CVs and portfolios

Documents → CVs and portfolios

A CV in Postulo is a variant: a selection of entries from your career record, in an order you choose, with a theme.

Make one variant per kind of role you apply for, not one per application. Three or four is normal. One per application means maintaining forty documents.

A CV, or a portfolio

The same page holds both, because they are the same thing selected and laid out differently.

• A CV is a career read backwards: what you did, where, and when, with the dates carrying the argument.
• A portfolio is the work first — projects, and the things they point at — with the career following as context, set small.

Choose which on the form. Everything else is identical: the same career record, the same tailoring, the same included switch, the same export. A portfolio picks from its own family of themes, because the difference is one of structure rather than of styling.

"Portfolios of different kinds" — a developer's, a designer's, a researcher's — is answered by the theme and by what you select, not by a third setting. They differ in exactly those two things, and both are already yours to choose.

Building one

1. New CV or portfolio. Give it a name for your own use — "Backend, English" — plus an optional headline and opening summary.
2. Add entries. The panel on the CV page lists everything from your career record that is not already on this CV, grouped by kind. Tick what belongs and add it.
3. Order it. The arrows move an entry past the one above or below it, and at either end the arrow is greyed out. Sections appear in the order their first entry does, so moving one job to the top moves the whole Experience block with it. A newly added entry goes to the end, and the arrows own it from there.

Tailoring without forking

This is the point of the whole design.

Tailor on any entry lets you rewrite its highlights for this CV only. The master record is untouched, and your other variants are unaffected. Leave the override empty and the entry follows the master copy — including any later corrections.

Included can be unticked to keep an entry on the variant while leaving it off the page. Useful for something you want back next month without having to find it again.

Themes

Two come with Postulo:

• Plain — a clean sans-serif layout. Sober and unremarkable, which is usually right.
• Classic — a serif layout with small caps and a centred contact block.

Both are A4 with generous margins, both avoid splitting a single job — or a single piece of work — across a page break, and both set every kind of document Postulo writes, portfolios included. A theme from a plugin only appears in the menu for the kinds it says it can set, so a theme that has never been taught to lay out a portfolio is simply not offered for one.

A plugin can add more. The menu lists whatever is installed, and a theme from a plugin appears there under its own name with no further setting to change. A theme does not have to set everything, though — one written for letters will simply not be offered here, and you will see it on the letter form instead. Nothing offers you a pairing it cannot then produce; that is the point of the menu being shorter on one page than on another.

A theme is markup, so it arrives the way code arrives: inside a plugin an administrator chose to install, having seen who wrote it. There is no upload box for themes, and there will not be one.

A theme draws only what it carries. The renderer fetches nothing while it draws — not a file on the server, not an address on the network — so a stylesheet, an image or a font a theme wants has to be inside it: its CSS inline, and anything else as a data: address. One it points at by address is left out of the PDF rather than fetched, which is what keeps a theme from reading the server's disk into somebody's CV.

If a plugin is removed, the CVs that used its theme keep working — they fall back to Plain and still export. Nothing is lost except the look, and choosing another theme puts that right.

Contact details are taken from your profile, not retyped per CV. Untick include contact details for a variant that will be sent through a system that strips them anyway, or for an anonymised copy.

Previewing and exporting

• The preview is on the page. Under As it will print, beside the entries, the CV is drawn exactly as the PDF renderer will see it and redrawn after every change — move an entry, and the document beside it moves with it. It shows what is saved. Scroll inside it to read on, or Open on its own for the document in a tab of its own. Fast, and needs no renderer installed.
• Export PDF renders it and keeps the result. Every export is preserved — see Files and what you sent. The PDF is tagged, carries your name in its properties, and is readable by a screen reader and by the software an employer runs over it — see Accessibility.

Export needs a working PDF renderer. WeasyPrint is installed with Postulo and used by default; if it cannot run, Postulo says exactly what is missing and everything else keeps working. See Installing Postulo.

A note on languages

A CV variant has a language field, chosen from the languages this instance offers. It sets the language attribute of the rendered document, which matters for hyphenation and for screen readers — including the recruiter's.

Left blank, it follows the language you read Postulo in rather than defaulting to English. Cover letters have the same field and behave the same way.

Each variant says which language it is in, as a flag beside its kind on Documents and on the variant's own page, so two versions of one CV are told apart without opening either. Where no flag stands for a language — Arabic, Swahili, Hausa and the others with no single home — the language's own name is shown instead, because no flag is better than a wrong one. A variant that follows your profile is drawn exactly like one that names its language: what the employer receives is the same either way.

It also decides which text the CV prints. Each career entry can be written in more than one language, and a CV declaring French prints the French version of every entry that has one. An entry with nothing in French prints as it stands — a line in the wrong language is better than a gap where a job used to be — and the CV's own page lists those entries before you press Export PDF, with a link to each. Finding out from the PDF an employer already has is not finding out.

A cover letter is different, and deliberately: a letter is prose you wrote rather than a selection from a record, so two languages means two letters.

It also sets the document's direction. A CV written in Arabic or Hebrew is laid out right to left; one written in English is laid out left to right, whichever language you happen to read Postulo in. The PDF goes to somebody else, so it is laid out for what is written on it rather than for who made it.