Crafting Your Resume
Phase 0: Motivation
Believe it or not, most engineers are better in practice than they look on paper. The goal here is to close that gap. An excellent resume will provide the opportunity to demonstrate technical expertise during phone screens and on-sites.
Warmup
Go through the following steps for each of these example resumes. Note that these resumes are by junior engineers who graduated from our coding bootcamp. Your resume should highlight your work experience.
- Look at the Resume for 6 seconds
- Write down the following observations:
- What was your eye drawn to?
- What skills does this candidate have?
- Would you hire this candidate?
- Now take a couple minutes to read it over in depth.
- What did you miss in the 6 second test?
- What stands out to you now?
Filling a Need
Imagine you are a recruiter. You need to fill positions that require certain skills and experience...
Experience building Single-Page Applications in Rails or Django. Familiarity with AWS.
Comfortable working with RESTful APIs. Experience with at least one scripting language (Ruby, Python, etc.)
Familiar with semantic HTML/CSS. Experience in object-oriented design. Knowledge of JavaScript preferred.
Must know at least one frontend technology (React, Angular, Ember). Knowledge of HTTP request lifecycle.
Solid foundation in computer science fundamentals, confident with REST APIs (building and consuming).
This is a pretty typical scenario. Build your resume to grab a recruiter's attention.
N.B.: If a resume can't pass the 6 second test, your portfolio will never be seen!
Phase 1: Layout
General Guidelines
Use the example resumes above as guides for formatting, or customize one of our templates.
You must submit your Resume for review as a Google Doc or Slide. You may use a different program to build a fancier layout if you like, but you must still share a plain-text Google Doc to us via email for review. Just include a link to the formatted PDF.
Stick to one page and use lots of whitespace with 1-inch margins on left and right.
No font sizes smaller than 11pt.
No fancy fonts or colors. Stick with an easy-to-read sans-serif font. Google has many to choose from.
Order
As a general guide:
- Work History
- Side Projects
- Skills
- Education
This is flexible. If you haven't built any side projects, emphasize other areas. If you studied computer science or are a recent grad with academic achievements you may wish to give education more prominence.
Include these links:
- Github
- Portfolio Site
- Projects:
- Link to live site
- Link to Github Repo
Phase 2: Work History
Review crafting project bullet points and incorporate action verbs in your bullets.
The difference between a compelling work history and a boring one is whether you have identified the results of your work.
Someone who can talk about outcomes is someone who a) made a difference at their job, b) cares about results, and c) is likely to produce results at their next job.
Quantify or Qualify
The difference between: "Migrated backend from Rails to Phoenix" vs. "Converted a 50,000-line Rails app to Phoenix, improving throughput by 1433% and latency by 623%."
The first is the bare minimum of what was done with no indication of how it was done or what was accomplished. The second has specific benchmarks and a reason for why it was done.
Every bullet point should be quantified and/or qualified:
Quantify: Numbers to measure your success. "Wrote specs" vs. "Wrote approx. 4000 RSpec unit tests and 120 Capybara integration tests."
Qualify: Specific reasons for why and how you were successful. "Implemented targeted advertising campaign." vs. "Deployed a Random Forests classifier to target users with relevant advertisements to increase ad conversion rates."
Simply describing something that sounds like success is a big plus. Consider the following blurbs.
Wrote scripts to test new product before shipping.
vs.
Wrote Bash scripts to test new product before shipping. Achieved 90% test coverage, resulting in bug-free launch.
Who knows if that's a meaningful benchmark? Maybe there weren't that many features. Or maybe the product still had bugs and they just didn't turn up during the launch. The key here is that you get to frame it. Position yourself as a winner.
Quality over Quantity
Describing results takes more space. Two longer bullet points that convey success are much stronger than four bullet points that only describe process no matter what portion of your previous job you're leaving out.
Phase 3: Projects
If you've worked on any side projects in your free time, show them off! Employers want to hire someone who loves coding so much they do it for fun.
Selling your Projects
Read here about crafting bullet points
Follow the steps outlined above for each bullet. Use the following resources:
N.B.: Every bullet should start with a verb and must include AT LEAST two resume keywords
In the right light, your projects can be one of your biggest selling points, so sell them well. What matters the most to employers are the problems you solved and the skills you applied. Any time you had to sit back and think about a feature before implementing it, you were solving a problem.
Words of Caution
Look up the proper spelling and capitalization for the technologies you mention.
- JavaScript, not Javascript. jQuery, not jquery.
Avoid extremely language or framework-specific bullets. This example is incomprehensible unless the reader knows Rails.
- Example: "Overwrites attr_writer on User#password"
DO NOT just enumerate features in your bullet points!
- Example: "Allows Users to login / logout", "Uploads photos"
Communicate as an Engineer
A good resume item does not read like a feature list on a product's website. Always write at a higher-level about what engineering solutions you implemented. Describe engineering problems you solved or the solutions you found in implementing those features. Employers want to hear about what kind of an engineer you are and how you approach problem-solving.
Keywords are King
A sample resume vs. That resume through a recruiter's eyes
Phase 4: Skills
List any relevant skills, including languages, frameworks, libraries, etc.. Anything listed is fair game in a technical interview. Here's an example
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
- Node
- JavaScript
- Jest
- jQuery
- React
- Redux
- SQL
- MongoDB
- Git
- HTML5
- CSS3
Don't organize your skills by proficiency. That is, don't do this: Proficient: Ruby, Rails, JS Familiar: SQL, React
The previous example makes you look less confident; however, it's ok to do this: Ruby, Rails, JS, React, Haskell (learning)
Phase 5: Education
If you took CS-related courses in college, add a "Curriculum Highlights" section under the name of your degree and list those courses. Linear algebra, statistics, and Electrical Engineering courses are also relevant here.
Include your GPA if you graduated 5 years ago or less and if it's above 3.2. If you studied a STEM subject or Econ, you can use your Major GPA if it is higher. (Note on GPAs: most employers won't care about them, but a few will. This is just for them.)
Phase 6: Review
Before you submit your résumé for review, make sure you can answer yes to all these questions.
N.B. Address these so your career coach can give substantive personal feedback instead of rehashing project guidelines
Layout
- Fits on 1 page?
- 1-inch margins on left and right?
- Margins and formatting are consistent and organized?
- All text >= 11pt?
- Uses a nicer font than defaults?
Work
- Do you describe not just what you did at each job but how well you did it?
- Do you provide benchmarks for your own or your teams success?
- Do you emphasize technical or programmatic aspects of your work history?
Projects
- Does each project include a link to the Github repo and one to the live demo (if applicable)?
- Do you describe clever solutions you came up with to build each project?
- Does each bullet include at least two keywords?
Misc
- Do your bullets follow the formula: Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y] by doing [Z]?
- Do you provide a skills list of the technologies you are familiar with?
- Do you provide contact information and link to your Github and LinkedIn?
- Does your contact information make it clear you are currently in the metro area?
- Is it a Google Doc where you have granted edit access for your career coach?
- Have you eliminated or minimized any timeline gaps in your resume?