Time to write your resume

Writing an impressive resume is not easy. There are tons of platforms that promise you that your resume will be amazing if you let them do it for you. There are also tons of resume templates, most of them quite complex and cumbersome. On the other hand, a resume is something personal, and it is better to do it yourself. Bearing the following points in mind will be enough to produce an appealing resume for recruiters. Let’s see these points and how to approach them.

What resume screeners are looking for

First, resume screeners want to find out whether you are a good coder and you are smart. Second, they want to find out if you are a good fit for a certain available position (they check your experience against certain technologies and tools required for that position).

Strive to highlight that you are a good coder and are intelligent. This means being as technical as possible in a concentrated form. Pay attention: too many words dilute the essence of your resume and lead to loss of focus. Be technical, clear, and concise.

How long the resume should be

To answer how long a resume should be, you must answer another question: how long do you think a recruiter spends reading a resume? Most likely, around 10-20 seconds. In other words, recruiters read between the lines, trying to quickly identify what interests them.

In general, a resume should not be longer than a page. If you have 10+ year's experience, then you can go with 2 pages.

You may think that it is impossible to condense your vast experience in 1-2 pages, but this is not true. First, prioritize content, and second, add this content until you cover 1-2 pages. Skip the remaining content. Don’t worry that the recruiters will not know everything you’ve done! They will be impressed by your resume highlights and will be happy to discover the rest of your experience in the interview.

Write a resume that fits on one page.

If you have 10+ years of experience, then consider two pages. Keep in mind that some recruiters may skip long resumes without reading a single line. They want to find the most impressive items right away. Adding less important items and/or too many words will distract the recruiter and makes them waste time.

How to list your employment history

If you have a short employment history (2-4 roles), then add all of it to the resume. Don’t go for your complete employment history if you have a long list of roles (4+ roles). Just choose 4 roles that are the most impressive (roles in important companies, leading roles, roles where you have achieved great results and/or made significant contributions).

For each role, follow the Achievement->Action->Effect model. Always start with the achievement! This will act as a magnet for the recruiter. Once they read the achievement, you’ve got their attention to continuing reading.

For example, let’s imagine that you worked at the company Foo and you’ve managed to increase the performance of the connection pool by 30% by tuning its parameters. Now the application can accommodate a transaction throughput of 15% extra. Add this achievement in the resume in a single statement as follows:

Increased the connection pool performance by 30% by tuning its parameters, leading to a transaction throughput boost of 15%.

List the most relevant roles via Achievement->Action->Effect statements. Always try to measure the benefits you created. Don’t say, I reduced the memory footprint by compressing ..., and say, I reduced the memory footprint by 5% by compressing ....

List the most relevant projects (top five)

Some recruiters prefer to jump in directly into the My Projects section of your resume. They follow the No Fluff, Just Stuff statement. You don’t have to list all your projects! Make a top five and add only those. Don’t add all five from the same category. Choose one or two independent projects, one or two open source contributions, and so on. An independent project with a high GitHub star rating is what will really impress recruiters.

List the top projects with their relevant details. This is the right place to lose the modesty and do your best to impress.

Nominate your technical skills

The Technical Skills section is mandatory. Here, you have to list the programming languages, software, and tools you know. It doesn’t have to be like a nomenclature, but it doesn’t have to be a short and slim section either. It has to be relevant and in harmony with the listed projects. The following list mentions the main criteria to follow in writing the Technical Skills section:

• Don’t list all Java flavors: Don’t add a list such as Spring MVC, Spring Data, Spring Data REST, Spring Security, and so on. Just say Spring. Or, if you are Java EE guy, then don’t add a list of JPA, EJB, JSF, JAX-RX, JSON-B, JSON-P, JASPIC, and so on. Just say Java EE, Jakarta EE. Or, if you see them listed that way in the job description, then you can add them between brackets. For example: Spring (MVC, Data including Data REST, Security) or Java EE (JPA, EJB, JSF, JAX-RX, JSON-B, JSON-B, JASPIC).
• Do not add software versions: Avoid things like Java 8, Spring Boot 2, or Hibernate 5. If such details are necessary, then the interviewer will ask you about them.
• Don’t list utility technologies: Avoid listing utility libraries that are commonly used in projects. For example, don’t add Apache Commons, Google Guava, Eclipse Collections, and so on. It is possible that recruiters have not heard of them. Or, if they have, they will smile ironically.
• Don’t list the technologies that you have only lightly touched: It’s quite risky to list technologies that you’ve used only rarely and/or superficially. At the interview, you may get asked questions about them that will put you in a difficult situation.
• For each technology, add your experience: For example, write Java (expert), Spring Boot (advanced), Jakarta EE (proficient), Hibernate (expert).
• Do not measure your experience with a technology in years: Most of the time, it’s not relevant. This metric doesn’t say much to the recruiter. Your experience is shown by your projects.
• Avoid common technologies: Don’t list operating systems, Microsoft Office, Gmail, Slack, and so on. Listing such things is just noise for the recruiter.
• Double-check your English: A recruiter can throw away a resume if it has typos. If you are a non-native English speaker, then find a native English speaker to proofread your resume.
• Don’t list a single programming language: Ideally, you should list two to three programming languages (for example, Java (expert), C++ (medium), Python (prior experience)), but don’t say that you are an expert in all of them. Nobody will believe you! On the other hand, a single programming language can be interpreted as meaning that you are not open to learning new technologies.
• Split technologies into categories: Don’t add the technologies as a long, comma-separated list. For example, avoid something like Java, Ruby, C++, Java EE, Spring Boot, Hibernate, JMeter, JUnit, MySQL, PostgreSQL, AWS, Ocean, and Vue.js. Split them into categories and sort them by experience, as in the following example:

  a. Programming languages: Java (expert), Ruby (intermediate), and C++ (beginner)

  b. Frameworks: Java EE (expert), Spring Boot (advanced)

  c. Object Relation Mapping (ORM): Hibernate (expert)

  d. Testing: JMeter (expert), JUnit (advanced)

  e. Databases: MySQL (expert), PostgreSQL (intermediate)

  f. Cloud: AWS (expert), Ocean (beginner)

  g. JavaScript frameworks: Vue.js (intermediate)

LinkedIn resume

Most likely, your LinkedIn profile will be the first stop for recruiters. Moreover, a significant number of e-job platforms require your LinkedIn account whenever you try to apply for a job. There are even cases where this account is mandatory.

LinkedIn is a social network dedicated to tracking professional connections. Essentially, LinkedIn is an online resume on steroids. On LinkedIn, you can create job alerts, and colleagues, customers, and friends can endorse you or your work, which can be quite valuable.

Important note

Pay attention to keeping your LinkedIn resume in sync with your paper resume. Also, pay attention if you are looking for a job via LinkedIn since all your contacts receive notifications about your updates. These contacts include people at your current company, and most likely, you don’t want them to know you’re looking for a new job. The solution is to disable these notifications before you make your updates.

Now, we can discuss the job application process.