hello avatars, celt here to talk about resume fundamentals. A resume is your entire professional life in a document, and must be close to perfect to get you a seat at the table. The mistakes i will be highlighting today can be the difference between your resume going in the trash pile or your resume going in the interview pile.
I was on the interview committee for a couple open reqs in my org, what an experience. So many people ruin their chances with mistakes that are avoidable. I am going to break this down by principle and then let’s take a look at a subscriber resume and see where we can improve it.
Tech Resume Principles
Format
Your resume will probably be put through a system to pull out key words, companies, techs, etc. Some algorithm applied to determine fit, can have hardcoded rules like if Google in resume, flag etc. Others can be key word based.
No resume template is perfect. Most tech resume templates can bring you far enough, or format the document yourself. Please dont pick a template with colors, logos, or weird tables. Your format/template should make it easy for me to parse your resume for the important things that i care about. Bold technologies, companies, softwares, open source libraries, or other important things here. Use your judgement here.
Only support your resume in PDF form. This is the only way to ensure your formatting does not get messed up. If its difficult for me to read your resume its just another reason to throw it away.
i generally recommend one page resumes, but there are different takes here. thought process is most people dont actually read it anyway, so lets just make it short.
General order of sections should be
name, location, personal details in the header area
work experience
personal projects, open source, etc
education
skills (if have the room)
If you have no work experience you can have your personal projects or education first and the other second. Chose whichever is strongest to put first, if you went to Community College, put your personal projects first in my opinion. further down the document means higher chance it isnt read.
No typos or broken English. I know many people in tech are not fluent English speakers, so have a fluent speaker review.
Work experience the most important because if you can generate revenue, automate (time savings), reduce costs (efficient algorithms), or create clean UI designs that is more important than your academic record.
Trim the fat
i dont care if you are an avid cook, proficient with Microsoft Word, or “skilled in Python”. Keep your resume relevant and specific. Why I am not a fan of the skills section. If you have to list out your skills, it tells me you didnt do any projects with them. If i am looking for a skill and you dont have experience in it, youre in trouble. Either come up with an exaggeration or do a personal project with the technology.
If the skills is irrelevant like Word, Powerpoint, or public speaking just remove it.
If the skill is not correlated to tech, only keep it on if it somehow shows you are above average at something that can transfer to tech, like a life skill. If you run Iron Man races for example, that tells me you are hardworking and dedicated and that transfers.
dont feel like you need to add information that has no value add just to hit one page.
Substance
Focus on giving strong ‘signal’ as the hiring committee likes to say. Enforce that you are a strong coder, logical thinker, and clear communicator.
The single most important principle here is show dont tell. The hiring manager will figure out you are a good coder if you say
“Enhanced high frequency trading algorithm to increase returns by 3%”
“Developed CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions that reduced manual errors and saved x hours quarterly”
“Developed ETL job that increased time savings by x due to y”
“Worked directly with CTO to create cloud strategy and migrate x applications to cloud, saving y dollars annually ”
Show the value of what you created, try to tie everything back to some quantifiable performance metric if possible. This can be difficult with some of the more abstract items like being a cloud architect, i would write it like this:
Architected finance application ensuring adherence to low risk tolerance, enterprise resiliency standard, and minimizing cost. Application generated x dollars / year.
Another benefit of writing like this is that you lead your interviewer to ask you clarifying questions in your frame. So I would ask something like What enhancement did you make to increase returns? or What steps are in your CI/CD pipeline to result in that amount of time savings? What was your enterprise resiliency standard? You should set yourself up for the question you can nail.
Good substance breakdown is generally Action + result + technology used. This is going to send a much higher signal than saying the traditional “I did this” type line.
Bad Substance
Developed CI/CD tools
Enhanced developer documentation
Created team’s git workflow
Managed customer expectations
Oversaw code reviews
These are all telling me facts about yourself. avoid please.
Subscriber Resume
A willing sub sent me their resume. There is one section i want to re-do here so everyone can understand how to show not tell.
Template and format looks good on this section, easy to tell the company, location, job title, and tenure. What we can improve is the substance. Here is what this section would look like if i wrote it.
Develop and maintain REST API services with <technology> that <metric or impact>.
this could look like “Develop and maintain REST API services with Go that saves 500 hours per year”
Created necessary stored procedures and views to ensure high application performance. SQL Server, Oracle
Automated operational database tasks that saves x hours per year, <technology>
Participated in front end code reviews in which I troubleshooted issues and mentored junior engineers. HTML, CSS, Javascript.
adding the code review part because it shows people sought your opinion and you had valuable input that let to troubleshooting of issues.
Created team’s git workflow which reduced merge conflicts by x% resulting in y saved hours per year.
you do not need to know the exact time savings if someone asks say, “i determined that merge conflicts on average cost us 15 minutes to resolve”
Adhered to Agile methods to streamline application development by <time metric>
hopefully our company publishes these metrics, if not a reasonable estimate should be fine.
Hopefully this resume workshop provides some insight into how the hiring committee is looking at your resume.
-celt.