It was an agonizing process, but the end result is something that recruiters recognize as being well designed. I hate having to maintain it.
That's what I mean by pretending.
The basis that the HR drone/recruiter (wonderful people or not) is only actually interested or capable of matching buzzwords (when hiring engineers, specifically, but possibly in any field) and thus will pass the resume based on meeting a Ctrl F hit percentage critera.
Once the actual hiring manager get the CV, they ask for the context and we discuss it. This largely gives me a reason to talk and thus make people like me, I feel less awkward because I'm not regurgitating my CV, and the hiring person is less bored because they haven't read this. This seems to give them enough context to move to the hiring stage, few ask me any technical questions at this point.
I'm a contractor in London with a very high success rate in landing gigs. Your mileage may vary, but try to think about the people who read your CV.
> They're busy and have a lot of CVs, thus they want to skim for relevance.
> They want 1-2 pages, they're not going to look past this.
> If they ask you about a tech on your CV and you don't stand up to scrutiny, they'll feel you're dishonest and you've wasted their time.
A little bit of empathy goes a long way.
Additionally, have a master CV template and customize it based on the requirements.
Cutting it down to 1-2 pages, removing everything not worthwhile listing for the advert.
Rephrase the technical terms for the buzzwords bingo as per job advert, e.g. .NET vs C#, ADO.NET vs C# database access,...
Dear God, is that really what they're looking for? Tech hiring gets more ridiculous every day.
- Name - largest on the page, picked a font that looked good at that size
- Email address - monospaced font, colored to appear as a link (which seems silly, but helps pull attention to it since it's the primary contact method for me)
- Physical address - Small font, so it, my phone number, and email address occupy roughly the same visual space as my name. Also, a different font to fit the reduced size without impacting readability
Per job:
- Company name and title - Larger than the description
- Dates - Small so they can exist on the same line as the company name, but a different font to be legible.
- Descriptions and duties (also used for summary) - The baseline for font and size.
A quick glance at my resume won't show the design choices made; it's supposed to be subtle while retaining legibility through a fax machine (you wouldn't believe the lack of quality of some of the resumes which I've been handed over the years). That subtlty/readability is what took the longest.
I honestly don't know what you mean by this.