I would be careful with LaTeX. I use to have a LaTeX resume generated with LuaTeX. At an old company, I saw my LaTeX resume in the ATS long after I was hired. Apparently, something happened and the PDF displayed as blurred-but-not-unreadable in the ATS. Maybe the ATS did some post-processing or used a limited PDF display engine? Lucky for me, the resume for that job was just a formality. These days, I just use Google Docs and export to PDF.

I've made sure all the most commonly used ATS systems can read the produced PDF without issue.

I wouldn't worry about automated ATS. Their use is way overstated on LinkedIn, by "resume experts," etc.

I'm talking about whether a human can read the document comfortably.

Do you have any tips, code, or even just a list of the common ATS systems? I need to do this with my latex cv but I'm not even sure where to start.

I don’t know of the example systems but I’ve applied to a handful of companies recently, all running the same-ish workday resume ingestion. You can actually tell which are running a more recent version because the parsing is more accurate.

There is also a common no-account single page application software, I checked at a company I’d applied to and it was called Lever(?)

Normally, I thought for ATS parsing if you upload in an application and a few of the prior experience text boxes are accurate, then you’re good. I’ve always had to fix my experiences though, even with using a word doc.

I think this open-source parser details a typical ATS algorithm: https://www.open-resume.com/resume-parser

Nix is completely orthogonal to whatever tech you use to build the resume - it's nice as a build tool + to provide dev environments for however you're going to realize your resume.

There is no reason to mention it, though. It's like mentioned Ubuntu as being necessary for having made a resume.

Nix ≠ NixOS. Nix is a build tool (like make or Ninja or Bazel) with strict isolation of builds and caching of artifacts. NixOS is a distro built on top of that tool, like the BSDs are built on top of make, Gentoo on top of Portage, or gittup[1] on top of tup. Running NixOS while you’re building your resume is irrelevant; using Nix to create the final artifacts is a material statement about the chosen toolset.

[1] https://gittup.org/gittup/

BSDs use ports or pkgrsrc which are "built on top of" make

Gentoo uses portage which is "built on top of" python

I’ve actually made the switch over to Typst[0] for my app [1]. I’ve previously used a quick jinja .tex template that then just pasted things in, but LaTeX can really throw some strange errors and overall handling the files was a hassle.

Typst was much easier to setup and the function-based operation meant that sending variables in was a breeze with better error handling there too. Also, I just grok the syntax a lot better.

Just another option for folks looking to redo their resumes/not use Latex.

[0] https://typst.app

[1] https://resgen.app

Typist looks interesting, although I've had no issues with LaTeX so no reason to change to something more niche.

Either your are a pro LaTeX user or you did not use the more advanced features.

Or I just didn't have the issues you or others did. Tex distribution can make a point, also editor most likely.

You've never had an underfull hbox?

It took me something like 20min to learn the very basics of Typst and generate a PDF of my resume from my machine (Typst is distributed as a single binary). Definitely a lot easier to work with than LaTeX.

I used this package [1] (see also the index [2] for more packages / templates).

--

1: https://github.com/talal/pesha

2: https://typst.app/universe/

I have used LaTeX extensively over the years until Typst came along. Typst is exactly what I need. A lightweight syntax alternative of LaTeX without the issues. It supports SVGs and many more things that are very useful.

I have yet to see a really good LaTeX CV. I guess it is possible but in my experience LaTeX just isn't designed for that and gives boring-looking results.

I agree that most LaTeX CVs are kind of boring. But I think they are more interesting than the end product in TFA, which I found completely underwhelming.

Now I have spent quite a lot of time customizing LaTeX, to the point where people have come to ask how I produced certain documents, because it surely could not be LaTeX. If you have a specific design idea in your head, LaTeX is able to achieve it if you just spend enough time RTFMing.

> But I think they are more interesting than the end product in TFA, which I found completely underwhelming.

I agree, that's a quite bad CV layout wise. Like someone has said "must be no more than 2 pages!" and his solution is just to eliminate all spacing.

I have yet to see an impressive resume from someone that wasn't boring in layout. Worse, I have seen very few resumes that were not boring in looks that were attached to a good candidate. :(

> I have seen very few resumes that were not boring in looks that were attached to a good candidate

I have seen many. You might be misinterpreting "boring". I don't mean that CVs should be like a Flash website. I mean they should look good typographically and not just like an instruction manual for a washing machine.

I wish I'd saved some of the best ones, but take a look at some of these: https://www.beamjobs.com/resumes/programmer-resume-examples

Ignoring the content, they are almost all far superior typographically to the example in this article.

I'm somewhat cheating in what I mean here, though. I was thinking of stuff like https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.html, where his CV is so basic in layout that it is kind of shocking. If I remember the CV of most high level faculty I got the chance to look at, none of them were that concerned with columns or typeface. They were, simply, lists of data.

It's a bit different in academia, especially if you are Donald Knuth! When do you think was the last time he sent a CV to a company looking for a job? The 60s?

Again, I know I'm cheating to pull his out. I don't have any links to any of the profs I worked near in the past.

I have grown rather convinced more people just go by whatever is in LinkedIn than I'm comfortable with.

A CV created with plain boring LaTeX is perfect for the right audience: people who can identify a LaTeX document at first sight.

It's nothing to do with LaTeX. Anything you can make in Word you could make in LaTeX.

Anything you can make in Word you can theoretically make in LaTeX with a ton of work that people who make LaTeX CVs don't both to do.

This is like saying "anything you can make in Photoshop you can make in Paint".

I don't think the difference is that great. More like Paint.net.

LaTeX is fine to me, as well. Heck, now that I'm older, I think bare TeX is probably fine. In line with what you are saying, I can offload the semantic nature of my resume to text files and just use the markup of TeX to layout how I want the page to look. Much easier if I don't try and have a single source that is both all of my semantic data with the layout at the same time.

I store the customizable data in YAML format and then use mako templates + a python script to transform my custom resume- and cover letter data into Latex | HTML | Plain text

Adding in python seems like it's a needlessly more complicated setup.

My resume is in LaTeX, but I like using a nix Flake so I can easily run `nix build` to build the resume, and I've guaranteeably installed the correct version of texlive that I need cuz it's reproducible.

Nix obviously isn't strictly necessary, but making a flake wasn't terribly hard and it's nice to keep stuff standardized between distros and macos.

> I think LaTeX is a far superior choice, yet the author pretty much dimissed it as a possibility.

Learning curve is a thing: I've never touched LaTeX, and I don't anticipate using it in the future. If I wanted to automate a thing as a learning project, I probably would rule out LaTeX unless I had a reason to want to learn it.

You don't really need to know LaTeX to do a resume in LaTeX, you just need to get a template and add your data to it

source: my resume is the only thing in LaTeX I've touched in over a decade

You can also use HTML+CSS and print to PDF.

> I probably would rule out LaTeX unless I had a reason to want to learn it.

The reason is that it's one of the best tools suited to this kind of work.

Hi, do you have an example of your latex source or template?

Here’s a sparse copy of mine.

https://michaelwilly.com/cv/latex

I don’t want to share the git because my real resume has more details.

I learned tex during a degree, I can use it mainly for math notation but I’m not sure that I know it in and out for typesetting.

My resume now uses a template.tex and a main.tex file and I \\input sub section tex files so I can iterate using git.

Look at that subtle off white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God. It even has a watermark.

> It's optimized for all the ATS nonsense it inevitably gets run through

How did you do/test that? I help maintain (didn't author it originally) the AwesomeCV template; we have an open issue about this, inconsistent results and not really having a good way to test it.

I took a similar approach with LaTeX, where I have a GitHub workflow [0] that regenerates my resume on commit.

[0] https://github.com/tneely/resume/blob/main/.github/workflows...

I've never tried LaTeX, but I've built my last few resumes with plain old HTML+CSS then saving as PDF. Works pretty great and is insanely simple to upkeep/modify

LaTeX is a nightmare to use, so you shouldn't inflict it on people. While I've used it and there's a lot to like, there's very little there that you'd want or need to make a resume. And without those things (most notably good formula support), it just doesn't add enough to justify the pain of having it in your life.