Your resume is a distillation of who you are, your
experience, accomplishments, stengths, and goals that explains how you are a
potential fit for a position. It is NOT
simply an accounting of your work history.
Failure to understand the goals and mechanics of a good resume will
eliminate you from contention for all but commodity jobs. If you don’t understand how a resume works
and take the time to make this critical document the best possible
representation of your work, how should a hiring manager interpret that?
Your resume needs to tell who you are, list (not explain)
relevant skills/experience, and demonstrate your strength as a candidate.
Read this first. It’s a great
big picture view of how to build your resume and why. Note that technical candidates need to modify
this advice accordingly (“wrote 5000 lines of code saving firm $10mm” just
doesn’t fly).
Frequent issues:
- Too long – nobody has time, respect that
- If you can’t distill information on your resume, what
does it say about your ability to do so on the job?
- It is NOT a list of everything you’ve done
- Do not include mundane items that everyone in your job
probably does – Ex: “Used JIRA to track bug fixes.” (yawn, delete)
- It IS a list of relevant experience,
capabilities, and strengths – I want to know what you CAN do
- Too much prose
- Don’t write “The ABC system is for XYZ. My
responsibilities were to do …”
- Use concise, bulleted statements to list relevant
information
- Give your reader the benefit of the doubt – they know
the context
- Remove Summary – your resume is a summary. If you
feel a need for a summary at the beginning, something is wrong.
- As for Introduction/Profile paragraph, see http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/write-an-interview-winning-cv/, #3
- Don’t describe the companies you worked for (unless in
circumstances where the company isn’t known)
- Make sure it’s clear where you were a contractor!
- Job movement is a red flag to hiring managers.
Contracting explains movement, so don’t omit where appropriate
- Spelling/formatting are important – what does it say to
the reader that you can’t be bothered to check/fix obvious errors?
- Make absolutely sure there are not misspellings,
grammar issues, etc. MS Word is your friend and enemy – it will
immediately show the reader every mistake in the document.
Extra/missing spaces are common
- Have someone proofread, especially if you are not a
native English speaker
- Formatting should be clean and consistent
- Http://affinityny.blogspot.com/ - articles on resume writing
- Remove detail for older positions, especially when not
relevant
- Don’t include GPA’s and other scores that aren’t notable
- Don’t include if it’s more than a few years ago
- Don’t use the third person
- Don’t name your resume JohnSmithML, so the reader knows
this is your resume tailored for ML jobs
