Resume Advice

Below is a standard set of resume advice I provide – it may or may not apply to your resume.

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