Resume for Software Engineers

The purpose of this doc is to help people who are trying to get roles as a Software Engineer and have trouble getting interviews. After reviewing a whole bunch of resumes, I saw a bunch of the same issues and wanted to make 1 document that addressed most of them. If this is helpful to you, please leave a reaction or comment!

Top Info

• Include your city and state but leave out your address
• Include your email, personal website, linkedin, and github
• If you don’t have one of the above but this may be something you want to create

Education Section

• If your GPA was below 3.5 you may want to exclude it
• Include relevant courses for the school you went to.
• This can include Data Structures, Algorithms, Operating Systems, etc
• Pretty much anything that shows how you picked up technical skills
• If there was a specific language you learned in a class, include that in parentheses

Technical Skills

• Separate the programming languages and the frameworks/technology solutions
• Also if you can, try to separate the scripting languages like html css from the actual languages like java ruby etc
• One thing to keep in mind, Don’t just put any skills here. If you have something in this section, be prepared to talk about it in an interview. Also If you have something in this section, you should have it present somewhere else on your resume. This could be either next to a course or in one of your projects

Professional Experience

• Keep like 2–3 of your most relevant and most recent professional experiences in this section
• For each one put the company name, your position there, and the time range you spent there

For each job in this section

• Include 3–4 bullet points about WHAT YOU DID there
• Mentioning the technologies and stuff is cool but recruiters are looking for what you contributed here technically
• So if you utilized a frontend framework to create reusable components for displaying item listings say that
• If you utilized an ORM to define database models and make it easier to write queries say that
• Saying what you did technically at a place is more important than saying you collaborated with people and more important than saying you used 8 different technologies there
• Did you write unit tests to verify 4 methods work as intended
• Looking at the job description can help you see what things they hope a candidate can do

Include QUANTITATIVE DATA

• This means try to include numbers for your bullet points

For help, try to answer these questions

1. how much of the thing did you do?
2. Was there 30% growth in something?
3. did it make money for the company, and if so how much?

• Include the technologies/languages where you can
• The technologies are important but not as important as a lot of people think. You should have it there to support what you put in your skills section but not instead of having info on what you did there

Projects

• A bunch of this stuff should follow many of the same guidelines from this section
• I’ve noticed especially with Projects that people talk more about the team did than normal
• This works to your disadvantage
• If you talk about what your team did throughout this section, it’ll look like you don’t contribute that much and your team did everything
• Be specific about what you did to contribute
• This section is how people without a ton of professional experience can compensate.
• So if you have like 1 relevant job, include a couple more of your personal projects and use your judgement
• Beef this up as much as you can with all the things you’ve done for it
• If you can, make sure these projects are on your github
• No need to put a link on your resume to the specific project
• Include the name of the project and what it was for(hackathon name or personal or for school etc)

Leadership Activities/Extracurriculars

• The more relevant to the job in question the better.
• Ie. computer science club and technical stuff may stand out a lil bit more if you have interesting stuff to talk about from those experiences
• Also if its a club say your position
• Include 1–2 bullets on how you showed leadership abilities
• Include numbers if you can
• Maybe include any awards you won in this section

Extra Info

• I’m just dropping my resume here for reference. My resume needs a whole bunch of work and is far from perfect but I think it’s a good starting point.
• Also presentation is key and if you made your resume on microsoft word from scratch, you may want to look into using a nice template. I use a resume template on overleaf to create mine and make sure it looks nice and formatted
• https://www.overleaf.com/

Thanks for reading :)