How to Craft The Perfect Software Engineering Resume in 2024
There’s no one way way to write your resume. Each person has their own unique background and skill set. So the best way to make sure your resume is perfect, is to see other great resume examples. Those from people with a similar background to yours.
Click here for more resume examples.
In addition, you should follow the general best practices so your resume stands out even more. To help you secure software engineering interviews, I will cover these best practices with the hope that you find it useful.
When writing your resume, there are some things you must always have. Key personal facts, past relevant work experience, education, achievements, list of skills, and contact information. However, before jumping into that, let’s touch on what not to do.
Resume Fails: Where Not to Begin
Don’t write an essay. The more years you accumulate in the field, the more potential details you can put on your resume. Including every detail from the beginning of your career will result in a very long resume. And the reality of the matter is, companies scan them in a matter of seconds. So you want to emphasize the most important things and leave out the rest. Less is more.
Underselling yourself. In professional context, it’s important to emphasize and highlight your strengths. Don’t shy away to recognize great work in an objective way. If you don’t recognize your achievements, no one will. At the same time, you shouldn’t come across as boastful either.
Tell a story. It’s natural to just list your work as hard facts. Like increasing retention by 10% or decreasing errors by 20%. However, don’t forget to include context around those facts. How it was achieved, or how the opportunity was discovered. This way, the company can get positive insight into how you think. And get an engaging story at the same time.
How to Write a Good Software Engineer Resume
Leave out the summaries. In tech, your achievements and experience do the talking. So it’s not particularly important to have a statement in your resume. Companies are able to read between the lines. Though it’s up to you if you want to include it vs not.
Focus on work experience section, it’s most important. This section should be at the top, have the most detail, and should take the bulk of your writing effort. To repeat, achievements and experience do the talking in tech. Through this, is how you signal your fit for the role.
Make it stupid simple. When talking about work stuff, it’s easy to sound complex and “sophisticated.” Especially, with technical concepts. You can end up sounding like “Increasing retention through auditing the process optimization.” What does that even mean? In the end, it just results in people getting confused. What requires actual thinking, is how to format these details and complex concepts, and boil it down to simple language that’s easy to follow. Make it stupid simple.
Less fluff, more facts and details. Back again on less is more. Keep fluff to a minimum in your text. i.e. adjectives and words that don’t add anything. For example “Spent time on working and improved the process.” This doesn’t add anything. Include real measurements, data, problems and solutions. “Built X because of problem Y, the impact resulted in Z increasing by % .”
Highlight the technical details. Now this is most applicable to software engineering specifically. By the nature of the role, including the technical details is actually important. So do talk about - the tech stack, interoperability of systems, tradeoffs, etc. - which you encountered in you past work experience.
How to Format Software Engineer Resume
Standard One Pager
This is a standard pdf doc. I’ve seen a lot of single page and multi page resumes - so whatever works best for you. As long as it’s easy to understand and relevant to the role.
The sequence of sections that work best for me is contact and bio first, relevant work experience second, skills third, achievements and side projects fourth, then education last.
Best way to see what will work for you is taking a look at great example resumes.
Click here for more resume examples.
Personal Website
A resume and personal website is the ultimate combo. With a website you can incorporate that x factor, which can create a positive impression! There’s something about the effort and intentionality put in with having a beautiful interactive personal site.
It also makes it easier to find you as you can link it everywhere and people can share it among themselves. Which makes you more exposed to opportunities.
Incorporate Experience Outside of Work and Side Projects
Something else that’s specific to software engineering resumes is the importance of projects outside of work.
Tech is a fast paced, constantly changing industry. It’s extremely critical to be aware of new ideas, tools, and innovations that are happening. Your genuine interest and whether you stay on top of things, reflect through your side projects.
Make the time to spend effort there. And besides, it’s a lot of fun!
Pick a popular side project others are doing online, or contribute to open source, or come up with your own idea.
Side projects that I worked on - cross platform mobile app built with xamarin, websites with ruby on rails, golang load balancer that implements consistent hashing, and some others.
Demonstrate ROI-Driven Accomplishments
Tech is a data driven field. As a software engineer, your goal is to create impact, and the only way you know if there was success is through metrics.
Naturally, your resume details should include those data points to highlight your impact.
Creating your descriptions through this pov, also makes a compelling case from a business perspective. In business, it’s all about operational expenses invested and the multiplied result back or ROI. Companies won’t extrapolate your sentences to a business case for them. You have to chew it for them.
Use Relevant Keywords
It’s really important to include phrases and words in your resume that is relevant to the software engineering role you’re applying.
Companies and recruiters usually don’t read in depth into the resumes and typically skim through. So your words have to resonate and make them realize that you are a fit.
On top of this, we live in a digital age. Companies have automations for filtering resumes. Recruiters use specific search queries for finding candidates. Having relevant keywords in your resume makes you search friendly and easily discoverable.
If You Don’t Have Much Experience
We all start somewhere. Many feel like there’s just not much experience to put on paper. And that’s totally normal.
However, don’t just leave that as it is.
Fill the void with as much relevant information as you can. Something that shows your initiative. That you are a self starter. That means highlight any hackathon participation, or clubs, or any other extracurriculars related to computer science.
When You Connect With Recruiter
After your resume made it in, and you connect with a company recruiter. The interview process begins. If you want to learn everything about that and how to best prepare. Checkout this blog here.
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Cheers! ☕
