Technical Resume Guidelines

Overview: how recruiters look at resumes

Recruiters are looking for your technical ability and experience building things. You should focus your resume on WHAT you developed, HOW you developed it, and what frameworks you used to build it. A recruiter cares that you implemented X using Y to parse, build an API, etc. You want to focus on the technical things you have accomplished.

Recruiters will only spend maybe less than 30 seconds to review a resume, so put the most important things closer to the top and leave out information that doesn’t positively add to your experience for the job you want.

General Resume Advice and Common Mistakes:

Resume Sections:

  • If you have some solid work experience already, I suggest ordering your sections in the order:
    • education
    • work experience
    • projects
    • skills
    • activities
    • awards
  • If most of your technical experience is through projects:
    • education
    • projects
    • work experience
    • skills
    • activities
    • awards

First off:

  • Make your resume look better! Use creddle.io for nice resume templates
  • Only 1 page resumes!
  • Make your name’s font size bigger than the rest of the resume’s font size
  • Contact Info:
    • Don’t put your home address (no one mails you anymore)
    • Don’t put your LinkedIn (unnecessary)
  • Objectives:
    • Don’t put an objective! Those are outdated and don’t add much to your resume.

Education

  • IMPORTANT: Put expected graduation mm/yyyy and degree type (ie. BS, MS, PhD)
  • For coursework, don’t put course numbers because they mean nothing to someone not attending your college. Put a course title that means something to anyone external.
  • Don’t put when you started college
  • Leave out highschool education info
    • An exception to this is if you are a first year college student and don’t have too much to put on your resume yet. But try to include tech related things.

Describing Work Experience and Projects

  • A general rule of thumb is to have 3-5 bullets per experience
  • In the next bullets describe what features you developed and how
    • Example: instead of saying you “built a frontend website”, you could say “developed responsive login page and implemented calendar visualization with React.js”
    • Example: Instead of just saying you “built new location-based iOS app for users to meet others”, split this project up into discrete features you developed.
      1. “developed realtime location iOS app with Swift and Firebase”
      2. “implemented location filtering algorithm to…”
      3. “parsed X API data and constructed Y database schema”
      4. “designed and built interactive user profile cards”
  • Start off each bullet with a power verb (ie developed, implemented, designed, analyzed)
  • Include what popular frameworks you used to build your project (ie. node.js, react.js, etc.)

Skills

  • Exclude from skills
    • IDEs (XCode, Visual Studio, Sublime Text, etc.)
    • software applications (Adobe Photoshop, etc.)
    • Operating Systems (Windows, OSX, Linux)
    • foreign languages

Contact:

Feel free to email me your resume for more personalized feedback after updating your resume with the above guidelines.

Motivation:

I first started reviewing resumes in 2015 while working for a small startup where I was helping with recruiting new technical team members. In 2017 I posted on UCLA ACM Hack’s Facebook page offering resume reviews to anyone who wanted one right before the internship recruiting season started. I wasn’t expecting much response since people are usually shy, but to my surprise I was messaged dozens of times the first few days, and I started getting 2-3 resumes per day after. This continued for the next 2 months and I enjoyed helping others with their resume. Most people were making the same mistakes on their resume, which is what I have accumulated in this guideline.

Note: This advice is purely based off my own experiences talking to recruiters and seeing many resumes.