Introducing: Minimalist CV Templates (+157 remote roles)
TL;DR: I’ve looked at dozens of CVs since launching this newsletter. Working with Tymen Wander, we’ve taken the best elements and created three minimalist CVs that will help you stand out. The templates are available to all paying members of the community. If you sign up today on either the annual or lifetime membership, you can send me your current CV and I’ll update it in the template for you.
I’ve already had one recruiter at a prominent D2C brand tell me that the template is a stand out and really well done. Sign up for a monthly or annual membership here:
Or, use this form to sign up for a lifetime membership:
I’ve looked a lot of CVs in the process of building this community and I’ve formed some opinions on what a good CV should and shouldn’t have.
One common thing I see is people putting too much information on the page and not using white space to their advantage.
So, I’ve tried to remove unnecessary elements and create something streamlined.
If you’re not familiar with Figma, you can copy this file and begin updating your CV. If you run into problems with formatting, because invariably everyone’s CV will be at different, send me a message and I’ll be glad to help.
Note: the templates are being tweaked and we’ll likely add more in the near future. We’ll also be adding more blocks that you can drop in, like volunteer experience and tools, as well as a pre-selected list of fonts, sizes, colours that you can experiment with
The impetus for this CV template was spurred after I read this ‘guide to minimalist web design.’ Add it to your weekend reading/skimming list.
Pesky interview question
Talking about your greatest weakness during an interview has been a perennially difficult question for many. Here’s one clever way to approach the what’s your greatest weakness question: start with “one area that I’m looking to improve is…”. One example, might look something like:
One area that I’m looking to improve in is having influence across the organization. How can I use data to influence others? What types of arguments do I need to make to bring along various stakeholders, departments.
That type of answer does a few things really well. It acknowledges the question and doesn’t simply dismiss it. It reframes the weakness as something that you’re working on. It shows “growth mindset.” And maybe most importantly it avoids using the “I work too hard” response.
Winning project
Sara Kimmich, a full-time data scientist with a PhD in neuroscience, who self-identifies as a Stack Overflow enthusiast ( 😊), is working on a free, open-source training community for Clojure/ClojureScript that is focused on structural equality and is the selected project for this past month’s sponsorship fee.
Sara previously launched a project called Online Brain Intensive (OBI) and will look to take learnings from that project into her next one. On the genesis of OBI, Sara noted that:
I’ve had an opportunity to see some of the most talented potential and active engineers drop out of tech because they’ve either self-selected out, they haven’t felt comfortable, or there’s been a hiring practice that hasn’t gotten them into the room and I would really like to see that change.
Sara had the idea to get everyone involved in big brain data to teach as many people as they could, at once, through an online intensive. The goal of the project was to get people to work together to make quick advances in the field.
What’s really interesting about OBI – and the approach that Sara is taking with the Clojure community – is that there was a specific intention to design the intensive so that anybody could be heard.
In the Slack group for OBI, Sara requested that no one give themselves any identifying information. The result was a 56% female participation rate in the anonymous group, compared with 18% female representation in the computational neuroscience field in general.
Sara expects the first cohort of the open-source Clojure community to be supported inside of 2020.
Want to learn more? You can watch this video to learn more about OBI and you can follow Sara on Twitter.
I’ll ask Sara to write a short blog post about how she spent the funds and anything she learned in the process and hopefully that’ll be useful to others in the community.
Good thing
I recently discovered Paul Jarvis. You might already be familiar with Paul, but if you’re not, he’s a successful indie maker. Paul wrote a book about building a company as a one person team – ‘Company of One’ – and he gets into his philosophy on business in this interview.
One of the things that struck a chord is when Paul talks about defining what enough is in the context of growing a business.
With growth, if you start to think about things like upper limits or like what enough is, and that’s different for everybody, “…” you can say ‘ok, like, if I know I need my business to make money to be profitable and support my life “…” if I reach that then I can ease off the throttle a bit, I can pay more attention to the audience that I have, I can maybe take a break, I could maybe recharge my batteries, I could maybe not work 16 hours a day but work 4 or 5 hours and find other things that I don’t have to monetize that I can just enjoy doing.
Anyways, whether you’re looking for a full-time remote role, or you’re building a project largely on your own, or something between those two things, that idea of finding enough and finding balance is kinda something that I want for everyone that’s signed up to this newsletter.
I’ll do my best to bring you resources, connections, and create tools that allow you to free up more time and work on interesting things.
Housekeeping:
Side project: I’ve got an idea for a small side project that requires one developer capable of building a Chrome extension and one designer. The goal would be to launch on ProductHunt and simply use it for our portfolios. Interested in hearing more? Email me.
Every Friday afternoon, I send out 2-3 questions to help you reflect on what you achieved this past week. To receive those questions every week, sign up here.
Looking to hire?: Tap our exceptional pool of remote workers to fill open roles. I’ll charge you 5% of first-year salary only when the role has been successfully filled with someone from our community. I’ll then take that full amount and put it towards one or more people in our community building a side project. You can fill out this form. This is still in beta. Email me.
Chris ✌️
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Slightly different format; you can view all jobs on this Google Sheet.
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