Developers: 7 tricks for a killer resume!

The fate predicted for the resume is similar to the one predicted for the book at the dawn of digital… Declared dead by the new players in digitized HR, the resume is nevertheless an effective tool — if you know how to adapt it to today's recruiters' needs.

In the era of e-reputation, LinkedIn, and Twitter, why come back to this archaic format whose very name comes from a dead language?

Let's instead focus on the English word: resume. While today many digital platforms and social networks let you better demonstrate your skills or personality, the resume is precisely there to summarize everything you can showcase in more detail elsewhere. At a glance, this weapon will demonstrate the quality of your work and your standing in the ranks of top-gun developers.

And even though the IT market — particularly application development — is currently very tight and finding a job is easy, the average level of developers is dropping.

The content

Contact info, experience, education… if you think you know what's in a resume, instead ask yourself: what will the people looking for a profile like mine actually look at in my background? Why will they be interested in me?

You want to be hired for a specific role, so your resume must demonstrate maximum correlation between your skills and the ones needed for the challenge you're targeting.

To assess this potential, the recruiters in front of you will rely on both your experience and your education. By "experience," understand "the sources of your skills" — not just your professional history. Personal projects or contributions to open-source projects are equally powerful ways to make your case.

As a developer, your skills are what let you solve technical problems on a given stack. Your resume must therefore reflect your ability to solve those problems on a particular stack.

Tip #1: The goal of your resume is to land a phone or in-person conversation.

Header:

This is where you present the basics of your identity: name, age, location.

Today, you also add the components of your e-reputation. Twitter, LinkedIn, personal site, portfolio and especially… Github (you recognize an artist by looking at their work). Don't forget the links — it's more practical!

Showing your code demonstrates mastery of a stack and is also an opportunity to show that you take part in the open-source community.

Don't be afraid to push your projects publicly. If you think someone will steal your code, remember that Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, published all the brand's patents, declaring that a company that depends on them no longer knows how to innovate. For a professional project, don't forget to respect any confidentiality clauses.

Photo / no photo? You're entirely free; once again, the resume is about making people want to take things further with you, so don't hesitate to put your friendliest face. Avoid cut-out photos, though, which give your resume the look of a sales brochure.

Tip #2: If you're bilingual or fluent in English, indicate it in the header. For example, go for a title like "Full Stack Javascript Developer (Node/React) — Bilingual in English."

Experience

This section can (should) be split into 2 sections: Professional Experience and Personal Projects.

Present your personal projects the same way as the projects you worked on in your various jobs. You can also include any school project, as long as it illustrates your ability to take on the technical challenge in question. Contributions to open-source projects are also (and always) welcome.

Be careful — be precise with dates: use month-level granularity. If you only put the year, the recruiter will immediately think you're trying to hide a gap. If that's the case, be honest and explain what you did during that period (personal projects, freelance, self-study, travel…).

Here's how to structure each of your experiences:

Title of the experience: Position held, Company name, Location (specify if remote), Date (month + year)

Subtitle: Mission, for example: Development of a microservices-oriented REST API

List of actions taken: This lists the various actions and tasks you carried out to deliver on your mission

Stack: List the stack technologies (only those you actually used)

Show that you're transparent. For example, if you were at a consultancy on a client engagement, you can play with the title:

Front-end Developer on engagement at VentesPrivées, SOGETI, Paris, January — June 2016

Tip #3: Show that you developed, maintained, and industrialized an application.

Skills

The goal of this section is to list and order your skills to show your future team that you've mastered the stack. Not easy to classify it all… Bluecoders recommends distinguishing: languages, frameworks, industrialization tools, hosting providers, and the software that makes up your work environment.

Indicate, with a self-evaluation system (stars or progress bars), the level you think you have on each listed skill. Stick to a simple scale of 3 to 5 levels and don't pile on peripheral techs — the goal here is again to highlight the similarities between your skills and those required for the role.

Tip #4: Order your skills by mastery level.

Personal interests

This isn't about whether you prefer coffee éclairs or chocolate ones — it's about telling your reader what you do outside your job. This helps identify common hobbies that could enrich your conversations during the hiring process and ease your integration into the team.

Avoid stating that you like sports, music, movies, video games, etc. Everyone likes that, everyone writes that — STAND OUT, FOR ONCE! No one wants to hire a generic person. So be specific: name the sport you love and play, what kind of music, what type of film, what kind of game… That's also what makes your personality.

Tip #5: Don't hesitate to say you love development and constantly keeping up with your tech stack.

The format

PDF, indexable! Whatever tool you use, save your resume in PDF format. By "indexable" we mean that the text in it is selectable. This gives you vector quality at a very low file size (less than 100kb). If your resume is 2 MB, you have a problem (probably an image), never go above about 500 kb.

Contrary to popular belief, a resume can perfectly well run on 2 pages or more if the experience you want to showcase calls for it. In that case, use the first page as a cover page to give the reader a quick overview of your background and detail your various projects and experiences on the following pages.

Finally, avoid extravagant fonts or questionable colors, and don't hesitate to ask people around you for feedback once your resume is done.

Tip #6: A well-organized 2-page resume is better than a single overloaded page.

LaTeX for perfection

If you want to completely overhaul your resume, do it in LaTeX! You can of course produce very nice resumes with word processors like Word or Pages. Nevertheless, LaTeX is by far the unanimous choice in the development world and will once again demonstrate your curiosity, your sense of perfection, and your distaste for WYSIWYG. If you're skeptical, save a Word document in HTML format and open it in your favorite editor :D.

Tip #7: Use the moderncv_ library._