JSON Resume

by tomrod • 4 years ago

47 32 4 years ago

j-pb10• 4 years ago

This looks like a solution in search of a problem.

A boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.

Coding is a creative process which requires a certain sense of craftsmanship, and a resume is like a buisseness card. It's an opportunity to express yourself and show of some of your skills and also your personal style and flavour.

Sending me a Latex, ASCII Art, Minimalist HMTL, Fancy HTML, JSON Chunk, tells me a lot about you as a dev and person already.

Defining a standard for resumes and then sending me a resume in said standard would also be impressive and cool for an individual resume that I receive. But once you take somebody elses standard and send it to me you'll just come across as boring.

forgotpwd163• 4 years ago

then sending me a resume in said standard

But unless requested no one will send it as JSON. Rather they'll export to pdf/html utilizing one of hundred themes (https://jsonresume.org/themes/). Essentially the same thing everyone is doing when using LaTeX but now even easier to do.

j-pb10• 4 years ago

Getting a themed resume will also stand out as "plain".

The candidates that are interesting to me have diverse and interesting lives, their resumes should reflect that.

pech0rin• 4 years ago

I have the absolute opposite reaction when filtering resumes. I just want something plainly written on 1 page so I can get a feeling for your career. Why do I care if you can format a document in a pretty way? Has literally nothing to do with what a resume is which is explaining your experience and why you would be a good fit. Filtering by style seems like a great way to filter out great candidates

j-pb10• 4 years ago

I think you misunderstand what I mean by style. It can also be plaintext if the candidate feels like is the best approach to solve the problem.

But there needs to be a sense of personality behind it. Some reflection on their personal approach to life and problems.

I don't want to hire a set of milestones and qualifications, I want to hire a person.

fivea2• 4 years ago

A boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.

I could see the point of that approach for a creativity-driven position such as designers, advertisement, marketing, or even front-end development.

For hard technical roles, where substante over style is a mandatory and very basic competence, seems to be a sure way for you to filter out all the candidates you'd be looking for.

j-pb10• 4 years ago

If you do backend and don't have any personal opinions about tooling, be it troff, man, pandoc, markdown, plaintext, or whatever, then there's plenty of enterprise opportunity for you, but I personally don't want to work with you. So I think that it's actually a great filter. Maybe it's slightly biased towards candidates with high confidence in their own choices and opinions, but that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

ctvo2• 4 years ago

A resume, for me, is used to communicate as clearly and as accessibly to as many people as possible about your work history and qualifications. We use them as a front line mechanism to filter candidates.

The problem with these approaches is they’re harmful to the goal of resumes while giving minimal signal for filtering. Oh, you know what JSON, HTML, or markdown happen to be? That’s a very limited signal you’re sending for your resume not being clear and accessible (to people and systems).

I also think your attitude may have been sensible in another market, but this one where demand outstrips engineering supply greatly? I could write my resume on crayons and still have people reach out.

Edit: You may also want to look into cover letters? It sounds like that’s what would solve your desire to get a unique, creative response from the candidate while they still maintain an accessible resume. This problem has been solved in other industries.

j-pb10• 4 years ago

(to people and systems)

Any company that does automatic resume analysis is already lost in terms of engineering quality.

mouzogu• 4 years ago

A boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.

maybe i misunderstood, are you saying you judge candidates on the appearance of their resume, as opposed to the contents??

i always took the opposite view. the more effort in a resume the more desperate it seems. i keep a very basic resume , not even 1 full page and i base it around my current role, so experience is foremost.

JTBooth• 4 years ago

I think y'all are probably trying to hire different candidates, and that your preferences are legitimate.

j-pb10• 4 years ago

I want to work with people that are interesting.

It's not the apperance per se but the "spirit". A very functional minimalistic resume is as good as a fancy design, what matter is that there is a underlying method/idea/attitude.

Of course the contents are just as important, but a candidate that provides a markdown file with the most important points in their career and their hobbies, is much more interesting to me than a word resume template that lists ever side job, languange, micro skill, scrum certificate and letter of recommendation.

dudul• 4 years ago

Let's go one step further. Why send me a resume in English? Just be creative and use an elvish language. Or invent your own language. Don't just take a standard and try to use it to convey information.

Unless the role has a strong design component just use something simple and plain to present your skills and experience. Make it easy to understand what you can do for us. Thats the important part of the resume.

j-pb10• 4 years ago

All those lists of skills and experiences are easily embellished.

Lists of dozens of programming languages, work experiences, and qualifications are a lot of noise that even the worst candidates can just add without any meaningful experience.

The document itself however tells a lot more about the person. It's impossible to fake, and the only truly objectively quantifiable metric of the whole resume.

An applicant that has a deep interest in ConLangs and wants to show that off in their resume sounds super awesome and would definitely get my approval for a fully paid trial run.

forgotpwd163• 4 years ago

Pretty cool, though a bit biased because was already doing something similar myself using YAML instead. It allows you to have your resume in one easy-to-work-with format and then export it to whatever format you want (be it pdf or web or even plain text).

tomrod• 4 years ago

Ultimately JSON is a subset of YAML, right?

forgotpwd163• 4 years ago

That's true. YAML 1.2 specification made YAML a strict superset of JSON.

m0llusk• 4 years ago

This has worked well for me. Having a big and diverse range of experiences in tech development and now applying for many different kinds of job this allows me to quickly make variations that emphasize some areas of experience and minimize or skip over skills and experiences that are not relevant to a particular job.

bdcravens• 4 years ago

Discussed in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996464

Having worked on a few ATS projects, most just parse the resume files they receive in the arbitrary formats and output to HR-XML.

https://www.rchilli.com/solutions/resumeparser-api

https://www.sovren.com/products/parser/

zozbot234• 4 years ago

JSON standards for general-purpose data about real-world entities should really be based on JSON-LD and use meaningful properties as defined by well-known shared standards such as schema.org. Then there might actually be some chance for, say, a "JSON-LD resume format" to be useful for automated, programmatic analysis.

StopDarkPattern• 4 years ago

This is pretty dumb, why would anyone want to represent themselves the same way someone else does? What is this? A format for ants?

Hackbraten• 4 years ago

I love this. It makes editing so much easier because I can use VS Code as a schema-aware editor instead of having to deal with a word processor.

It also lets me use Git so I can keep track of changes. Plus, it allows me to personalize the visual style via CSS and HTML before I export it to PDF for submission.

A few commenters seem to think that JSON Resume is meant as a file format that one would submit to potential employers as-is. It’s not! It’s a source format, which scratches the itch of people like me who like semantic text-based formats.

If JSON Resume didn’t exist already, I’d have ended up building something similar myself.

JSON Resume

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