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What do you guys use to build your CVs? Do you automate it in any way or just use something like Google Docs? I'd be interested to know.

Personally I've been using rendercv for a while and I can't imagine going back to doing it manually. However, I think I might need some more flexibility. Been struggling to get any interviews so I've been doing what I can to experiment with my CV. If any of you have a good typst template they've actually used to land a role I would love to ~~steal~~ borrow it.

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[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I use LibreOffice has my word processor, and no substantial amounts of automation to speak of. And each time I intend to submit a resume, I save off a new copy and tailor it specifically for the recipient employer. After all, what's relevant and worth highlighting (not literally!) to one employer won't be the same as for another.

Yes, I'm aware that a lot of recruiters/reviewers use LLMs as a first-pass filter, but that's precisely why my submission should be crafted by hand each time: if it's an LLM, then I want its checkbox exercises to be easily met, and if it's a human, I want to put my best foot forward.

In days of yore, where paper resumes were circulated by hand to prospective employers at career fairs, having a bespoke resume for each would have been difficult to pull off. But with PDF submissions, there's no reason not to gear your submission to exactly the skills that a company is looking for.

To be clear, tailoring a resume does not mean adding fake or hallucinated qualifications that you do not possess. Rather, it means that you copyedit the resume so that your relevant skills are readily apparent. If you already listed an example project from a prior employer or internship, but a different project would better align to the prospective employer, consider swapping out the example for max appeal. Bullet-points are particularly easy to rearrange: if you have web-dev skills and that's desirable by the employer, those should be moved up the list of bullet-points. And so on.

Although resumes are now mostly PDFs, the custom remains -- both as an informal fairness criteria between applicants, but also because it would be more to read -- that one's resume should fit on a single sheet of US Letter or A4 paper, barring unique exceptions like professors that have long lists of published papers or systems architects that hold patent numbers. And so the optimization problem is how to most effectively use the space on that sheet of digital paper.

[-] _hovi_@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the in-depth answer. I could definitely be better about it tbh but I agree highlighting points relevant to each role. Makes a lot of sense.

However, I think automating it actually makes this easier. With rendercv, I have everything in a yaml file, and can comment/uncomment relevant parts where needed, etc., and I can have it re-rendered to PDF on each change.

that one’s resume should fit on a single sheet of US Letter or A4 paper

Yeah I might have to go back to this. I recently expanded to 2 pages to be able to show more personal projects / open source work, but it hasn't seemed to entice any employers much anyway.

[-] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

Having previously been on the reviewing side of job applications, if you have GitHub/Codeberg repos with your work, please, please, please include those links somewhere on the resume, ideally spelled out and also clickable in the PDF. It's a neat trick to showcase more work than what fits on a page.

Although the non-technical recruiters might gloss over links, the technical reviewers very much look at your code examples. Why? Because seeing your coding style and hygiene, Git workflow and commit messages, documentation, and overall approach to iterative improvement of a codebase is far more revealing than anything that AI-nonsense coding tests can show.

So while this won't necessarily get your resume past the first gate, always be thinking about the different audiences whom your resume might be passed around to, within the prospective organization you're applying to.

[-] _hovi_@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Thanks yeah. I do make sure to have links to the code and demo/distribution (if the project has one)

this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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