Show HN: Real Resume Examples from 1000s of Top Paid Professionals

https://www.visualcv.com/resume-samples?locale=en

by zthomas • 11 years ago

90 40 11 years ago

zthomas5• 11 years ago

We've posted our resume builder, VisualCV on HN a while back and had got a lot of great feedback. A lot of people wanted to see some real resume samples that others have created so we built a curated database of some of our top public users and ran a script to take a screenshot of all their CVs. Hope you guys find it useful.

drivingmenuts• 11 years ago

I note that the job titles are not correctly sorted by alpha under their respect starting letters.

netcan• 11 years ago

This is one of those things that's so useful it's a wonder it isn't more common. Every job site, resume builder & such should have this.

Same goes for business plans, marketing plans, all the various plans and paperwork you need when applying for loans, grants and such.

There's probably some benefit to be had in an 'examples or paperwork' site.

lawyer pay a lot of money to access samples of all sorts of letters, affidavits, submissions, petitions and whatnot. They're useful.

JazCE• 11 years ago

I never understand why people include a photo of themselves on their CV.

jadc• 11 years ago

In Europe, it is generally the norm to include a photo of yourself on the CV... Never seen that in the US.

However given this site is called "VisualCV" (emphasis on visual), I can see why people posting on there would want to include photos, in addition to the nice graphics and stuff.

edent• 11 years ago

As ever, the UK is different. I've never seen a CV with a photo attached. I'd imagine it would fall foul of a lot of anti discrimination laws (age, race, gender, disability, etc).

kifler• 11 years ago

Depends on the culture. Some will even put their marital status on there - someone who is single has much more time to dedicate to a company compared to someone with a partner and kids at home.

yaur• 11 years ago

In the US anyway its illegal to discriminate based on marital status and its a red flag when a candidate starts the conversation by volunteering that they are part of a protected class.

loumf3• 11 years ago

I've heard this is common outside of the US. I have never seen one in real life and it's probably illegal to require it -- even having them is a problem I wouldn't want to deal with.

oAlbe• 11 years ago

There are countries where it's reccomended (or even needed) to put a photo on their CV. Here in Italy for example is a common practice.

Same goes for age. In UK you don't need to put your age on the CV since law says you can't be discrimined by how old (or young) you are. But again, here in Italy is a very common practice.

jonnathanson• 11 years ago

It probably helps to create a positive impression, assuming you're photogenic; photos are kind of biased against the unphotogenic. LinkedIn, for instance, is always haranguing new users to put a photo in their profiles. Presumably, this is because profiles with photos are clicked on a lot more often -- especially if the photos look good. It's just one of those human-nature hacks.

Photos are also problematic, in so far as they allow the person screening the resumes to make hiring decisions -- even subconscious decisions -- on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, apparent age, or even just physical appearance. I imagine that requiring photos of all candidates would be illegal, or at least highly actionable, in the US.

That being said, I don't think there are any rules against putting a photo in one's resume here. I'd just do it with extreme caution. I only see significant upside if you are a great looking person, or have a photo that just screams "Now THAT is a kick-ass professional!" Otherwise, there is just too much risk involved. Risk that you'll be weeded out for "fit" (read: "This person doesn't look like the kind of person who works here"), or for having a weird photo, or even for being the kind of person weird enough to include a photo (since again, photos are not the norm in the US).

I will say this much: as unorthodox as these visual resumes are, I kind of like them. They stand out, and they present the vital information in a much more digestible format than ye olde paper resume does. I just think the photo aspect is tricky. I'd also wonder whether real-life HR managers, recruiters, and hiring managers would grok this style, or whether they'd find it too eccentric. Recruiters are usually working within a mold, not trying to break one.

acheron• 11 years ago

My experience has been that any place big enough to be dealing with recruiters, a couple layers of HR, and so on, is also going to have an online application system where you'll be lucky to have something more than "paste your resume into this text box". Certainly no way to send a photo even if you wanted to.

I know when I worked at big companies, by the time I saw a resume it had always been through at least one system, and often two or three; and any formatting that the applicant had done was long stripped out, leaving bizarre line breaks and other problems all over the place.

rwmurrayVT• 11 years ago

I wrote a comment about it on Reddit. Apparently in Germany if you don't include a photo of yourself they assume you have something to hide. It seems absurd to me personally.

detaro• 11 years ago

It is, but unless they make a law against it these things change very slowly ("Everyone has always send in CVs with their picture, why should we change that/why are you doing it differently than normal"). International companies or software startups probably move quicker in these things than banks or production companies.

mattdlondon• 11 years ago

Agreed - what struck me with that site is that all the CVs had photos of the applicants.

For anyone applying to where I work please please please do not include a photo because I instantly know your age & ethnicity - things that I am not supposed to know about you.

Obviously I am going to see your face eventually (assuming you get to an on-site interview), but seeing it all before I get to talk to you in person can lead unconscious bias which is not good for anyone.

foolinaround• 11 years ago

unfortunately, ethnicity can often be deduced from the name..

bnegreve• 11 years ago

unconscious bias which is not good for anyone.

A bias has to be in favour of some people. Those people are usually the ones who include their photos.

trequartista• 11 years ago

Are these real resumes? I can see a resume with the headline - "Sustainability Intrapreneur". What's the point of writing such buzzwords in resumes?

loumf3• 11 years ago

It's a dog-whistle to the person they want to work for.

ffn• 11 years ago

Because it auto filters out companies, recruiters, and HR staff who like fluff and politics, and retains the ones who are more direct and in-your-face. So if you're a person who is very good in a rigid social structure and placating folk's egos and whatnot, using buzzwords signals you're more than willing to buy into company hype and that therefore makes you more employable. To many larger / older corporations who have plenty of momentum and make money just fine, it's more important for new hires maintain (and strengthen) company structure than for new hires to get a lot done.

On the other hand, if you're a just-ship-it no-nonsense individual who likes to focus more on doing things than maintaining relationships, than by all means build that weird personal site that's nothing like a normal resume and that showcases all your relevant skills instead of using buzzwords. Companies with large and rigid internal social structures will probably avoid you, while volatile newer companies will seek you out.

loumf3• 11 years ago

If you're trying to get a job as a graphic designer -- then sure, make a fancy resume. Otherwise, it looks like a total waste of time -- I presume they just paid someone to do it.

To me it signals that you don't know what matters -- like using a plastic-binder on a school report.

If you could somehow use the design to communicate the content better -- then I'd be impressed.

EDIT: I just realized that this site builds the resumes. Again, they look nice, but other than that, I think they don't work any better as a resume than a plain one. In general I like well-designed marketing collateral, but resumes are things to skim and understand quickly -- I'd like to see good designs that accomplish that.

wongarsu• 11 years ago

I think https://workstory.s3.amazonaws.com/cv_samples/2360/softwaree... is actually a nice example of good design improving communication.

I can see at a glance that he has experience with frontend developent, clean code and agile development, can quickly see some keywords detailing that and if I'm hooked by that I can then read all that text about his work history.

ashark2• 11 years ago

Ratings border on being useless to begin with, but out-of-ten? What's the difference between a 6 and a 7? I'm skeptical that anything finer than a 5 "star" system is meaningful without hard data to back it up, and even with that you have to divine whether it's calibrated to their best skill setting the 5 mark, or whether 5 represents best-in-the-field knowledge (so it'll almost never be used, so why not make it a four scale, but then what does the four mean...)

Ratings. Ugh.

Also, is it really normal for people to list something like "clean code" as a skill at all? Let alone one that can be rated out-of-ten? It seems like putting "contains no cyanide" on breakfast cereal.

(it does look very nice, though—I may, um, "borrow" some of that design)

ChristianGeek• 11 years ago

I like the design, but it has to be the worst possible photo to put on a résumé...it actually detracts from the rest of it.

jpdus• 11 years ago

I can't find any pricing details on your page before signing up - this is bad practice in my view. I won't invest time trying out your platform if I have no idea about costs.

hodder• 11 years ago

I created my resume in notepad with no formatting. It has served me well.

With most job applications now demanding you fill out proprietary forms, I usually have to cut and paste into the fields supplied. I also have a simple pdf version with very minor formatting in case I am handing/emailing the resume to a contact.

That being said, this is a cool site, and it is probably useful for people working in artistic fields. Just remember that the content is the important part.

presty• 11 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9109064

gk12• 11 years ago

Ah, I _knew_ I saw this exact site posted just a few days ago, but searching HN showed nothing recent. The fact that it was flag-killed explains why it didn't show up in the search.

zthomas5• 11 years ago

Dude, what do you have against our posts? It's a completely legit post and a lot of people on HN clearly find it useful.

smutticus• 11 years ago

Some of these resumes are just terrible. Just look at the use of carriage returns in Bobbie Workley's CV.

A resume should be just a clear and simple representation of you. Fancy does not always mean better.

vishalzone2002• 11 years ago

i thought most companies(at least in US) want 1 pager.. these looks really long..

icameron• 11 years ago

No results for Programmer? Searching for .NET brings up a 404 error. Does that mean there is no such thing as a top paying job in .NET programming? Argh, I must be doing something wrong. Nothing for Ruby either

zthomas5• 11 years ago

I only implemented as a simple autocomplete for a simple tag search. We actually have over 1400 tags but only about 140 are actually active for searching, I think that's actually an oversight on our end. You can go to https://www.visualcv.com/resume-samples/directory# for all the tags, rails and .net are both on there

zthomas5• 11 years ago

Developer here. Thanks for all the great feedback. VisualCV was actually a really old rails project (built in 2007) that we inherited and completely rebuilt last year.

Our goal for the project is to focus on how to present professional information visually and with UX techniques that we've learned from web development. To us, most resumes are stuffed with a lot of insubstantial text. We wanted to instantly see numbers, results and achievements in a glance. Recruiters generally take a few seconds to screen for key information and indicators of success and we wanted to present all those info with nice visual hierarchy and make it a pleasure to view. Admittedly, I don't think our current designs have hit those targets as well as I've hoped but we do have some exciting designs in the pipeline.

As you browse through the database you might notice that some of the resumes look a bit messy (they are the black on white design with sidebar images). These are mostly legacy users that we had to migrate to our new platform. Their previous resumes looked something like this: http://legacy.visualcv.com/

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