I have had lots of feedback that my Chinese resume is “very western”. I would expect this to be the case considering I have simply translated my English resume into Chinese and kept the same layout. Of course I have also added a few obligatory pieces of information such as marital status, age and a photograph that are not on my English resume.
Personally I find the typical “lots of boxes” Chinese resume style to be very unpleasant to the eye. I also think that some of the required boxes are superfluous. For instance why should you need to specify your gender when the employer can simply look at the attached photograph and clearly identify if the applicant is male or female? I am also uneasy about putting my ARC number on their for security reasons.
Has anyone else gone for the Chinese layout and style? We all know how the saying goes - when in Rome…, however what’s your opinion?
You forgot your blood type, zodiac sign, religion, weight, parents’ names, penis size, life story, detailed descriptions of the businesses of the companies you worked for, and other irrelevancies. Also, if you got a promotion at a company, list each position separately in a separate entries for the same company. Only put in the years, not the months. Make sure the formatting between each entry is totally inconsistent. Put a comma in your name. Use tables and a variety of ugly fonts. Make sure website links and email addresses are underlined and colored blue. If you ever worked for the Taiwanese government, make sure the entire name of the agency is included, up to and including R.O.C. In your address, do not put a space between No. and the number. Make sure to include your educational history all the way back to elementary school, as well as your score in primary school mental arithmetic contests.
Do whatever you can do to make it look busy and cluttered with irrelevant information.
What he said. I don’t play by the rules, and so my resume is not at all what Taiwanese people expect. I usually get “你的履歷還真特別” or “很精彩,” neither of which I think are meant as complements. Oh, well.
I took a friend’s resume and liberally edited to remove his personal information, but the format is the same. For the 自傳 section, he wrote a whole page covering his parents’ profession, his time before moving to Taiwan, and how he’s been busy since coming here.
Also, don’t be consistent in terms of listing things in reverse chronological order vs. chronological order. Mix it up a bit; they love inconsistency and jumbled formatting here (as can be seen in the design of the average Taiwanese website). Include a description of yourself, including self-evaluations of how excellent your performance is in your schoolwork and your job (but offering no objective evidence for it), as well as a statement about how you are humble, self-effacing, and filial to your parents.
I’m helping a friend make a Chinese resume, but can’t find the correct translation of references (contact details of past employers and colleagues). Any ideas?