How can I make a star-based rating system for my technical skills on my CV be more usable / informative?

Question

I'm currently working on my CV and have come across a problem that many others have dealt with: How to rate my skills across several fields. I would like to use a star-based rating system instead of using a few keywords over and over again. I have read some arguments against that, but I still think there are some benefits to it and have been trying to figure out how to make a star-based rating system more informative to potential employers. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

• The skills section in my CV mainly consists of software (for example, several Adobe Creative Cloud programs) and some programming/coding languages. However, my proficiency in those programs/languages varies vastly, so I need to include some form of rating of my relative skill.
• I could use a set of keywords (e.g beginner - advanced - expert or basic knowledge - working knowledge as suggested here). However, that wouldn't be fundamentally different from using a star-based rating system, but it is more verbose. (Sidenote: I write my CV in German, where the accepted terminology goes something like this: Grundkenntnisse - Gute Kenntnisse - Sehr gute Kenntnisse - Herausragende Kenntnisse)
• This is for technical skills only. I fully understand that there's no benefit of rating things like creativity, determination, critical thinking et c. using such a system.
• I intend to use the full scale. I see why rating myself 4/5 or 5/5 stars in every category to make me look smart is a bad idea. But by listing, for example, HTML as 4/5 and PHP as 1/5 I make sure my potential employer has an idea of my skills and I won't be given tasks that exceed my knowledge in the respective field.
• I understand that fine differences are hard to justify (why did you use 3.5/5 instead of 4/5 stars?), however it's better than nothing or a worse system like the one described above.

I have read that another good way of avoiding this problem is to list my work experience in the respective field in terms of years or finished projects. However, there are two reasons why this is not a good choice for me:

• I am just finishing my bachelor's degree, so I don't have much work experience worth mentioning. Most of the things i could list here are personal or study-related projects.
• My CV is accompanied by my online portfolio, which includes examples of my creative work. My study-related projects and all the papers I wrote are listed/linked/downloadable on my website. My CV is also hosted on this website, so they are easily accessible from there (I know you may also have some reservations against online CVs instead of PDFs/prints, but that is NOT what this question is about). Therefore, listing those projects in my CV again would be redundant and unnecessarily verbose.

This is my reasoning behind using a star-based system. There are other reasons, e.g. design-related ones. This is why I have been thinking about how to make a star-based rating system work. For example, I could include a legend with explanations for the ratings 1 through 5. Or I could include those explanations in the HTML title tag, so it appears on mouseover.

Which of those options should I opt for? Or is there a better way? How can I make a star-based rating system for my technical skills more informative? What are other ways to utilize such a system to it's full extent?

Please note that I am looking for answers on how to make this work, not for a lecture on why this is a bad idea. I've read those arguments and they didn't convince me. Some examples of 'good' CVs using such a system are also appreciated.

Answer 1

Don't use a rating system at all - they are extremely subjective and tend to be meaningless in different environments. You stand more chance of your CV being rejected than looked at in closer detail.

Concentrate on your education and experience - don't say

"I am an expert in X"

"I rate my skills in Y as five-star"

I have worked with many developers who rate themselves highly, but in reality are extremely poor coders. I have been that person myself. It doesn't mean you are lying, it just means you are not objective - and a recruiter will be hiring you on their objective reasonings rather than your subjective ratings.

Instead, you should concentrate on objective views of your situation - your experience, your education, the projects you have worked on and what you came away from them with.

Say stuff like:

My last project was built using PHP6 on the server side and Angular 2 on the client side, utilising Javascript to ECMA2015 standard. I covered new concepts such as x, y and z during this project.

If you spell out what you did in a project, even in short form as above, that gets across the information technically competent hiring managers are looking for - the progression of your skill base (no, you did not come out of school, college or university as the best coder ever - chances actually are rather that your skills taught to you by your educational system are already somewhat stale the moment you hit the job market), do you leap from technology to technology or do you build on good foundations, are you distracted by the latest shiny or do you prefer to hone your skills in a particular area...

For a developer, the best thing to get you hired is a good GitHub account with public repositories of your work - an online portfolio is a good start, but a GitHub repository of the same work can show that you can work in particular ways (you can use source control, for a start), gives recruiters access to the actual code behind the portfolio which isn't available through "view source", and shows if you are active in open source at all - if you are, it gives an insight as to how you approach issues with other people, as your submissions are tracked etc.

As a hiring manager, give me a GitHub repo of your work to look through and I will spend time looking at it. Give me an infographic which takes me cognitive effort to digest and you run the risk of the information not getting through.

Answer 2

Since you're listing programs from the Adobe Creative Cloud, I'd assume you're a designer.

For novice designers sometimes fancy equals good. For more experienced designers, good usability equals good. Using the same set of keywords everyone else uses is good usability - people don't need to think about what you mean. Using stars is fancy.

Since you want to use the stars anyway, your goal is to reduce the "fancy" part, without giving up on the stars rating.

• Don't use stars, use dots. See Tripadvisor for an example.
• Make sure to have placeholders like Tripadvisor or IMDB, so people see something is rated 3 out of 5, rather than 3 out of an unknown number.
• Don't use anything on mouseover. CV on print must be the same as the CV on screen.
• Consider still writing the actual skill levels and just using the dots as a visual aid.

Answer 3

As a person reading CVs (technical checks): Don't do star ratings of yourself. The waste of space, the arrogance of evaluating yourself (i suppose your university did not rate you with stars) nearly make me throw-up when getting a CV like this. Wannabe designers with no idea about layout, page balance and typography messing around with heavy symbols redirecting focus onto their touchscreen driven representation of the world. You actually put a selfie as an application photo and it would not add to the bad impression.

So these were the problem with my direct impression when getting such a CV. Another major problem: if you give 5 stars to yourself, it is hopelessly undefined what that actually means and I would be careful to to that. If you evaluate yourself to be 5 stars, for me that means that you think that you beat the vast majority of people similar to you in that skill and are fundamentally proficient. So that would my interpretation, while somebody else possibly has another one. So probably it's better not to do it, since another person may think it is normal that you have 5 start in everything you need for the job and I give you interview questions which are close to unsolvable.