Create an impactful resume in LaTeX (Overleaf)

A resume is a formal document that highlights your professional qualifications, including your education, skills set, relevant work experience, and much more. A resume is more than a sheet of paper. It can be considered as your first professional impression in front of your employer. If you are seeking a job at any firm, a resume/CV is a must-have document for the position.

When creating a resume people turn to Microsoft Word or online templates. However, if you want to stand out from the crowd using the resume, you might want to give LaTeX a chance. LaTex is a software used to prepare a document, mainly used by academic and research communities for publication of their work. LaTeX is also used by many students around the globe for submitting their project reports.

Why LaTeX?

There are many reasons to consider LaTeX among other options. First, it is free software, i.e., there are no licensing fees to use it. You can create as many documents as you want to create without paying any amount.

Second, documents made in LaTeX are visually captivating. Documents created in LaTeX use markup tagging conventions to define the general body of a document. When creating a LaTeX document, the author defines the logical structure using straightforward, well-known terms like chapter, section, table, figure, etc. and then leaves the formatting and layout of these structures up to the LaTeX system. As a result, it promotes separating the layout from the content while yet enabling manual typesetting revisions as necessary.

The third reason to choose LaTeX is its availability and ease to use; we can use LaTeX to create, modify, and download documents at any place, anytime with minimum effort. An editor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs can be great to create simple structured documents, but while creating a resume you need to get a bit creative; this is where engaging with general-purpose editors becomes tricky. It takes a lot of unnecessary effort for formatting/edit a resume. However, with LaTeX you can create a clean and elegant resume with minimum effort that is easy to understand.

Why Overleaf?

Overleaf is easy to use, online, collaborative LaTeX editor. Overleaf is used by more than 11 million students and over 6800 institutions worldwide. Some of the features of Overleaf are as follows:

1. Ease of use: Even if you’ve never used LaTeX before, there is nothing technical or challenging for you to install, and you can start using it right away. Overleaf comes with a complete, ready-to-go LaTeX environment that runs on its servers.
2. Collaboration: Overleaf allows multiple users to edit the same document at the same time. Overleaf makes sure that you’re always up to date with your collaborators and what they are doing.
3. Document History: You can see exactly who made what changes and when by looking at the history of all your modifications in Overleaf. Mistakes can occur whether working together or alone. It is easy to go back to earlier versions, which eliminates the possibility of losing work or changing anything you later regret.

How to create a resume with Overleaf

Creating a resume with Overleaf is easy.

STEP 1: Register and Log in to Overleaf

You can register using your e-mail credentials or institution.

STEP 2: Select a template (Optional)

If you have never worked with LaTeX and you don’t know how to use it then you can select any template from this collection. It offers 1000s of templates available to use free of charge. Just click on any template and then click open as a template.

STEP 3: Edit the template

Once the template has been loaded into your device, you can start editing the *.tex file. LaTeX uses commands to format the file. So, you might need to learn some basic commands according to your needs. If you just want the basics then you can refer to the official documentation “Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes”. If you are eager to dive deep into the topic you can refer to the full official documentation here.

STEP 4: Compile the document

Once you have modified the *.tex file and you want to review your changes, then compile the document. Compiling the document will reflect all your changes in the *.tex file into a PDF file. Once you are satisfied with your work you can download or print this PDF. Congratulations, you have your new visually appealing resume!!

Thanks for your attention. Hope it was helpful. If you have any doubts feel free to contact me on LinkedIn. Have a heavenly day.