Crafting Resume Bullets

The primary purpose of your resume is to demonstrate to a recruiter that you possess specific skills. Recruiters spend only a few seconds glancing over your resume so you have to rely on keywords to tell the story.

Steps to take

  1. Identify a key skill that you will demonstrate. See this list for ideas.
  2. Answer the following for each bullet:
    • What did I do?
    • How does it demonstrate the key skill?
    • What was the impact or benefit?

Compile a list of the skills you want to demonstrate, then craft your bullets around them.

Example 1 (Non technical)

Skill to Demonstrate: Leadership

What did I do?: Founded company softball team

How does it demonstrate the key skill?: Took initiative. Organized long-term project.

What was the impact or benefit?: Improved team morale and collaboration.

Result: "Founded and managed company softball team, resulting in improved morale and communication."

Example 2 (Technical)

Skill to Demonstrate: Scaling an App

What did I do?: Stored images in the cloud.

How does it demonstrate the key skill?: Shows I know how to use AWS S3.

What was the impact or benefit?: Reduces server load and allows for scale.

Result: "Stores image uploads in the cloud using AWS S3, reducing server load and allowing app to scale gracefully."

Example 3 (Technical)

Skill to Demonstrate: Use of Third-Party API.

What did I do?: Determine user locations and filter searches.

How does it demonstrate the key skill?: Shows I know how to use the Google Maps API.

What was the impact or benefit?: Allows users to search for each other based on location

Result: "Integrates Google Maps API with geolocation based searching to display location of other users on a map."

To help get you brainstorming:

  • Did you find some clever way to DRY up your code?
  • Did you bootstrap some data to avoid extraneous AJAX requests?
  • Did you make some tough choices in your database schema?
  • Did you use cookies to store anything other than a session token?
  • Does your JavaScript use any math to resize something in the DOM?
  • Did you use a library in a way that its author probably didn't anticipate?
  • Did you write any custom SQL queries to optimize performance?
  • Did you make any trade-offs related to performance, eg. store information that's costly to compute?
  • Are you doing any caching?

When answering these questions, the key is to point out features you built that went above and beyond the basic requirements.

Example bullet points:

  • Achieves better performance by leveraging Cloudinary to cache different sizes of images.
  • Uses observer pattern to handle management of global Z-indexes for overlapping items.
  • Lowers latency of DB read/write by factor of 7 by using Unicorn to enable virtual multi-threaded processing.
  • Utilizes Redis key-value storage to cache bearer tokens from Uber and Slack, allowing for O(1) lookup.
  • Generates dynamic gameplay in HTML5 canvas element by utilizing vector math for game state updates.
  • Parses XML Bart API responses to obtain departure/arrival information and give real-time advisories per query.

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