This first friend is not a technical man so my initial reaction was that he would be rather averse to learning even the basic amount of LaTeX required to generate a CV using moderncv for example. But, I thought, he might not be so averse to learning the basics of Markdown necessary to write a CV in it; though I sincerely doubt he'd be willing to figure out the mess of pandoc, Makefiles, and LaTeX templates I use to generate my CV (purloined from http://mwhite.github.com/resume/).
To solve this I produced a simple web application that takes an uploaded Markdown file (in the correct format) and produces a rather nice looking CV out of it.
try it here