It’s been more than two years since my previous attempt at résuméing.
I was swayed by a new business I joined, a microgreens city-farm.
I would rebrand it as Rostymo, and tried to make it a fully-digital brand. I wrote about the adventure in its separate series.
That’s what I’ve been doing between this and previous stories. To get the entire context, you may want to read it first, before advancing in this résuméing series. But it’s optional.
I’ve been using Figma heavily for the past two years, so I decided to take this instrument for my résumé. At this point in time, I can say I know Figma much better than I ever knew Sketch, as I’ve been using it almost daily.
While 2 years ago I could say that Adobe Illustrator is much better tool for print project, I won’t say that right now. Figma is advancing rapidly, and Adobe is mostly stagnating (in its quality) for the last decade or even longer.
Since the last time I’ve been designing my résumé, I gained some new knowledge on the matter.
I would like to highlight only one thing that — I afraid — matters a lot in the modern-day job-hunt adventure.
Most companies use AI tools to screen résumés, and they compare some key words with what they expect the ideal candidate to have in their résumés.
So to advance their chances, a candidate may want to hack their way in with as many potentially related words as possible.
With simple words, a human asks AI to write a professionally looking résumé.
An HR person asks AI to debloat the ‘professionally looking résumé’ and summarise it as a couple of sentences.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but here we all are. The future.
If the person wants to put these key words, the first step would be to define the words. Since it’s AI vs AI battle, I guess you can ask your favourite AI assistant what keywords you need for your job position. Providing job description would help too.
Somebody should read them after all, right? Eventually we have a machine that would do that.
Then, we need to place those words inside the document.
I see the next options here:
Write all the words in a tiny font, somewhere in the end of the document.
As bonus, you can use white color. It’s white on white, so it may go unnoticed with human and not be printed.
Both options may be penalised by the AI, if it can see the font size and colour, and devalue them accordingly.
Use a tool like Adobe Illustartor, which allows to place a lot of the content outside of the visible artboard bounds. It won’t be printed and it won’t be visible when viewed with a default pdf-viewer. I checked with macOS, but I have no Windows for almost two decades, so I can’t speak of it.
This content can be black and of a regular size. So if a software can penalise smaller and/or white font, it’ll be more difficult to penalise the text outside of the printing area.
Invent your way of placing these keywords genuinely into the document.
Since I chose Figma as my instrument, I decided to go with the third option. Mostly as a challenge. I don’t want to be penalised and potentially an HR would like to actually read these words, right?
Who knows what’s in their heads. I don’t understand these folks anyway.
For me, it’s quite easy to organise any amount of text on a piece of paper. So I went all-in and generated huge body of text with OpenAI. I won’t search for the exact prompt, it doesn’t really matter and you can come up with a better one easily.
Since I couldn’t choose between management, design, and programming, I decided I’d go this triple-way. I may find a job by not trying to hide anything from my previous experience.
However, I believe the quickest way would be to strip all the unnecesaary and irrelevant experience, and present myself as, say, UI/UX designer, and focus on that only. I think it’s too late for me to go that way.
This went through some iterations, and at some point I realised that the key-words are mostly hard skills. With this triple-approach of mine, I guess I can afford to place quite many key-words.
The more the merrier, I assume.
ChatGPT generated quite a reasonable text for this. To not lie, all I needed to do is just to remove some things I never heard about. Those were literally a couple of software services, some of them obsolete now.
I used this as the starting point of my résumé, and went further.
and one of them being an industrial company, which must be unusual for the folks like me.
Plus all the previous 8 years cramped with a single sentence: I’ve been making (corporate) software. I used this visual metaphor of multiple dots as multiple companies and roles, I’m not sure it’s obvious.
A light saber!
In the header, I added some basic info, like name, position(s) and their basic description
I specified my location because— again, it’s still Ukraine, so the potential employer must be aware I may just die spontaneously 😐
I’m open to relocation, by the way. It’s just that I’m not too eager to just escape. If I’m going to leave the country, it’s somewhere interesting, and for some reason.Have you noticed the lesser coat of arms?
I added the website link, plus the qr-code to make it easier to follow the link from a hard-copy résumé.
I decided to add some icons, just because it’s very easy in Figma, why not. It makes much easier to orient in a mass of text, especially when a person isn’t too motivated to carefully read that text. (More on that in my next résumé attempt.)
Later, I would introduce added icons to my website, as cover images too.
While doing the document, I realised that I could offload most of the unnecessary and optional text as links to my website. The issue was that my website was not deployed by that point, but it was somewhat ready on my localhost. So this résumé was created in parallel to deploying my website.
On a separate note, I realised it’s a good idea to mention some projects I made, since I can easily link them to their respective pages. You can explore them by reading the projects page and following projects tag.
Chat GPT reminded me that some companies value certificates and awards. I have two awards from Google for technical implementation of advertisements:
one project was made for Google,
another one for Infiniti, a car brand.
I need to find the URLs, it was in my previous life, a decade ago.
Also, I thought of mentioning I’m very good with the computers (leaving the DevOps hobby unmentioned). That’s why I wrote a separate story about that either:
