By making a few small improvements to your IT resume, you can increase the number of interviews several times. Just trust me: I see dozens of tech resumes every day and many of them lack just some minor upgrades to bring their owners more interviews and job offers.
These upgrades are:
- Focus on your recent projects. Your experience for the past 3-4 years is the most interesting for recruiters. Don’t describe older projects in detail.
- Enrich your resume with numbers and accomplishments. Instead of ‘Was building a web application with [X] and [Y], write ‘Led the development of [X] feature, integrated it across [Z] products, resulting in extra [Y] in revenue’.
- Avoid ‘false accomplishments’. These are your responsibilities, described in the past tense. Until you’ve shown an impact, it’s not meaningful.
- Include the relevant keywords. Read the vacancy carefully, and include in your resume all the necessary skills you possess. Recruiters will match your skills/title with their vacancies, as well as your experience within a particular domain (SaaS, eCommerce, fintech, etc).
- Establish and showcase an online presence. Your activity on GitHub, StackOverflow, HackerRank, etc. shows off your skills and increases your chances of being considered for a particular job. If you have some noteworthy profiles and links, include them in your resume.
- Don’t grade your skills in nebulous percentages and/or categories. Your potential employer will objectively evaluate your skills and knowledge during the technical interview or a test task. As for self-evaluation in a resume, it often leads to misunderstanding between a candidate and a recruiter.
- Check your resume for typos. Even the incorrect spelling of technologies like Jquery or Nginx make your resume look unprofessional.
- Omit the Summary and Objective sections. In 9 cases out of 10, summaries and objectives are not impressive. Instead of wasting time on creating the regular summary, I recommend omitting it.
- Use modern fonts. Forget about Comis Sans and similar fonts for good. Instead, try modern fonts like Palanquin, Merriweather, Lato, and Poppins.
Curious how your IT resume stacks up? Check the score of your resume for free with the CV Compiler. Covering over 30 IT specialties, it gives instant suggestions and compares your resume with the best practices in the industry.
This post was originally published in the blog of CV Compiler.
Top comments (5)
I've been looking into using the resume.json schema to hold my resume data, as there are a number of sites which will generate some very crisp templates for you if you have the patience to fill out all of the fields (I can only work on it in short bursts, it is quite tedious).
I also have decided that the one-page resume thing is BS. I felt like it was hurting me because I worked as a consultant for a large part of my career and there were a lot of impressive projects that I played a pivotal role in creating.
If you have a lot of experience, all your information might not fit into one page. But, you should aim to be concise, as recruiters usually don't have time to read through all the resumes, especially if they're long. I reckon two pages is the limit.
What are your thoughts on graphical resumes? Is it too much or is it the eye-catcher that recruiters enjoy?
Here's a mock-up of my CV:
Would love to get some feedback.
Definitely check CV compiler like the author mentioned and similar things liks skillroad's free resume review. Style is really cool but needs to be balanced out with accessibility for bots. A lot of large companies will use software for the initial screening. Good luck man 😄
Great tips and straight to the point. I would also recommend to check the fullstackresume.com service to build your Full Stack Resume in less than 30 seconds. Instead of writing all the content by yourself the service will generate it for you based on your unique experience using minimalistic A/B tested template.