So what should your CV/resumé look like? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 25, 2020, 06:40:40 pm
content: I suppose there are people on both sides here, hiring and seeking? I would like some opinions.What do you think of these:https://resumegenius.com/resume-templatesMy CV has always been just a series of paragraphs with minimal formatting. I have also never put a photo of me on one, this is a European thing I think.Do CVs really need to be graphical and typography masterpieces?

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 25, 2020, 07:05:11 pm
content: The purpose of a covering letter is to get an HRdroid to read your CV and pass it to the hiring manager.The purpose of a CV is to get the hiring manager to give you an interview.So make it easy to pass through those stages.Apart from the usual guff, have a keywords section for the automated filters.Have a chronological career history sections, with each company having a very brief synopsis of why you joined each company.Have a list of projects and achievements, a couple of paragraphs for each, with trailing keywords. These should be tantalising rather than have full information. Select the ones that are relevant for the job application, discard others.Ignore photos, coloured paper, maximum two pages,and anything else that gets in the way of getting an Interview.At most two standard fonts, one for heading, one for bodies.Hobbies should either be relevant or interesting enough for questions to be asked.Remove adjectives, use bullet points.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 25, 2020, 07:13:12 pm
content: Heh, so I pretty much have to change nothing... Thanks!

author: ejeffrey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 25, 2020, 08:11:57 pm
content: They don't need to be typographical masterpieces but they should not be a wall of text. Some formatting is helpful so that I can quickly parse it to see if your experience is a fit.I want to see a brief description of *your specific* responsibilities and accomplishments at your previous positions and a brief list of skills (the latter is mostly to make it through the recruiter's filter). Include leadership and design experience of course, but saying you were "part of a team that did X" doesn't tell me anything about what you can do.Don't put anything on it you aren't prepared to talk about in your interview. Nothing gets you to fail an interview with me faster than saying you are proficient in 7 programming languages, but being unable to e.g. write a function to sum the items in an array in any of them. Likewise, if you say you are experienced with SPI/UART/I2C interfaces you should be able to explain the differences between them. You don't need to be an expert, but if you can't talk intelligently about X, don't say X on your resume. If you hacked something together for a school project a decade ago but haven't used it since, don't list that as a skill on your resume.

author: Ice-Tea
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 25, 2020, 09:08:24 pm
content: Quote from: Alex Eisenhut on November 25, 2020, 06:40:40 pmHaven't ever seen a CV with photo to be honnest... Even though one could argue Linkedin is just that.

author: Domagoj T
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 25, 2020, 09:38:23 pm
content: This is me talking from the hiring side, but anyway... what immediately landed this guy an invitation for an interview were his claims, in no particular order:that his IQ is 160, as measured by an internet quiz,that he regularly comes to new workplace and explains to the boss how he's been doing stuff wrong and how to improve them,that he always takes the lead role in new work teams and leads them to successes beyond the most optimistic projections,that he often feels like he's working with mentally inferior people who struggle to keep up with his advanced ideas...I may have been mean, but I suggested we invite the guy just to see if he was serious. He never responded to the invitation, so I live my life with this unsatiated curiosity and every now and then think about how he might have changed the world if he had joined our team.On a more serious note (even though the above is 100% true), right now I'm in the process of looking for another job. My CV is just a plain boring table with invisible borders and short description of stuff. I got an invitation for some tests two weeks ago and just today got a call to come in for another round. I don't think the format of CV matters much if you are applying for work at a relatively small company where HR can reasonably read all the applications and only matter when the company is quite large. That being said, on my previous job, in the hiring round I was in they accepted 12 individuals, and I know for a fact that they had more than 1000 applicants and somehow my boring CV still got the HR's attention.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 25, 2020, 11:06:52 pm
content: Sorry, I never got your invitation.(Very small joke. I am bored.)Quote from: Ice-Tea on November 25, 2020, 09:08:24 pmMe neither. I just saw it a lot in connection with European-style résumés, and my sister in Germany said that's the way it works, but we don't work in the same fields at all.

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 25, 2020, 11:43:28 pm
content: Quote from: Alex Eisenhut on November 25, 2020, 11:06:52 pmIt's actually not a European thing, it's a Very German thing. A job application in Germany needs to look almost like a Nobel Diploma. Picture, perfect layout, perfect content etc. As I came here over 20 years ago I was astonished. Where I came from, the first thing you'd do was grab the phone and call the employer.In Germany, applying for a job is like your final exam. Weird, I never got to understand that.That aside, keeping your CV up to date is a good idea. But I hate the layouts in the original post. KISS.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2020, 12:18:59 am
content: Two pages max. Dont write complete sentences everywhere, that is a complete waste of time. Write about what you did, write what the project was about. What software you can use. Delete everything that is old or unrelated, or keep it very brief (some people get off-put if they see a gap in the timeline).And make sure the grammar is correct. Use QR codes instead of links. At the end of my CV I place the logo of a bunch of stuff. Like microcontroller companies, softwares, that sort of things, that are easy to recognize.I had a guy, who came to the interview with a 17 page long CV, rambling about what his achievements were. CV is one of those things, if everything on it is important, than nothing is important.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2020, 02:17:07 am
content: The thing I always disliked was the resumes that were 4, 5, 6 or even more pages long, sorry but I'm not going to sit and read through all that looking for anything that might be relevant. I prefer it if the resume is at least somewhat tailored to the job they are applying for. Unfortunately a lot of what will get you past the HR droids and what will impress the people doing the hiring are often mutually exclusive. HR in nearly every company I've worked is adept at filtering out any interesting candidates and passing on the most boring cookie cutter stuff sprinkled with all the right keywords in irrelevant context. Also this should be obvious but apparently some people still have not got the memo but use a separate email address for your professional stuff, not the one that is linked to all your social media accounts unless you are absolutely positive that there is nothing on any of those that an employer may use to judge you. And make it a professional sounding address, not something like sexyprincess69@yahoo.com.

author: wizard69
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2020, 03:55:36 am
content: Well this could end up being very interesting and long discussion.Quote from: Alex Eisenhut on November 25, 2020, 06:40:40 pmIt depends upon the job. In my mind a Resume should have two pages. The first should cover your contact information, work history, education history and associations related to work. The layout of this information should be terse and in a matrix or other carefully laid out form for quick review. No paragraphs at all.The second page or possibly some of the first page should cover what your experiences are. The information should be logically grouped in paragraphs and needs to be cleanly written ( no run on sentences or overly complex statements). I really doubt that having more than one full page here is an advantage for anybody.The only third page is the cover letter which needs to be separately written for each company that you wish to apply to. It really isn't a resume as such but rather an introduction to that HR person that filters such stuff and helps them forward it to the right hiring manager.QuoteIn the USA it might even be illegal or could easily cause the Resume to end up in the waste bin. Even if it is legal most companies will do what ever they can to avoid any possibility of racial bias. Putting your face on a resume would mean that it can't go any further through the hiring process.QuoteWell again it depends upon the job!!! In some industries / occupations it can be extremely important. In others it just needs to look decent, have no spelling errors and no grammar error. In this regard it is best to have the resume looked at by several people for these sorts of errors. In any event clean formatting makes it far easier to read the document and frankly larger text doesn't hurt. That last thing you want to do is send a resume to a 70 year old hiring manager written in 8 point wall of text. You need to look at this way what would your prefer to read yourself.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2020, 06:24:41 am
content: I made mine look like the front page of a datasheet by copying the format of a popular chip manufacturer. Including some easter eggs.The kind of people that would get the joke and have enough of a sense of humor to find it funny is the kind of people i want to work with. Tho in my experience it seams to also make it trough the clueless HR droids because it had the keywords in it (They probably just Ctrl+F for the right words and not even read the rest). But it did make for a good personality test once you get to the actual interview part, anyone who works in the field recognizes the format and brings it up as the first thing. One of them told me he printed it out and went to show it to other engineers that got a good laugh out of it.So in the end the unique CV format didn't really work as a filter to deter the clueless ones, but it was still fun.As for photos. I don't see why that would be on a CV. If you have a cool home lab however, definitely put in a photo of that (also can serve as a test of competence of the guy that is interviewing you when you start pointing at test gear on the photo).

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2020, 08:39:09 am
content: The CV should be terse (precis is a valuable skill), easy to scan (to pass first filtering), and easy to read (to get the interview).It should contain only things relevant to the job offer; that includes the usual brief overview and brief history, and one/two terse paragraphs for every relevant technical or managerial experience. Those paragraphs should tantalise the hiring manager into thinking you are an interesting candidate.The usual waffle that HRdroid like (e.g. can work in teams and on my own) should be "demonstrated <waffle> by X".It should be as long or short as necessary to meet those conditions. If you have significant experience and achievements that will be more than two pages but probably won't be more than four pages (exception: an academic job requires length/weight).Including relevant out-of-hours experience indicates that you work because you enjoy it, and aren't merely a time-serving wage-slave.Provided you clearly delineate (e.g. use bold font) between core skills/applications and other skills, it is OK to include technologies that you have used briefly. That indicates a wide knowledge, flexibility, and the ability to choose/use the best tool for the job, and the ability to learn whatever the new employer needs now and in the future.That latter is important for any interesting job where you are extending yourself and aren't merely repeating you last job. It may not be the case for contractors nor for technicians that need to fit into a slot in the machine.Make very sure you can justify everything in your CV.It is better to say "I don't know because I haven't that experience, but I've demonstrated I could find out" than to waffle.

author: posatomic
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2020, 11:23:13 am
content: I used to do some hiring, actually I hired my boss at my old placeI can give a couple red flags that you should avoid if you think the place you apply has no relevant HR department:Spelling mistakes. If I see a spelling mistake in a CV I immediately give less attention to what's on it. It's just unprofessional. It takes 5 minutes to check your spelling.Overly fancy CVs. This is a big one for me. If I'm looking for embedded software engineers, I don't want to look at the CV of a journalist."rating" yourself. So you rate 5 out of 5 stars in C programming fresh out of college? This opens up a big can of worms that I really love to jump into. You'll get invited for a talk, but you'll get the questions according to my 5 stars, not yours. You might not enjoy the resultsToo many corporate buzzwords. If every CV contains "can-do attitude", "proactivity" and the likes, their purpose is kinda lost.Motivational letters. I don't care about how long your tongue is. This is company-specific of course, but don't include one unless it's requested in my opinion.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2020, 11:53:21 am
content: We are "lucky" in the UK, we have a TV programme called "The Apprentice". It illustrates all the things that you shouldnotsay or put in your CV, to a laughable extent.That includes exaggerations and lying in the CV, statements like "I'm a world class salesman", "I'll give the job 110%", corporate buzzwords everywhere (without an "as demonstrated by" clause).

author: Kjelt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2020, 12:08:24 pm
content: Had to go and was given an entire cv and get hired pto course three years ago.In short what changed the last ten years:- max 2 pages, first page must be an eyecatcher with contact and personal info , icons styled layout nice colours and should contain all the HR BS keywords that are requested on the job advertisement if you have knowledge.You can even do a nice + to +++ of experience indicator with each keyword or filled scale.Be creative don't copy paste.The reason is that the EE or his boss are not the first persons to see your CV.You have a high chance that 27 yr young HR woman will do the firstvscan and sort.BTW I did do all the above and from the five companies I got five very positive feedback on the cv, one HR person said finally an engineer that understands that a cv should be a representation of your person, so are you a dull paper shoving person or a creatively interesting person ?

author: hugo
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 29, 2020, 11:05:28 pm
content: QuoteYou will put a photo on your resume only if you're good looking and you don't want the job ...

author: fourfathom
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2020, 12:42:30 am
content: Sorry for the diversion, but this brings back some memories...Quote from: Domagoj T on November 25, 2020, 09:38:23 pmWe hired a guy like this -- even worse. His resume was OK, and he interviewed well enough, but after a few weeks his true personality broke through with some extremely disruptive and unethical behavior. We waited a couple of months before firing him, because we wanted to put together an air-tight legal case. It turns out that some creative reference-checking might have warned us off, as he had done this type of thing before. For liability reasons people don't usually give a *bad* reference, but they usually can drop some hints.Amazingly, within a year this guy had talked some Venture Capitalist into giving him a few million $$$ to start a company. It quickly went down in flames, with him being led off in handcuffs (no joke).So I guess my recommendation is to make sure that any references given actually have a good opinion of you. And don't be a psycho.