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How to tailor your developer resume
Some points to craft a great resume for a software developer
Recently I have been suggested to read the book The Tech Resume Inside Out. It was an astounding moment for me and changed the way I think when I write a resume. For example, it describes how hiring processes work and empowered me with the ability to tailor my CV for those specific processes.
It shows how the resume is scanned by Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software and then how hiring managers and recruiters read and look at it. Some companies receive hundreds of resumes per day and having an outstanding CV is key to step a foot inside the company's door.
At a very high level, this is what happens:
The resume is received and parsed by their ATS. A first scan is done automatically so that recruiters can filter out non relevant ones.
With this grossly cleaned set of resumes ready, they start scanning them one by one. The volume is still high, so usually recruiters can spend only few seconds evaluating each of them. The resume must be considered valuable in the first glance to have a chance to proceed to the next step of the hiring process.
How scary is it? I never thought it was even possible to scan a CV in a matter of seconds, nor I was aware of any ATS. Certainly, this ain't true for all the companies, but when looking for a new employment and applying to several open positions, there are fair chances to fall into a process like this.
So how to stand out from the crowd of resumes? The book provides plenty of information, tips, suggestions and more. What I am going to do, is to highlight what for me was a game changer.
Biases
Let's start with what I think is the most important. Recruiters and hiring managers are humans, and like all humans have biases. As developers seeking for a new role, we don't want to be skipped over only because of our ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or anything else. We want to be valued by our skills and seen as the professional we are.
I never thought this problem was even a thing, but the world outside is a clumsy mess that spins at its own pace and rolls wherever it likes and we have no control over it. But we can and have to deal with it. So how to avoid recruiter biases as much as possible? The main hint is to omit any personal information as they are non informative of our professional career and can lead to bias.
Don't talk about the number of children we have. It could make recruiters speculate about how many hours of permits and days off we may need to look after them.
Don't write our age. We could be considered too old or too young for a certain position without even a single look to our experience or skills
Don't write our ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, political beliefs, etc. We can be skipped unconsciously by the recruiters without even them realizing it.
Don't use a photo unless explicitly required. Even if we attach our best shot, something in our appearance may refrain some recruiters from reading further.
Is it all unfair? In a sense, yes it is. But this is the harsh reality.
Be concise
My CV used to be quite verbose and I wasn't even aware of ATS software. Seems like verbosity and ATS are not really keen to collaborate. Nor verbosity and recruiters are. If recruiters have just a few seconds to decide whether to toss our CV into the bin or not, we want to make out the most from this short time by providing them at a first glance with all the information they are searching for. Verbosity just misses the purpose. Here are a few tips I found most valuable.
Make my contact details easy to find. Don't crowd that section too much, let's be essential with just email, phone and LinkedIn profile. If we have one, we can add our personal website/portfolio/blog and that's it, but only if it adds real value to our profession. For instance, avoid empty GitHub profiles.
Make our tech skills prominent. Recruiters want to know immediately if we are a Java or .NET developer and what are the frameworks and tools we are most proficient with. ATS will filter out non relevant resumes, so we have to make clear what are our technologies, languages and tools, so that our resume can be promoted to the next step.
Use a bullet point structure to describe all of our achievements in each of our work experiences. This is a good way to dry out any verbosity and get straight into what did we achieve. Just, don't write too much of them, up to 4 or 5 are enough.
An achiever, not a doer
This one was also astounding. I always thought that describing what I did was a good way to showcase my skills and abilities, but here is where I had a mindset shift. A company cares about what we can bring to it, what we can accomplish if they will hire us, not about how great we are.
A few tips to be seen as an achiever, instead of a doer, are:
Usage of strong action verbs in our bullet points. "Achieved", "deployed", "empowered", "led" are all verbs that describe the value we added to our previous companies. "Refactored", "coded" are meaningless to recruiters.
When possible, we have to quantify our success with numbers. "Increased performances by 80%", "Dropped support tickets by 40%" are simple examples of valuable goals. If our code refactoring dropped issues by a 40%, we have to write it. Refactoring is what we did, but less issues is what we achieved. So the whole sentence could be "Dropped support tickets by 40% by refactoring legacy code to use a new library". I would say far better.
Resume Layout
This subject is a bit complex to express, as somehow it falls into personal tastes and choices. Nonetheless, there are common guidelines described in the book that are general and driven by common sense.
The layout must be neat and clear. Relevant information must stand out to be seen by ATS or recruiters at first glance.
Don't overuse bold. Too much bold equals no bold. Be sure to underline only the most relevant information.
Use a readable font. It must be smooth and readable, otherwise our resume will easily be tossed.
Use some good resume designer. Although the book discourages their usage, it also suggest Standard Resume as one of the cleanest and straight to the point resume designers, that follows the principles described in the book.
Conclusion
Those are by far my most important take overs from the book The Tech Resume Inside Out. And no, I am not involved in the book or in the resume designer. Nor I have any interest in promoting them. I just genuinely enjoyed them and I think I learned a lot on how the recruiters think and work on the other side of the job seeking process. This is the only reason why I decided to write this article.
I hope you will enjoy it too. After all, writing a CV can be a satisfying process.
To the next bite!
References
The Tech Resume Inside Out book: trust me, it is worth your time and money