Writing a resume that lands you the interview
How often have you sent a resume, and never gotten a response?
I went from having zero interviews out of all of Britain to having a dozen in one city and got the job.
Look, writing a resume is taxing and it is really frustrating after sending hundreds of resumes for months without getting any response. Even worse, not getting an interview.
By the end, you’ll learn what things you should include in your resume, what to do when you have no experience, what formatting should you use, and a lot more.
What makes me qualified
Look, I’m not a hiring manager and never “officially” hired a person, I had dozen of CVs that Id send for months with absolutely zero interest. I had hundreds of calls with recruiters, I’ve gone through every single google result where I contacted countless agencies all over the United Kingdom and got a few interviews that lasted 10minutes.
After some serious reconsideration, I decided to write on forums and talk to real-life hiring managers that have been doing it for quite some time, whom I found on discord. I started to study the psychology of selling yourself and discovered a bunch of other things that I’ll just touch up in this post.
What is a resume
First, we need to actually understand what a resume is, and what purpose it serves — it is nothing more than telling about your abilities, experience and many more. It’s about selling yourself on paper, in the hopes of getting an interview in a specific industry.
Simple! Yet, I see many people write about their life’s story, irrelevant experience for the field they are applying for, talking about other people, and much more.
A resume purpose is not to get you a job, it’s to get you an interview. The interview is the part that gets you the job.
We’re going to get more in details on what to actually put in the resume, but it is important that you understand what a resume is in its core principle.
NOTICE: It’s important to understand that what I’m writing is based on my experience and the people I talked to. You will get a different answer based on whom you’ll ask on how to write a resume.
Some stats
Before we talk about the specifics, we need to get realistic about the expectations and understand what impact a resume has.
Most resumes get tossed within 11seconds. It might slightly vary on the company, but it doesn’t matter because you don’t know how the specific company operates, so let’s take an average out of it.
If you’re sending your resume to the right job postings, you should get at least an interview or two out of ten sent. On average a very good resume would get about 3interviews out of 10, compared to a bad one that would get one interview from ten.
If you can’t get an interview, and your skills are good, it’s most likely because you have a poor resume.
Only apply to the jobs you are qualified for
Just because with the internet you can send a lot more resumes, it doesn’t make it entirely a numbers game — there is some truth to this, but we’ll get into it.
If you’re trying to lose weight, it’s not only the amount of food that you eat, it’s the quality of the food. It’s not only the number of resumes you send out, but it’s also the quality of your resume.
While companies have their own process of looking at the resume, its good to acknowledge that if you send your resume to jobs that you’re not qualified for, you’re making your applying irrelevant, and some companies might even blacklist you for other roles at their company.
It’s a good idea to keep a track what is your response rate, so you can improve and see if your resume is working or not.
Once you get your resume sorted and working, only then it becomes a numbers game.
Tailor your resume to the job
To get a higher chance of getting an interview, you have to tailor your resume to the job you want. Don’t go around saying you’re an expert at C, C++, C#, Python, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Swift, Objective-C, Java.
Even if you know all of that, you’re getting hired to do one thing, maybe two.
Look, I hear what you’re saying. If you’re hired as a front-end you might do back-end too, but most of the time you will be doing front-end, and that’s where you will excel at. That also depends on the company.
The majority of the time you’re going to do one thing, and therefore it makes sense to hire a person with an extensive knowledge rather than someone who can do everything, and not excel at anything. If you’re a senior, perhaps you can do everything, but its good to market yourself strongly.
Have skills that are ‘relevant’ to the job. If you are applying for a Java position, mentioning you know Objective-C might be helpful, but the focus does not lie here unless the company uses Objective-C somewhere internally. Mention it last.
If you have other skills such as playing the guitar, don’t mention it, keep it relevant.
Great to have other skill and experience — but no one cares
If you have other skills that are not programming, good for you! However, whatever that might be, it doesn’t matter. Yep, no one cares if you worked at a McDonald, been a personal Trainer, whatever is that you did.
What does matter is your major hard skill, transferable skills, what are the skills that are going to be a great asset to the company you’re applying? If you worked in sales, applying for a small agency, you can say that you have the necessary soft skills to communicate with the client!
You should, however, exclude any experience that has nothing to do with programming. What you should put instead are the personal projects that you’ve built to gain the skill.
Some of you might say that you worked at a multi-billion dollar industry, such as McDonald — no one cares, it’s not a privilege to work there because its a multi-billion dollar industry, unless… you worked in their tech sector.
You can always talk about this at the interview in more detail.
What to include in a resume
Everyone agrees that a CV should include your experience and technical skills at its least — and some contact details, usually at the top of your resume.
In terms of the rest, it depends on whom you’ll talk to, just like anything else.
I’m going to explain some of the common sections that you might see or use for your own resume. Said that, one thing you should not include is your references section because if someone wants to know, they’ll just ask.
Let’s go over some of the sections that you might think of or came across.
Personal Summary
I’ve seen hundreds of CVs with exact same summaries. The most common is: “I’m a hard-working individual, passionate, dedicated and detail-oriented. In other words, I’m just perfect!”
Let me shock you, these are the basics of any job, and again, it doesn’t make you unique.
Plus saying that is like saying: I’m skilled in flying planes, hacking, operating boats, and I’m a martial arts expert. Oh! Not only that, I’m a genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist. Just trust me. Avoid self-proclaimed words such as “team-work”, “self-motivation”, “detail-oriented”, and all of that.
Unless you have something unique to say there, I wouldn’t put anything, unless you can genuinely it in the summary, and display some of your character in a sentence.
It might help if you know how to write one, stating your expertise, niche, personality, professional interests, and aspirations. Get to the point.
Technical Skills
It’s a good idea to put a technical section in your resume because it will make it easier for the recruiters and the HR to scan your resume, on whether they should forward you or not.
A dev manager will tell the HR person “These are good words” and “These are bad words”. The HR person doesn’t know what any of those words mean, but if you list them in the technical skill section, they will know that you are on the good list.
The way I like to write it is:
Experience
The experience you put in your resume should be relevant to the job. If you don’t have any experience, no one will hire you. Said that, build a personal project to gain that experience. It’s that simple.
If you’re established in the industry and worked a decade, don’t put all of your jobs there, because most likely they are outdated anyway. Put the recent ones. No one is going to go through 5pages of your experience.
If you don’t have the experience, put in your personal projects — that is also experience.
Hobbies and Interests
This is one of these things were different people will tell you different things, its based on one’s preference — it also depends whether its a good thing or not.
Hobbies can spark some mutual interest that can lead to a friendly conversation in the interview, which you can build a good relationship, which means you’re more likely to get hired, as people hire whom they like.
On the other hand, no one cares.
If you have an awesome hobby, whatever that means for others, you could stand out and it could be possibly a memorable thing.
People will judge you based on your hobbies. Regardless if it’s illegal to discriminate or not, people will do it — you’ll just never hear from them back again.
Said that, some recruiters will judge you based on your hobbies and toss it to the bin, because of cultural fit.
I personally live out this section out from my resume.
Keep the layout simple
Keep it simple. Keep it modern. Don’t put graphics. Don’t overcomplicate it.
I get it, you want to differentiate yourself by standing out. You do that at the interview. Unless you have a blog, a YouTube channel and have some good content — this will differentiate you right away.
Most of the times this strategy backfires and hiring managers prefer it simple. They don’t want colored text, pictures of yourself, graphics — it’s distracting and you might be doing it to cover something else up.
The hiring manager already saw a graphical resume, a lot of people do it, so you’re not ever differentiating yourself.
If I wanted to differentiate myself, I would send my resume via post to spice things up. Would that be the best thing to do? I don’t know — I guess it depends on whom you ask. What I do know is that it would be different than usual.
Keep it short
I get it, you have a lot of great things to say, but no one has time to read it.
Make sure it’s one page long, at its very least two pages — there shouldn’t be any reason for it to be longer than one page.
As mentioned above, your resume will be looked at no more than 10seconds, so no one will ever look at your other pages. That’s why you need to choose the best information and put it in front.
You might say that everything you put is important, and you can’t make it shorter. Fine. No one will read your other pages, and it will look unprofessional decreasing your chances of getting a job. Who wants to read a book about someone in an interview? There are more people to come.
If you take a picture of yourself, you won’t take one picture, you would take hundreds of them, and choose the best to put on your profile picture — do the same with your resume. Put the best information.
Make sure you don’t try to cheat on this, however. Don’t make your font size 5px! That would be three pages in one! That would get instantly tossed in the virtual bin.
Your first step on improving your resume is on making the font size to be at least 14px and making sure it’s no more than one page long — if your font is too small your resume could be automatically rejected by the software.
That is if you’re applying for a programming job, the resume length might different if you’re applying in a different industry that requires you to make lengthy descriptions.
PDF or DOC?
I’ve been told to save it as a PDF extension by one person, and as DOC by another person. So which one is it?!
A developer will tell you something different than the HR, then the hiring manager, then a recruiter and so on. Took me a while to realize that.
There are different cases when you should use a PDF and a DOC extension, so have both ready anyway — sending your resume with the right format is very important and for a good reason.
The DOC format is preferred across recruiters, HR, and websites where you apply for a job.
A recruiter will most likely want to put their logo on your resume, which means that before submitting it to the hiring manager, he would open the resume in word, put in his company logo and save it as a PDF format. If you send the file as a PDF what might happen is the layout might get messed up, because the recruiter might use a different version of the word document, or some nitty things. Same goes for the HR.
Its the same deal when you’re sending it via a website because many times you will send your resume to a recruitment agency that will forward it with their logo on it. It also helps the software scanning your resume to get the keywords and forward it to a person. If you send a PDF via a website, the software might think it could be an image, and it would toss your resume.
On the other hand, a DOC format wouldn’t be the best to send to a hiring manager, or directly to a person, because he might have trouble opening it up. Just like me. So make sure to use a PDF format in this case.
Use the STAR method
STAR is a straightforward method you can use because it gets right to the point and describes what situation you’ve handled and how it ended up.
STAR is an acronym that stands for:
- Situation: The challenge you were facing
- Task: What your job was
- Action: What steps you took
- Result: What the outcome of your action was
Hiring managers love STAR! It’s right to the point and tells them exactly how you solve the problem.
Imagine that you’re working on a webapp, and the client isn’t happy with the loading speed. Your job is to improve it. Explain using the STAR methodology of how you managed to solve the problem.
The website time was loading slow, cut down on image size, bundle code and optimize it. Increased the image loading time by 34% by taking some quality away, as well at optimized the code and after bundling managed to decrease the size by 78%, which resulted in a total of 1.5s loading time, that is 3seconds faster than before, which means that more people stayed on the website.
Summary
It’s important to remember that a resume is a piece of paper where you talk about how you can help the company based on the skills and experience you possess. The more concise it is, the better. Live the rest for the interview. Remember the STAR technique.
I have met people whose skill levels were a dozen times better than mine, but they couldn’t get an interview because their resumes were bad. Cases differ, of course, but even if your skills aren’t sufficient, you should still get an interview.
Let me know in the comments if this has helped you increase your response rate and land you more interviews!
If you found the article helpful, share it with people who might benefit from it! :)