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It was basically a cartoon version of him, walking through his various life accomplishments.
It was well-done, and all, but I found it a bit annoying. Also, it was Flash.
The only thing you should spend time on with your CV is the content. The ROI on tweaking the look and feel is very low. Aesthetics are not what people care about, unless your resume is so hideous that it gets thrown out.
A “boring” short black and white non-interactive document that I export to PDF.
It has my name, contact info, a list of recent work history, and mention of some of the technologies that I work with.
Last time I was applying for jobs, two years ago, I got an interview and eventually a job offer from the company I most wanted to work for among the ones I’d been submitting applications to. I’ve been there since.
I agree with you. And I think that any attempt to make the document look flashy would only have worked against me. At least when applying to the kind of jobs that I prefer – backend software engineering work.
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-bas…
But you can just go to https://registry.jsonresume.org, login with github, create the gist, and then your resume is automatically "deployed". And it is stored on github gist, so data is yours, and has revisions as a nice added benefit.
For me personally, I found LaTeX to be the perfect solution. I have my resume tex setup so I can set toggles to define what gets output. E.g. applying for a manager position, I might keep it brief and more technical.
The resume is modular and can be updated by updating external txt files and not the LaTeX itself. It looks nice, is always consistent, has nice links, etc.
It's optimized for all the ATS nonsense it inevitably gets run through, it generates a PDF, and I've made it near impossible for recruiters to copy and paste and repurpose it without retyping much of it, and I have a tone of tech tricks in their like invisible text that automated systems might see.
If LaTeX itself is sufficient, I can't imagine needing to add in something like Nix and a webserver or how that would be better in any way.
That said, I never send the same resume to everyone. I tailor a resume for each job I apply to. This doesn't mean leaving off positions or lying. It does mean taking the work done in a position and giving it a slant toward the target job.
For example, let's say I created a web app that shows a sales dashboard, with stats visualization, from raw daily sales data.
Job 1 (applying for Front-End) - Created monthly sales dashboard web site using React, MaterialUI, SASS, Node, Riak, and D3. Dashboard provided grid-based summary over individual weeks, months, and years. It also provided configurable line graphs and pie charts for various sales metrics. Data pre-processing done with Sci-Kit. Later added sales prediction using Machine Learning.
Job 2 (applying for Data Analysis) - Analyzed raw daily sales data to determine data cleansing needed, and created tool pipeline using Python NumPy, SciKit, and scikit-learn. Integrated pipeline into Riak data source ingest, and then built sales dashboard web site to visualize the data. Provided ML model for sales prediction built with scikit-learn, with XX parameters. Model achieved YY accuracy with only a ZZ mean error.
Same work in both, but I highlight the tasks most relevant to the target job.
Other thoughts are that Latex is a good way to get a well laid out PDF resume (PDF is not the web, you should have two versions of your resume), and I agree with other commenters - the final product needs more polish if it was actually going to be used to produce a resume to send in (I think it's fine as a proof of concept though).
With that expectation set, the end product was severely underwhelming. The visual flare is non-existent.