The Overengineered Resume with Zola, JSON Resume, Weasyprint, and Nix (2023)

I think the presentation of a resume is much less important than the content. It’s interesting that sourcers and recruiters make most of the decisions about who gets to the interview stage (particularly in a down market), yet they are the least qualified to assess the capabilities of the candidate of everyone in the whole process. Despite that, their assessment of a candidate’s resume has an outsized influence on the candidate’s outcome.

When you have 1,000 resumes from laid off software engineers from FANG companies that all look mostly the same, how do you decide who to call?

I’ve been thinking lately that an interesting project might be to look for publicly available resumes of people who have recently accepted new jobs within the tech industry and compare their resumes against those of people who have been looking for a new job for a while. The comparison would be qualitative if only a few resumes are available or perhaps quantitative (i.e., a classification model) if many are available.

Recruiters are not looking for the same signals as hiring managers, and since I’m not a recruiter, I would really like to know exactly what it is that they are looking for.

As an example of this kind of discrepancy that caught me totally off-guard, I was slightly below the “years of experience” requirement on a particular job posting that seemed to match my background perfectly. The recruiter I was talking to had reached out about another job posting where I did meet the YoE requirement, but I said the other posting was a significantly better fit for my skills and experience. The recruiter replied that the YoE requirement was not negotiable, so I was put onto the interview loop for the much less applicable role because of this arbitrary and narrowly missed line in the sand (and of course I failed that interview, wasting both my time and theirs).

A hiring manager would care less about years in seat and more about capability. That such a YoE requirement might be used as a hard filter when scanning resumes caught me by surprise—I had previously sent out plenty of resumes where I narrowly missed the YoE requirement, and in retrospect, my application was probably discarded immediately while using up the “quota” of how many times I could apply to that company. These sorts of insights from the recruiting world would be great to know in advance from the candidate’s perspective.

Unsolicited advice:

If you're going to that trouble, finish the swing. The final product here is BAD.

The person reading the resume doesn't know it's automated so no credit points for that, and it looks like a person didn't pay attention to basic detail. This does you no good, it hurts you.

Example glitches:

The contact row dropping LinkedIn to next line. The ragged bullets hanging to the left of the left margin relative to headlines. The dates not right aligned. The too-large font making it take ALL of two pages for just a decade.

These things do get judged at a glance when someone's looking at lots of PDFs.

Also, just because a resume goes into an ATS doesn't mean the hiring manager isn't looking at the original PDF. Usually the ATS surfaces/sorts applicants but one reads the original PDF or Word doc anyway, because the ATS interpretation is often unreliable on its own.

All that said...

One idea to counter the above advice is either in italics under the contact line or in a clear footer, put a colophon or imprint saying: This PDF was auto-generated from my job history data, blogged about the automation here: https://full.web.link/resume-blog-post

But still, exhibit a higher bar for the end product. Engineers that fall in love with over-engineering without regard for the output and "end user experience" are everywhere, and a problem. Engineers that produce above-the-bar output end users appreciate, while ironically over-engineering, with full tongue in cheek recognition of the over-engineering, are rare.

On the other hand, they just managed to get their resume in front of thousands of people.

Interesting approach. I am currently looking for jobs and went the 'career coaching' route for my CV. I did a few iterations with my coach until I got my current result (ideally I had a link):

I first looked at Canva templates, but apparently nowadays you are supposed to do black/white and no fancy designs for ATS readability. Then I tried it with Google Docs b/w resumee template, which kinda got me to write actual skills. Then I approached the coach, got her template and iterated, and then I also added some rules from here (https://principiae.be/pdfs/ECV-1.01.pdf).

I also involved ChatGPT to analyze job postings and to get the mix of keywords in my resumme right. Tools like https://tagcrowd.com/ also help with that. For example, I am targeting 'IT analyst' roles, and it does make sense that I have the word 'analysis' a few times in my CV.

E: mine is basically structured the following way

Name

Title

Summary

3x5 ATS keywords/skills specific to my profile and role

last ten years, also written in a way that 'gamifies' ATS: 'Year, worked as ROLE at Company, did XYZ'

--page 2--

Education (degree + grades)

Skills Training

Languages

Some more IT skills (programming languages, project management, ...)

E2: I obviously have no idea what I am doing, but I got three interview proposals for 10 applications, so I guess 30%.

Mine is also automated, but a lot more lightweight.

I - like OP - use JSON Resume [1]. Besides that I just have a Github Action which creates a PDF and also updates a web-based version [2] hosted in AWS S3. My favourite thing about this setup is that if I want to make a small change I can just log in to Github and commit a quick edit in the repo [3] through Github's web-based UI A new PDF is generated and the web-based version being updates automatically.

[1] https://jsonresume.org/

[2] http://geoff-clayton-cv.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/

[3] https://github.com/jefc1111/cv/tree/master