Fix your resume, get that dream job!
Okay, catchy title aside, I want to talk about two common mistakes I’ve seen while reviewing tens of resumes.
If I can leave you with a single thought, it would be: your resume has a single purpose — to get a hiring manager interested in learning more about you!
That’s it! However, many engineers send generic resumes that do not do them any favors. I suspect this fact contributes to many candidates being screened out early across the tech industry.
Continue reading to learn about two mistakes that I think you should avoid!
I recently found the Tech Resume Inside-Out book and was curious to learn any advice it had! (You can find my book review here.)
While it presents many useful tips, the following stood out to me as things I’ve seen repeatedly in resumes:
1. A high incidence of buzz words and technologies.
Listing every possible related technology can look as if the candidate over-generalized and didn’t focus on any particular one. Libraries, tools, databases, programing languages used a long time ago may no longer be relevant and, in my opinion, do not belong at the top of the resume!
Listing too many of them may also portray the candidate as trying to appear more knowledgeable than they are. It may negatively bias interviewers, especially those who understand how long the road to mastery truly is.
Finally, a resume full of unrelated keywords and facts may signal that the candidate did not consider the interviewer’s time.
The relationship between your resume and interviewers is 1-to-many. Help yourself by helping the interviewer infer that you’re a match for the role you’re applying for!
A job, a role, is a two-way street. Both parties should get something out of the relationship. You signal that the relationship will go that way as early as uploading your resume!
2. Listing responsibilities but not accomplishments.
Usually, candidates talk about systems they’ve built or team responsibilities, but not their actual impact and how it was measured.
Hiring managers are looking for signs that the candidate can follow direction and is self-driven to be effective, and cares about the end result. This is especially true for more experienced (senior) candidates!
Consider the following examples:
Refactored a monolithic code-base.
vs.
Refactored a monolithic code-base into individual components, improving first-page load time from 8 seconds to under 1 second.
Let’s break them down:
Responsibility
- refactoring a monolithic code-base
Accomplishment(s)
- ease of code maintenance through smaller (individual) components
- first-page load time decreased from 8 seconds to 1 second.
One of them quickly tells the interviewers what you achieved and shows you care enough to understand the outcome!
I had a negative experience in one of my first interviews, which scarred me for life. I was fresh out of college and had made the first mistake outlined above. The interviewer had a printed copy of my resume in front of them and proceeded to ask me questions about each item I had listed.
As I explained my limited experience for each, they proceeded to cross out, with a red pen, every… single… thing… I had listed. I was in shock!
It was all a shady tactic to get me to take a really poor offer, but as I walked out of there, I did so, doubting myself and if I was to ever know enough to pass an interview. It was unfair and cruel. Even though I later understood what (and why it) had happened, I swore to myself to never be in that position again! This turned out to work to my advantage since hiring managers care about the things you know best, not about that one framework you played with 10 years ago in your spare time!
I’ll leave you with this: adapt your resume for each role you’re applying to. Be honest and “loud” about your core skills, don’t lie, don’t embellish your resume, and, most importantly, include only facts that are relevant to the current opportunity!
— Mihai
