it appears in HTML can be tweaked by the renderer and via CSS. Also I assume clean markdown would generally look better in most renderers.

>the same markdown looks much better in stackedit's rendering

Link to that one as the example then ;)

I think it's down to different markets wanting different things. A cool project, but maybe not so useful, would be a resume generator that from one data source (in Markdown perhaps) could generate resumes in the "correct" form for Europe, India, the US and so on.

Noted. I have added links to various rendered forms in the readme: https://github.com/awalGarg/cv-maker#example

> Know one cares how many time your project was stars or forks your project has. If that was relevant they would have contacted you :) Just link to your GitHub/Bitbucket/whatever- page.

I assume you mean "no" instead of "know".

But more on point, are you sure this is true? I have heard many companies (Google is one) look highly on projects you made which are very popular.

This is what grabbed me in the title even before looking at the link.

Someone calling their own creation elegant. I just found it weird. Like someone saying "I made this good game". Of course that's what you would (should) say to the customers, but here it doesn't fit somehow.

I feel it is a start.

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