Painfully, we still live in a world where your GitHub, Bitbucket or personal project and LinkedIn profile may need to be accompanied by a resume.
Here are a few pointers
- Don’t ship it too early. If it has spelling errors, poor grammar or punctuation or any other similar bugs it needs to go through rigorous QA before you can deploy. This sort of thing will matter to everyone along the hiring chain.
- Be careful of feature creeping when a two page resume will do. You should be able to deliver a broad enough picture of what you have done in one to three pages depending on how experienced you are. For more experienced developers, perhaps think about collapsing information on the older jobs that you have included if less relevant or current.
- Make sure the same font is used throughout the resume. Although your resume may have gone through several iterations, leaving a trail of different fonts that change for no apparent reason is a poor signal as to the standard of your code.
- For front end developers and designers, be mindful not to get so washed away with UX/UI that you completely forget to put much actual content in there. Resumes need to strike a balance of content long enough to tell a story of what you have done and your capabilities but not too long that the reader becomes disengaged. Too much flowery and convoluted language can create the impression that you are trying too hard to sell yourself which can generate uncertainty.
- Be economical with the truth when it comes to including that part time student job at the fast food outlet back in your student days. Try to keep content relevant to software development.
- Include a link to your GitHub. This is a fantastic way of showcasing how brilliant you are and will send out the signal that you are not a software developer by trade but there is a much higher calling for you to write great code than ‘just your career’.
- Avoid including every single possible personal detail you can think of such as tax file number, passport number and so on. Lean resumes work in a lean world.
- Include any user groups or meet ups you attend. Employers love to hire developers that cannot leave the code alone outside of the workplace.
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