Writing a good resume can be a challenging task, especially when you consider how little time hiring managers and recruiters have to review them. On an average, they probably spend less than 30 seconds on it. To capture their attention in a short time, it’s important to highlight why you are the right fit for the job as succinctly as possible.
Here are a few tips to help you create an effective resume. Please note that this is specific to the tech industry. These are my recommendations; not rules or the only way or the best way. Also the conventions change over time. What recruiters / hiring managers look for can and probably will change over time. For example, cover letters were important at some point, but they are not required now. Most people don’t have time to read them.
Before we get into the content of the resume, keep the following things in mind.
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- Keep your resume to a maximum of one or two pages.
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- The top 50%-66% of your resume is prime real estate.
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- It’s okay to tailor your resume to a company and have different versions for different companies.
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- Resume format is not that important unless you are a designer. A standard template is generally good enough.
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- It’s okay to bold critical information.
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- Use the “So what?” test. After reading about your contribution, the reviewer shouldn’t think “so what?”
The Skeleton
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- Name and contact information.
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- Summary of qualifications instead of an objective (new grads can skip this).
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- Skills
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- Work experience from most recent to oldest. Include relevant personal / side projects.
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- Education (for students and recent graduates, put this before work experience).
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- Affiliations (E.g. member of a board, honors society, etc.) – only if you think it differentiates you in some way.
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- Personal interests or achievements, if there’s anything outstanding (examples in the content section).
The Details
Name and Contact Information
Email, phone and LinkedIn profile link are enough; no need to include your address. Add a link to your Github/Gitlab etc if you have something to showcase.
Summary of Qualifications
Why do I prefer it over an objective? Objectives could sound boring. Everyone knows that your objective is to get a new job. What more can you add there? If you have a very specific objective, like working only in a specific technology/environment/team etc, then it might be ok, but I think you could clarify that with the recruiter instead of consuming space on the resume. Summary of qualifications is a good way to provide relevant information outside of your projects / achievements. For example:
“Engineering Manager with 15 years of experience in e-commerce and financial applications. 7 years of management experience in coaching and growing high performance teams, strategizing roadmap and partnering with cross functional teams to execute large scale projects.”
gives the reviewer an idea about who this person is. It is possible to include this info as a part of your role, but since these are core manager responsibilities, you may run into a risk of repeating them.
Skills
Any position that requires knowledge of specific technologies or tools should list those skills. E.g. developers, data engineers/scientist, architects, UX designers etc. Avoid a laundry list of skills and specify only the relevant ones. E.g. adding “Microsoft Word”, “Adobe Photoshop” as skills for a Software Developer isn’t helpful.
Education
College students or recent graduates could add education, relevant coursework (please don’t list every course you took) and highlight their GPA if it’s above 3.5. College projects, published papers, participation in coding competitions or hackathons are all worth including. This isn’t necessary for experienced professionals. They can list their degrees after the work experience section and there’s no need to add coursework.
Work Experience (in reverse chronological order)
Include important and relevant projects, achievements and side projects. If you have more than 6-7 years of experience, include anything older than 6-7 years if it’s relevant or outstanding, and condense it to a line or two. You can have your role, company name and dates on the same line to save space. If you had different roles or switched teams within a company, have the company name on a separate line and team/role + dates on another.
Use strong verbs, such as “Architected”, “Designed”, “Improved.” Use “collaborated” instead of “helped”, “partnered with” instead of “worked with.” If you led an initiative, say “led” instead of “worked on” etc.
Don’t just list your responsibilities or what you did; highlight the complexity/impact and how you measured it.
“Implemented CI/CD pipeline and worked for end to end automation for all build and deployment” only tells me that you know what CI/CD is and what to use it for. “Created CI/CD workflows using Docker for automation, which reduced the build and deployment time from X to Y minutes“ explains why it mattered.
Similarly, Instead of “Wrote automated code scans“, write “Introduced automated code scans, which improved discovery of vulnerabilities from P to Q“
Sometimes only 1 number may not highlight the appropriate impact. For example, “Did X to reduce latency by 20 ms.” vs “Did X to reduce latency from 40 ms to 20 ms.” In both cases latency is reduced by 20 ms, but as you can guess, reducing latency from 40 ms to 20 ms is much more impactful than reducing latency from 500 ms to 480 ms. If you are expressing the improvement in %, this may not be necessary.
Summarize less relevant experience in one bullet. E.g., if you are applying for an Engineering Manager role, your experience as a Sr Software Developer 7 years ago (assuming you moved to management after that) could be summarized as just “Sr Software Developer at XYZ” or “Sr. Software Developer: Built various Data and Analytics tools for the Financial Industry using ABC” should suffice. You may say that this doesn’t pass the “So What” test, and you are right! But this is mainly to show continuity. If you graduated in say 2007, and then directly list managerial experience from 2015, that may look odd to some eyes.
Early in your career, the focus is mainly on execution. As you grow, design, strategy, influence, vision etc matter more. Make sure your resume reflects that appropriately.
Affiliation / Personal interests and other information
These aren’t usually necessary unless it’s relevant or you’ve done something outstanding, such as being a board member, doing military service, completing an Ironman race etc.
What NOT to include
At a high level, don’t include any information that’s not necessary or relevant for the job that you are applying to. Examples:
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Some of you may not believe me, but I have seen a resume that had the candidate’s passport number. Please don’t include any sensitive information like that.
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No need to give references. Recruiters will ask for them if needed.
- Please don’t add your pictures.
- Avoid rating yourself on a skill (like 7/10 on Java). Let your work or interview performance speak for that.
- Avoid repetition.
- In almost all projects, you need to do requirement gathering, design, code, test, deploy, add monitoring/alarming, etc. There is no need to repeat this for every project.
- You may have worked on more than 1 project in which you did something similar or they had similar impact/outcome. Combine them into 1 instead of repeating. E.g. If you used tool A to solve a problem for Client P in 1 project and for Client Q in another project, they could be combined into 1 line.
Last but not least, it is important that you check for grammar and spelling mistakes. Most modern editors have built in spell checking tools. You can and should also get your resume reviewed from at least one other person.
By following these guidelines, you’ll be able to create a resume that stands out to hiring managers and recruiters and effectively showcases your skills and qualifications.
I wish you all a rocking 2023 and beyond!