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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

I think it looks like a young person's work. No offense! What I mean is that it looks like it's supposed to be impressive from the point of view of the author (you), and you've made it look "snazzy".

This is partly because you don't have any real world experience to list (by "real world" I'm specifically meaning what recruiters would mean, i.e. salaried or contract employment for a business they can look up). You have to fill the space with other achievements. In a way, that's an opportunity to say something about yourself that people later in their career forget, replaced by lists of companies and boring job titles.

You don't need to put your address, or age, or any of that stuff. If you get employed then they'll need your address to set up legal contracts and so on, but for the purposes of getting a job, I'd leave it out. Or replace it with "based in Texas but available for remote work" or something that gives people the information they want.

Your email address is a free gmail one. There's nothing wrong with that, but it looks more professional if you use one with its own domain - and you already have one of those. As a technical consultant on an interview I know it doesn't matter, but a tiny part of me would wonder why you didn't list connor@leviathan-programming dot cf (excuse the advanced anti-spam measure there). My prejudice would be that if the candidate didn't bother to set up a forwarder then what else would they leave half-polished?

I don't like charts and stats in CVs or résumés. I think they're kinda dangerous. You don't want to put your skill level too low because you don't want to sell yourself short, and the HR people reading the page will automatically assume you're exaggerating. As soon as you get into a technical interview, someone's going to see that you claim 90%+ mastery of Javascript and ask you a bunch of questions you can't answer, and you'll feel like an impostor. That's why generic phrases like

good, solid understanding of Javascript

work well. They're even better if they're expanded on with some sort of examples:

I built a platformer game made with an early version of P5.js with demonstrating advanced physics and combat, which I release on X platform / which went down well with my friends.

I've altered that to be a full, first-person sentence, because that's the style you have gone with for most of the rest of the page. It's important to have a consistent voice. I see these two next to each other:

Built a free frontend coding website with some unique features.
A site to help people with volunteering projects, originally entered for a hackathon.

The first is declarative and the second descriptive. It reads a little strangely. That's why I'd suggest changing it. Personally, I prefer the declarative style, it's much less passive.

I also don't like icons very much. They're tricky creatures. What ends up happening is that you find icons that fit about 80% of your points and then have to use something generic for the remainder, because, let's face it, we don't have a convention for a "sustainable quality" emoji.

They also mess with the appearance of text, because they're inconsistent ratios (an envelope and a map pin are landscape and portrait respectively). This means that the line-height in your contact section looks too tight, even though it's actually the same as the rest of the text.

Colours are OK, but a lot of people are going to print this out and pass it around in meetings, so using colours like light blue is iffy. On a mono printer that might look very faint.

You can call me lots of things, but you can't call me late. Time is priceless and I make use of every second. You can count on me to get your website done before or on the deadline every single time

This isn't necessary. People assume that of their candidates... or at least they assume everyone makes the same claim. It's the same with phrases like, "team player" or "detail-oriented". They're fluff that takes up space you could be using to sell yourself.
It also sounds a bit like a joke ("you can call me lots of things"?)

There's nothing wrong with having a jokey CV! My own LinkedIn profile is complete nonsense and has got me a bunch of recruitment interest, so I can't talk back here. I do, however, think it should be consistent. Keep that voice going in other paragraphs or get rid of it all together. Ideally, you would have different versions of the document for different targets (for instance if you applied for Rock Star, you'd heavily lean towards the game-writing experience, but if you applied to Facebook you might talk about analytics or social APIs).

I'll give you a unique design, that works perfect for everyone.

Yeah, nobody can do that! That comes across as a little naive. And it contradicts your comments later in this thread where you say resumes aren't meant to be responsive.

These are my first thoughts off the top of my head and I'm not trying to be exhaustive. They're also just my opinion and I'm neither a professional CV writer or HR/recruitment expert, but I have read and written a lot of them over the years.

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ironcladdev profile image
Conner Ow

Thanks, I'll keep these in mind and change this in the future if I have time.