As a hiring manager when I'm looking at resumes to fill a position I'm going to read into your resume as much as I can about you. A resume is an advertisement about yourself, it's not an auto-biography – so every *single word* you write will either work for you or against you.
Now, you can use that to your advantage by masking what may be a writing weakness, but the only purpose of a resume is to get your foot in the door and get the interview. When Ford advertises their Focus, it may not be their strongest car, but I guarantee you they spend millions to advertise to the best of their ability to generate enough interest to get you to walk into a showroom and check it out. And by the way, they only have 30-60 seconds of your interest in order to do that.
Writing not your strength?
Not everyone is strong at writing, it's actually a rare skill amongst technical folk, and that's ok. But if you want to set yourself apart (or even be on par), you need to have it proof read by a friend who is good at it. It's worth it to pay someone to format it nicely for you, and if that's not even an option go on CraigsList and find some nicely polished resumes and copy their template.
The older the experience, the less relevant it is.
There's this fallacy in the tech community that the more you write the better. Nothing is further from the truth; a hiring manager does not care what you did 5 years ago. To prove it, try this experiment: when you're interviewing make note of how often prior to 5yrs your previous gigs are brought up. The older the experience, the less relevant it is. A hiring manager is evaluating what you're currently capable of doing, not what you were doing as the junior version of yourself back in the day.
Back in the day if you were a Help Desk support guy, and now you're a Sr Network Architect, unless you want to go back into Help Desk why would you burn valuable resume space on highlighting this experience? All you need to do at this point is just mention you worked there, save the space for focusing on your current and more relevant experiences.
Stick to 2 Pages – SERIOUSLY!
Continued from the above, just like the Ford advertisement, you have the reader's attention for 30-60 seconds. The first page is critical, and the second page is a little less critical, and anything beyond that is irrelevant. There's only so much information someone can absorb, so if you spread important details across many pages, it'll get diluted and lost.
In fact if you have a ton of experience and you're able to effectively summarize it in 2 pages (or even 1), that's viewed as EXTREMELY impressive. It takes quite a bit of writing skill to accomplish that; ask a VP or higher in your current organization what types of reports they like, or what kind of emails they prefer – it'll always be something along the lines of short and concise. Managers want information summarized accurately in a quickly absorb-able format, they do not care to read exhaustive amounts of detail unless asked for.
Some tips:
- Look at every word, and consider chopping it out to see if the sentence still reads effectively. E.g. "managed and lead a team..." – just say "lead a team". The extra verbosity doesn't help.
- Nuke verbosity on older experience, they're irrelevant now.
- Although it's not reducing content, if you need to go ahead and increase margins or reduce the font size to make the content fit to 2 pages. This is a fine art though and only to be used when you need just a wee bit more space.
Format it nicely – PLEASE!
It's about readability, and like an ad it's about aesthetics.
- Go easy on the bold and use changes in font sizes and weight to separate out sections (Experience, Skills, and Education) and subsections (e.g. each position within the Experience section).
- Align things so that they start at the same column positions.
Attention to Detail.
The lack of it will guarantee your resume a position in the garbage bin; even messing up on a single punctuation mark can severely impact your resume. Why? Because an interviewer doesn't have much to go on, and to bring on an employee and ramp them up comes at a great expense. So a resume is the first opportunity to evaluate your work; so if you're not willing to be diligent enough to make your resume bullet proof it can be interpreted as an indicator of what your attention to detail may be like on the job.
Whether it's right or wrong doesn't matter, that's the reality of the game, and if you're smart you can use that to your advantage. Now an interviewer isn't going to base their decision whether to hire you based off a resume, they'll use the interviewing process to fully size you up. So the resume is really that vehicle to get you that interview.
It's like playing poker, and when it comes to attention to detail a resume gives away your "tells".
Tips:
- Be consistent with how you write things. Don't write "UNIX" and then later write "Unix", pick one and stick to it.
- Get your acronyms and product names right. E.g. verify if Adobe spells it as "Coldfusion", "ColdFusion", or "Cold Fusion".
- Spelling, typos, and grammar mistakes = suicide.
Focus on accomplishments – Not duties.
We all know that developers gather business requirements, design solutions, architect stuff, test things, deploy applications, support users, troubleshoot problems, etc... It makes zero sense in burning up resume space by cataloging all the duties that are common (and obvious) to the job role.
There's this fear that if you don't spell it out that the reader will assume you haven't performed that duty, or worked with that specific version of software, etc... Choose what you divulge wisely; if you're a web developer it's irrelevant to list out every desktop variant of Windows (98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, etc...); however if you're a Desktop Helpdesk support person, then that is relevant.
A hiring manager is interested in knowing what sets you apart from the others - what is your value add? This is why you want to focus on accomplishments – as a result of your duties, what did you get done and what were the results? At that position how are/were you better than your coworkers (awards, rank, recognition, promotions, etc...), mention how you got projects done on time (or ahead of time, and by how much), projects completed under budget (and by how much).
Remember, a hiring manager (even a technical manager) is driven by the needs of the business, so frame your accomplishments in how it helped the company. Strategic value, productivity increases, cost savings, revenue increase, profitability, competitive advantage, etc...
You want the reader to feel jealous that you're providing all this amazing BUSINESS value to your current company, when it could be they who are reaping those rewards (if they hire you that is).
Don't use internal product names.
Nobody will know what you mean if you reference internal products or tools; e.g. "Created the foundation of the HappyPO System." Instead describe what the system is.
Final words.
Every word you write has to add value – otherwise it takes away value. So when reading your resume, scrutinize every word and evaluate that if you were to chop out the word – does it impact it? If not, leave it out.
::