How to Help an Employer Choose Your Resume. Tips for Software Engineer position.

The hardest part about selecting candidates is finding a decent resume. Would you agree with it? I bet you not. But quite often software engineers forget to showcase their skills in essence and overwhelm their resume with buzzwords that may not give a more professional look as expected. So, let’s see how you can fine-tune your existing resume or create it from scratch if you are looking for a job as a software engineer.

Reconsider the visual part of your resume

Engineers hardly ever bother with style and proper structure which make it tedious for recruiters to extract the information they are looking for. If you think that the design part of your CV is not important, you should reconsider it once again. According to Ladders, Inc., recruiters will give your resume 7.4 seconds. No much, huh?

So you better make your resume structured and readable.

Know what company you are applying for

If you are applying to a start-up, you should keep in mind that in most cases freshly made companies will look for multitaskers. To make it clear, we are not talking about unicorn start-ups Grammarly or Gitlab. We are talking about small and thriving businesses that just reached the break-even point. They often look for 2-in-1 specialists in terms of skills, knowledge of the industry or people who are willing to learn new skills on the go.

So, if you are targeting such type of companies, indicate in your resume that you are:

• ready to learn and do it fast (in case you have not much experience)
• explain how their business will benefit from your skills set 

Given you worked mainly as back-end developer, but you also have some experience as DevOps. Do mention it! This will increase your chances to be contacted by a company.

Be concise describing your qualification summary

Briefly summarise your work experience, achievements and skills. The goal is to show the qualifications that are relevant to the job. Five bullet points that show your candidacy advantageously will be enough.

Poorly structured CV summary:

Good and structured CV summary:

Work Experience

The most valuable thing about a resume is your work experience. Therefore, it is vital to help the employer to spot the right thing. If you worked for several companies, then place the last one at the top of the resume block, and all the rest in descending order. You can describe your last job in details, but only if the current position is relevant to your prospect one. Use verbs to describe an experience: Work, Architect, Deliver, Design, Implement, Help, Maintain, Coach, Support.

For clarity in each job description, you can indicate:

• technologies used;
• your responsibilities;
• team size (if you was on team lead position)
• specific tasks that you worked on;

Separate skills from tools

Do not mix up knowledge of programming languages ​​and frameworks with tools or, online platforms that you use. If there are too many skills you want to highlight, then group them by topic. A good example of how to group programming skills (source Quora):

Make it easier for them to contact you

Even if you mentioned your phone number or email but saved your resume as an image it will be hard to extract your contact details from it. It forces the HR manager/recruiter to make that little, but an extra effort on rewriting/typing it from your CV. What to do? Create and download your resume in .pdf

Besides, pay attention to the file name. It takes a few seconds for you to rename it but makes life much easier for people to find it among other “nonameCV.png”.

A bad example is CV.png

A good example is Annie-Davis-CV.pdf

What else you can also include in contact section:

• Web site;
• GitHub;
• LinkedIn;
• Current location 
• Articles from Medium

Conclusion

The main recommendations for creating a resume for software developer:

• Reconsider the visual part of your resume. Make it structured and easy to skim through.
• Modify your resume depending on what type of company you are applying for (start-up or enterprise)
• Be concise describing your qualifications. The ideal size of a resume is 1-2 pages.
• Make it easier for a company to contact you. Leave your correct and clickable contact details.

Need some extra help with creating a good-loking resume? Check Applyya – free resume online builder.