Chapter 2
Writing a Noticeable Resume
A common joke amongst recruiters and interviewers is that they always throw half of the resumes in the trash without reading them, because they do not want unlucky people working for them.
Getting your resume noticed can be quite hard, and may involve a little luck. The advice and writing technique shown in this chapter will hopefully reduce the reliance on luck as much as possible.
How to Write a Resume and Cover Letter
The written part of a job application generally consists of two parts: a resume and a cover letter. A resume is an account of your professional qualifications and other relevant skills, whereas a cover letter is a personal letter to the interviewer that describes how the specific role you are applying for suits you, and what extra qualities you can bring to the team along with the role.
Even though your resume should appear generic, you should tailor it to a particular job. When you submit your resume, make sure you tweak it in favor of the job you are applying for, focusing on your most prominent skills that match the job specification.
A resume should never be more than two pages in length. Most interviewers are developers in their day job, and simply do not have time to trawl through pages and pages of a career history. Keep it concise and relevant, and concentrate on your most recent roles.
With this in mind, you should make sure that any key information you definitely want an interviewer to see is toward the top of the first page. Focus on the key strengths you want to convey here. Do not waste space by adding a title that says “Resume” or “Curriculum Vitae”—everyone reading this document knows what it is. One of the most important things you want the interviewer to remember is your name; make this as your heading, and make it the largest font on the page.
Some candidates now put a small headshot photograph on their resume. This can help interviewers put a face to a name when discussing candidates after performing several interviews, but it is up to you whether you want to include a photo; it will not have any overriding positive or negative effect on your chances of a job offer.
A common approach nowadays is to have a developer profile at the top of the page. This is a short paragraph, perhaps three or four lines, that sums up your aspirations and career to date, and describes what you are looking for from your next role. An example profile might say:
An experienced Java developer with four years experience in the retail and banking industries. Always keen to learn new technologies, and looking to take more leadership over project delivery.
By placing this toward the top of the page, the likelihood of an interviewer reading this statement is high. The profile shown here is written in the third person. It is purely a matter of preference if you write it in the first or third person, but, like the rest of your resume, make sure you are consistent.
Something else to include early in the document is a section on key skills. This can be a list, perhaps a set of bullet points that you see as your most employable traits.
Whatever you write here, make sure you cover as much ground as possible. If you have experience in languages other than Java, mention them. Say what operating systems you are experienced with. Mention which tools you use, such as the IDEs you prefer, as well as other aids to your role as a developer such as source control systems.
Do not just write a list of acronyms. Do not just write a list of every library and tool you have ever touched. Interviewers will not pay much attention to several lines of acronyms—“SQL, XML, JDBC, HTTP, FTP, JMS, MQ,” and so on. It is much better, and more engaging for the interviewer, if you describe your key skills as:
Expert with Spring JMS and the HTTP protocol, some experience with Apache Cassandra.
Whatever you decide to include in this list, make sure the items are appropriate. Any key skills you list should be reflected elsewhere on your resume, such as in your description of previous roles.
Include a small section on your education and qualifications. Start with your most recent qualification. Include the dates you attended the institutions. If you have a university or college degree, include the titles of any theses, dissertations, or papers you submitted. You do not need to be too detailed about your high-school qualifications. Include a single line highlighting when you attended the school, and any key examinations.
If you do not have a university qualification, be a little more detailed about your grades in key subjects, such as math or English.
As you gain more experience, you can place less emphasis on the education section in your resume. If you are applying for senior or leadership roles, employers will be much more interested in seeing evidence of what you have achieved in the workplace. Regardless, you should always include your highest qualification.
Unless you have just left school, the majority of your resume will be made up of your work experience. Treat each role as a different section, and for each role, include the dates and locations of where you worked. You should include a brief description of your responsibilities and what you achieved. Where appropriate, mention any technologies or libraries you used. Similar to your key skills section, summarizing your experience with bullet points is fine: Any interviewer will want to read and understand your experience as quickly as possible.
Remember that the interviewers are interested in what you have achieved, what your role was in any team success. Rather than describing a role as:
I worked on the team that released the game XXX. It received two million daily active users within the first month.
It would be much more informative to say:
I was responsible the development of the server for game XXX, focusing on its stability. It handled two million daily active users within the first month, with no downtime.
This way, you have made it clear what your role was on the team, what your responsibilities were, and what was achieved thanks to your input.
Where appropriate, try to use powerful adjectives when describing your work. By describing yourself as a “lead” developer, or having the “sole responsibility,” or being a “core team member,” you are emphasizing your value to any work within a development team. Remember that you must be able to validate your descriptions.
If you have any gaps between employment dates in your resume, you must be prepared to talk about them in an interview. If you decided to take some time off and go travelling, that is fine; if you were made redundant or were laid off and it took you several months to find a new job, that is fine, too. But employers will be interested in knowing what you did with your time off. Prospective employers will be looking for candidates who are productive, forward thinking, and proactive. If you can truthfully say you were helping with some open-source projects or doing some kind of charitable work, this will put you in a lot better favor over someone who cannot explain what he or she did with any time off.
Even if you tried to start your own business and it failed, there is no shame in this at all. In fact, most employers would see this as a positive personality trait.
If you have any appropriate online presence, providing links is often attractive to employers. If you have a Github profile, a link to it will give employers additional insight into how you work. If you write a blog, include a link to that, too. If you answer questions on question-and-answer sites such as Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com), provide links to some of your popular answers or to your profile page. This is very informative as to how you work and think in a “real-world” environment, rather than the strange, alien environment of a set of interviews.
You should expect any interviewers to perform an online search for you. If you have a Twitter account or Facebook account, or similar account that is easily traceable to you, make sure the content posted is something you are comfortable sharing in an interview. If it is not, make sure you have the privacy settings configured appropriately.
Candidates often include a small section toward the end of a resume of some personal interests. This can have very little bearing on a decision to call someone in for an interview. Although it can show that you are an interesting individual who does more than just work, a decision to interview someone will be made on the relevant professional credentials on a resume. If you are struggling to fit the contents of your resume into the hard two-page limit, leave this off.
Some candidates also include one or two references with their contact details. There is no issue if your resume makes no mention of references, but if you choose to include them, make sure they are up to date. Speak to your references beforehand, and make sure they are prepared to expect a call and talk about your best qualities. Failure to do so will reflect poorly on your reliability.
Writing a Cover Letter
The cover letter is a chance to show that you have done your homework about the role you are applying for. It should be relatively brief, much less than one page, with the aim of persuading a recruiter or interviewer to invite you in for an interview.
Use this letter to highlight any key entries on your resume that you feel are relevant for the role. Also mention your most recent role and what you did there. If a current employee referred you, mention him or her by name: Many companies offer a referral bonus for any successful hire. You want to make sure to follow through on this—if you are hired, you might even get a cut of the bonus!
If you are not currently employed, the cover letter is an ideal place to say what you have been doing since you left your most recent role.
You should also state why you want to join the company you are applying to. If it is in a different industry, explain why you would like to move industries, too.
Say why you are looking for a new role. There is nothing wrong with wanting to leave to develop yourself and your career, but you must be able to articulate that in the letter and in any subsequent interviews. You should also mention any softer skills you feel you would bring to the role.
Even if you have contact details on your resume, include a line in your cover letter explaining how best to get in touch with you. You want to leave no excuse for not being invited in for an interview.
The body of an example cover letter could look like:
Please find my resume attached for the software developer role.
My current role is as a server-side Java developer for Company X. I have been at the company for three years and worked on two different teams as a Java developer in that time.
I feel that both Company X and I have gained a lot from my employment there, and I feel it is time for me to move on and apply my technology skills in a different industry, and hopefully gain some new ones too.
I am confident I can bring my enthusiasm and experience to Company Y and to this role. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
It is these small attentions to detail that may differentiate your job application from another candidate’s.
Summary
Your resume is the first thing that any prospective employer will see about you. It is an advertisement, your brand. You have full control over this document, and so you should make every effort to make sure it is perfect.
There should be no mistakes at all on your resume. Double-check all the dates, make sure there are no spelling mistakes, and make sure the grammar is correct. Simple errors on your resume will give the impression that you do not care, and, therefore, can’t be trusted to produce professional-grade, properly tested applications.
Keep the formatting consistent. Your resume does not need to have fancy headings and several typefaces: You are not applying to be a graphic designer. Keep your formatting clean, simple, concise, and easy to read.
Get others to check your resume, and take any feedback from them constructively. Read and re-read it several times; you will always find minor adjustments and other small changes to make.
Schedule a small amount of time every two to six months to keep your resume up to date. You will find it easier to remember any key points you want to highlight. Also, updating your resume more frequently means you will be making fewer changes at any one time, so the chances of making an obvious error or typo are limited.
Always try to keep your resume to two pages at maximum. This allows an interviewer to print it on a single piece of paper, double-sided. Over time, as your experience grows, you will have to be judicious in what you decide to keep and what you decide to remove to keep the document under a two-page limit. This can be hard at times, and you may find yourself fiddling with margin widths and font sizes to fit on as much as possible, but sticking to a two-page limit is key. Interviewers simply do not have the time or the interest to read an eight-page resume.
If you take only one thing from this chapter, be aware that anything you write on your resume is fair game for an interviewer. Do not lie; do not say you have skills or experience where you do not. If, or perhaps, when, any falsehoods are uncovered in an interview, you can almost be certain you will not be receiving a job offer. Even if you manage to get through an interview with a false resume, most employers will perform thorough background checks, and any wrong qualifications or false roles will be uncovered there.
The next chapter looks at how to handle assessments once an interviewing team is happy with your resume, and would like to find out if you would be a good fit in terms of skills, knowledge, and personality.