I sometimes wonder why nobody ever attaches real world success data for different styles of resumes. Like most(?) people, my resume has also undergone an evolution in style and layout. I would gladly trade whatever I find aesthetically pleasing about mine, if that meant a greater success rate in having my resume read/chosen.
I don't think that kind of data would be useful. It's kind of like asking "what do I have to do to make my song a #1 hit?" It depends entirely on what the mood is of the people who happen to be looking at your resume, and the culture that guides the judgements they make about it.
I had spent a good deal of effort building a very simple and pleasing resume using LaTeX, and I ended up having a professional career counselor look at it, and she said "Did you use a template? It looks too much like a template." So what? Templates are templates because they look good. If it didn't look like a template, it wouldn't look professional. And something that should've elicited a complement was instead peddled as disappointment.
Instead, I'll just figure that I wouldn't want to work for anybody that trusts people who are too petty or too clueless to make good hiring decisions.
>It's kind of like asking "what do I have to do to make my song a #1 hit?"
Sure, but it's also kind of like asking - Given the fact that all these songs are number one, could we extract some common features?
Maybe you'll find out that songs have to be shorter than 3 minutes or nobody plays them on the radio, or that they have to be dynamically compressed within a certain frequency range because most people listen to music on hardware that does not reproduce certain frequencies very well, or that having a weird time signature makes a song unpopular, etc.
>I wouldn't want to work for anybody that trusts people who are too petty or too clueless to make good hiring decisions.
Hah, that would exclude a large portion of the professional software industry !
My point is that those features are transient. A #1 song today probably can't be #1 in ten years. If Beethoven were born today, he would not be topping pop charts, even if you have plenty of data showing that his style of music is good. Resume writing either comes down to presenting the fact that you are clearly the most qualified for the position, or because you caught the fad of resume attention-grabbing design in the right way. The later will only really help you if you're competing against many similarly-qualified yet boring candidates. It's better to have more valuable content on your resume than to apply statistics to its paint job.
>Hah, that would exclude a large portion of the professional software industry !
It probably does, but I don't actually want to work for a large portion of the professional software industry. I want to work for people that value me and share my vision. And in turn, I want companies that make those kinds of hiring decisions to not have access to people like me.
Okay, well this seems to be a new point you're making. I think we all realize that you can't have features that are eternal/absolute.
Your example doesn't carry your point. Beethoven, like Mozart actually is popular simply because both are part of mass culture. Classical music however is not part of popular culture and is restricted to certain niches.
Also, there is a legimitate view out there that pop music hasn't changed for the past few decades, and has certain recurring themes - love, loss, sex, etc. But anyway, that is not a very interesting conversation.
I don't agree with your view on resumes. In my opinion, resume writing comes down to knowing the mind of the person who is going to read the resume and convincing them that you're the right candidate. Since mind reading is usually a difficult task, all one can do is increase the probability of success by adopting tips and tricks that others have used.
> It's better to have more valuable content on your resume than to apply statistics to its paint job.
By writing a resume the "common" way, it does not diminish your own value and self-worth. It seems like you want companies to appreciate you only if they hire someone in HR who also appreciates your style of writing resumes. Thats pretty bizzare TBH, but hey whatever works for you.
It's not a new point, it was the first thing I said. Beyond the basics (correctness, accuracy, ease-of-use) what people want in a resume is a fad. What people like in music is just as much a fad.
You can't read a person's mind, but you can change it. That's what your resume is for. You don't have to read any minds, you have to get others to read yours.
>It seems like you want companies to appreciate you only if they hire someone in HR who also appreciates your style of writing resumes.
If a company hires HR people who think "simple and professional" is not good enough for a resume, then they almost certainly won't appreciate me. Simple and professional is what I'm offering. I'm not going to jump through flaming hoops and read resume acceptance statistics to get noticed. I'm going to solve actual problems.
