Don't use progress bars in your resume

Sometime ago, I got a chance to be involved in hiring process at my company and one thing I have noticed is that good part of applicants like to use progress bars in their CV’s to show the level of their knowledge.

My only question is how? How do you calculate the percentage of certain skill in the first place? Saying you know 80% of something usually means you know what or where 100% is. That further means you have more than 80% of that knowledge, because you know what you don’t know. Now, I don’t want to start a philosophical debate about circle of knowledge, so I’m gonna keep it short and light.

If you’ve graded your knowledge of HTML to 80% or 4/5 stars, are you really sure there isn’t some part of HTML reference, some trick or whatever, that you missed that can give or take away some of those precious points?

Other thing is that you can’t easily rate something that’s constantly changing and improving. Say you graded your CSS knowledge to 75%. CSS Working Group gave us CSS-Grid few months ago. Is your CSS grade now 50% or 71% or something else?

My advice is just don’t use it, it’s pointless to say the least.

Have something to add or comment? Feel free to email me or write me on Bluesky.