I used to write my resume in Latex. It is pretty satisfying to code and then compile a document and Latex does amazing things with a document.

However it has become more and more painful to edit it.

I have moved to a simple Google Document 3 years ago.

Reasons :

- I dont really need all these advanced Latex features, I am not writing a maths book.

- Docs has everything I need in order to make a resume (tbh I have considered doing it in Photoshop to have more graphical flair but never spent the time to do so)

- I can get feedback directly in the docs.

I am not going to spend the time to do it in Latex again

While some LaTeX templates are more unwieldy, in the case of Limecv, if you don't want the stats bars, just don't include the macro that adds them. It's not always so terrible.

I disagree. I never really used anything but LaTeX/XeLaTeX to generate my CVs but I've seen what people make in text processors and it usually sucks. On the other hand, I agree, open source templates are rarely the best — and unless they are very generic I'd suggest not to use them verbatim. You don't want your CV to look like the other 50 in the pile (yet you don't want it to look too weird either).

Speaking as someone with a LaTeX résumé, I agree with you. I use it because it's the typesetting tool with which I am most comfortable, not because it's the best tool for the job. I would never use HTML/CSS to create a résumé, but that's because I am bad at using them.

I "ported" moderncv LaTeX style in simple XHTML/CSS a while ago here: http://www.benou.fr/~ben/cv/cv.en.ganne.html Feel free to clone it if you find it useful. I use both moderncv for PDF and this for web-based resume.

I wanted to make something like for a while. I'd use a reportlab-based generator though and Jinja2 templates. Ideally, I want something that can generate both compliant and optimized HTML and a PDF, while having easily hackable style sheets and stuff. I'd add just a little bit of Python code to make it easy to add new stuff (new skills, new experience, etc.) and generate CVs with different highlights from the same data and templates (I used to have one for my primary stuff, one concentrating on devops stuff, one for immigration purposes, and yet another one for something I don't remember — it's hard to keep them all up to date when you mostly use just one).

Would be a cool project one day, for now I'll just keep using LaTeX.

I've moved past ModernCV though. Too many people are using it nowadays :)

The part that has been highly efficient for me, is that I can still build my resume today. Adding to it will not break it, and it is just editing a text file then running make. Printing it next year will print the same as this year. Stability is very comfortable.

>unless you...can essentially create your own "template"

This is pretty much what I did. I've learned exactly enough LaTeX to write my resume (and I'm happy with it).

I tried using res.cls (which was recommended elsewhere in these comments) and I didn't like it. It was very opinionated, offering only a few different pre-defined layouts. Using a different layout would've involved modifying the class file, which was more than I could handle as a beginner. Writing my own class file from scratch (with help from some tutorials) was a lot easier.

Funny, but I actually ended up writing my own LaTeX class ( https://github.com/mvarela/orbit-cv ) to reproduce a Hugo-based résumé for which print to PDF worked horribly bad. I probably spent more time trying to find the way to print it to PDF than to whip up the first iteration of the LaTeX class.

I agree. I love LaTeX and spent many hours building a YAML/Markdown document that could be compiled to PDF with a custom LaTeX template, or HTML with custom CSS. But after using that for a year or two, I switched back to Word because it was just too painful trying to get the document to fit nicely on two pages without a WYSIWYG editor.

LaTeX is not an efficient way to create anything.

But, to be fair, it's not supposed to be efficient - it's supposed to be consistent.

But I really wish it was less painful to use.

It's a very efficient way to typeset good looking mathematics. Of course, that's no surprise, because that's what it was built for.

Not just maths. It can be used to typeset books on any topics quite well, I did it for while a few years back. Text format makes it easy to convert any sources to it, and if you don't need many formulae nor tables/figures typesetting becomes pretty trivial. And unlike visual typesetting tools you almost can make an error of moving some guide too far or something, if you say 10mm margin it'll be a 10mm margin (visual tools have their use, I guess, just not when you're a geek and prefers to see code and not a picture). And it even warns you about underfilling/overfilling, what's not to love?

And speaking of word/openoffice/google docs. Those are text processing tools, not typesetting ones. If you need typesetting on any complexity their are the absolute worst choice. If your CV has a very simple structure and style, on the other hand, sure, go ahead.

I wonder if any tech recruiters notice this kind of things... If I wanted to hire nerds, I'd surely notice. CV made in word, marked with "not geek enough" :)

I’d argue it’s effective, not efficient, there. But that might be splitting semantic hairs

Like so many tools that originate in that time, it is very efficient after an initial learning curve. I use LaTeX to typeset theoretical CS things (papers, exercise sheets, ...), and those often contain a fair amount of mathematical notation. Expressing them in LaTeX math notation comes quite naturally to me now and doesn't require much thought at all. And when I do miss some symbol, there are excellent tools like http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html.

I’m curious - what’s your definition of efficiency here? I would include learning time in that, plus cognitive load, and it’s clear you are not.