Tag Archives: template

Resume blues partly alleviated by LaTeX

Posted on by

Once again your fearless correspondent is seeking new consulting opportunities.  One of the major drawbacks of consulting is the constant need to keep marketing yourself!  When it comes to self promotion that old standby, the resume,  is still one of your most effective tools.  When communicating with potential clients their first question is; “Can you send me a resume?”

Resumes are a black art.  There are many,  mostly bogus,  theories about what constitutes a good resume and an entire cottage industry has sprung up to support resume creation.  I am sure you have walked down the power resume aisle in your local big-box bookstore marveling at how people can write entire books on composing three page resumes.  Maybe you have suffered through a corporate out-placing where well dressed human-resource types will earnestly criticize your use of bullets and personal pronouns.  Whenever people go on about resumes I always think of Monty Python’s theory of Brontosauruses.

Here’s the nasty truth: a resume is an advertisement!  Do you honestly think anyone would dare to propose a theory of advertisements? A good ad gets noticed and helps sell the product.  The same holds for resumes.

I have a simple resume style that has worked well.  The only complaints I get relate to file types.  Some clients want plain text, some want Word documents, others want PDFs and most don’t care!

Lately I revised the LaTeX version of my resume.  LaTeX is my preferred document format.  LaTeX source documents are simple text files. You can manipulate them with any text editor on any computer system.  Hence LaTeX documents cannot be held hostage by software vendors that encode your words in version specific binary formats. If you have ever converted a Word document to an old or new format you will know of what I speak.  Because LaTeX files are simple text it’s easy to share LaTeX on the web.  My current resume borrowed from a number of authors.  When I borrow I try to give back.  The following links point to the LaTeX source of my resume and the final PDF output.  Help yourself but be courteous and maintain the creative common license block in the LaTeX code.