Hi everyone, today we are going to take a look at how we can create a pretty resume using LaTex.

Minimalist and concise

When writing a résumé we always want to achieve a minimalist and concise document to easily catch the eyes of any recruiter/company. To do so, we want to organize its content into 2 columns, having a good spacing for all the content to fit without losing readability. And here is where LaTex comes to the rescue.

I split my resume into: Skills (33%) and Work Experience (66%) columns.

\begin{minipage}[t]{0.33\textwidth} 

\begin{minipage}[t]{0.66\textwidth} 

Preview

Before describing each section, let's have a look at the final result

# Name Section

This is a command that takes 2 parameters: first name and last name. The last name has a thicker font and uses the accent color.

\namesection{Alan}{Turing}

# Skills

Here you want to list all your skills and additional information. As you can see in the preview, this column has several sections: Info, Education, Course Work, Skills, and Languages.

\ Info

\section{Info}

Here we place general information: location, date of birth, contact information, links. I think having plain urls looks pretty ugly so I decided to follow the following format: {domain}//{user_name}. This way it's easier to have an idea of what the link is about. E.g.

\textbf{Dev.to://}\href{https://dev.to/protium}{protium}\\

\ Education

\section{Education}

For this section I opted for the following format, where each entry is a subsection

{University Acronym}
{University Name}
{Degree}
{Year} | {State, Country}

E.g.

\subsection{FaMAF}
\location{National University Of Córdoba}
\descript{BSc. in Computer Science \\
BSc. in Physics}
\location{
2017-2019 | Córdoba, Argentina
}

\ Course work

\section{Course Work}

A list of all the courses you have finished or certifications you have obtained so far. Here you want to add a link to your certificate if possible (Coursera, Udemy, EdX, etc). If there is no certificate you could add a link to the course syllabus.

\ Skills

\section{Skills}

For this section, I wanted to list all the tools/languages I know and have experience with, for which I added different \subsections:

• Programming: all the languages I have experience with
• Infrastructure: all the infra tools I have experience with
• Storage: all the storage solutions I have experience with
• Familiar With: all the technologies I have used for personal projects or PoC at different companies.

\ Languages

\section{Languages}

The last section is dedicated to the languages you speak, with information about your level. In my case I have used the Common European Framework of Reference. E.g.

\subsection{Languages}
\textbf{Spanish:} Native\\
\textbf{English:} C1\\

# Work Experience

This is, of course, the main section of our resume. Over the years I learned that a good work experience description should provide the following information:

• Company Name and Website
• Your Position
• Month and year
• Location
• Very small description of the company/product
• What where your main tasks/accomplishments in the company. (Here is the real deal so let's get into more details in the next section).
• Tech Stack: the company's tech stack. Be careful about not revealing sensitive information.

# Describing your position at company X

I have seen a lot of resumes during my career and I think most of the people fail at describing what they've done while working at company X. So to make it easier, let's list what a good description should have:

• Achievements: what you have achieved while working in company X? Did you create something amazing? As example, you could write: "I refactored the search algorithm which led to an improvement of 70% in performance". It must be something you feel proud about.
• What tasks did you enjoy at this position? "I created a PoC to add rust to our event processor"; "I created new tools for automatize deployments"
• Some trivial tasks: "Prepared migration from Vue to React". Maybe you didn't enjoy these tasks but they were part of your tasks at company X.

E.g.

\runsubsection{\href{https://cool-00.example/}{Cool Company 00}}
\descript{| Senior Software Engineer}
\location{\ello{\textbf{Aug 2021 – Present} | Munich, Germany | Cool platform}}
\vspace{\topsep}
\begin{tightemize}
\item Developed a cool algorithm that increased the speed of transactions by 70\%
\item Migrated cloud to AWS
\item {\bf Tech Stack:} NodeJS, ReactJS, Typescript, JWT, Web Sockets, Jest, ExpressJS, Go, RabbitMQ, Temporal, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, GCloud, Github Actions, Argo CD, Sentry\newline
\end{tightemize}

# Fonts

Ideally, you want to choose fonts that are easy to read and do not look too fancy. For this project I have used 2 google fonts in order to:

• have a geek font for the Skills, locations, positions.
• have a "normal" font for the jobs descriptions.

You can easily change these fonts in the resume.cls file.

\setmainfont[Color=primary, Path = fonts/maven-pro/, BoldFont=MavenPro-SemiBold]{MavenPro-Regular}

# Colors

Colors are defined as follow

\definecolor{primary}{HTML}{2b2b2b} 
\definecolor{headings}{HTML}{6A6A6A}
\definecolor{subheadings}{HTML}{333333}
\definecolor{links}{HTML}{33AFFF}

Note that links is our accent color.

That's it!
This post ended up being longer than I expected. I hope you found something useful here and I'm looking forward to see your customizations!

👽