Ask HN: Resumes that look good but professional too

It could be as simple as this guy's -> http://ananthakumaran.in/resume.html

Mine made with HTML + CSS. I made it sure that the whole page fits in a A4 Size so that I can easily export it as a PDF to be shared with recruiters. I also make sure to send the URL of my resume (https://veerasundar.com/resume/) along with the PDF. (bit outdated, though! :)

Thanks ;) planning to do a show hn on it soon.

I have had tremendous success with very unorthodox layouts, features and subtle use of colors on my resume via Adobe InDesign.

https://www.alecgorge.com/Alec%20Gorge%20Resume.pdf

I used to completely redo my layout every year while I was in school and had success with it. Especially at the collegiate level when many resumes are the same in practice, something new for the recruiter to look at goes a long way.

On quite a few occasions I have walked into an interview and been greeted with some variant of "oh wow so you are the person with the cool resume!" or "we have all been talking about how we love how your resume looks!"

I have never gotten negative feedback on my layouts and the positive feedback has been a huge confidence boost in those interviews.

I spend hours and hours attempting to build a unique layout provides personality and the information needed—this means no pie charts or arbitrary skill ratings. I view the design as a way for me to communicate something about my passion for typography and layout while giving an insight into my personality. I always want my resumes to be friendly and have a clear hierarchy.

I'm still on the fence about using paragraphs instead of bullet-points but it looks so much better with justified paragraphs that I think it is worth the trade-off to stand out in a positive way.

Of course, all of the work into the design goes to waste if you don't write clear, concrete supporting information. Too often I see resumes that contain factual but boring/non-contextualized data. Why did you do X thing? What problem was it solving? How did it solve it? What did YOU do that that was special? Use numbers to give a sense of scope and size.

I'd say you can lose the GPA now :)