How to improve your résumé 101

Who is the target audience for this article?

Although the title is quite generic, most tips and overall content is best suited to

• New grads and slightly experienced people (1–2 years of experience)
• People already working or interested to work in the software/tech industry.

Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

Why it’s important to have a good résumé?

Every employee is a Human Resource, and HR recruiters & existing employees together work to recruit new employees. To oversimplify how the job market works, demand is when a business needs to scale and needs more human resources and supply is the pool of people/candidates interested in working with said business.

Around the early 90s, for core-software roles there were lesser number of skilled candidates and more job opportunities so nearly everyone who applied got a chance to interview. This is a simple effect of the supply & demand concept as there was less supply of skilled resources but a growing demand in the IT field.

Now, things are different. There are a vast number of established companies across the world with huge number of employees under them already. In particular, if you are in a over-populated country like India there is a churn of new grads every year with a large majority aiming for a software/tech based role with suitable compensation. Note that the over-abundance of supply now is only for core-software roles based on frameworks which are established for a over a decade. There is still a deficit in the supply for emerging fields like ML, Cyber security, and some others. While it does seem like an opportunity to some, these are emerging and candidates for such roles in big firms are usually expected to have extensive studies such as PhD for them.

With an over-abundance of applicants for every opening, there are 2 side-effects

1. Recruiters now have to make quick decisions to select or reject a candidate from a large pool of applicants to form a smaller subset to be assessed in more detail.
2. Candidates now have to show case their talent and skills in a elegant way to be recognized as a valuable asset to the company, even at a quick glance.

So the above leads to a still underrated document as of today called the résumé which in my opinion is nearly as important as your offer letter in the recruitment process. To make the best pitch about yourself in a brief and organized manner is the purpose of résumé, or to put it more bluntly to improve your chance of securing job opportunities if you’re a job seeker.

Assessing a poor quality résumé

Below is an example for a poor quality résumé, not intended to represent any real-world person.

If we walk through the above résumé, we will find a number of faults. To mention a few

• Qualifications summary talks about candidate’s generic wishes and no objective historical performance.
• Selected Accomplishments has all qualitative aspects without a single instance of actual recognition by an institution. It is basically self assessment of the candidate, that too qualitatively with no metrics to go by.
• Experience lacks a flow in the order of tasks done. It largely describes every day tasks such as coding, estimating timelines which would happen in any project. There is no specific project described, nothing mentioned about individual contribution, impact and result of the projects done and so on.
• Education does not have grade/percentile score of the candidate.

Overall we could assess a résumé quality with 2 simple factors

1. Organization and structure (generic overall)
2. Concise and value-adding content (job-specific, section-wise content)

Simply put, lack of the above essentially implies a poor quality of the résumé. Writing great content per section and then ordering the section in itself encapsulates organizing and structuring your résumé (both are inter-dependent). There are finer grained factors like grammatical correctness, reverse chronological ordering, priority of sections, unnecessary graphics/fonts, and so on.

See this for more examples of bad résumé in general, aside from content specific to the role.

Building a better quality résumé

Below is an example for a better quality résumé, not intended to represent any real-world person.

If we walk through the above résumé, we will find a few improvements. This also looks better aesthetically, and has better organized content. To mention a few

• Summary now includes objective historical performance and specific skill set experience.
• Experience now talks about specific projects summaries, including the problem statement and quantitative results ($2–3 million, 81% to 95% etc)
• Honors and Awards has all specific instances of awards and positions granted by institutions along with timelines.
• Conferences & Courses section is added with some useful and relevant courses to the relevant job role.

Education still does not have grade/percentile which is required for new grads and would be good to have for up to 1–2 years of experience at least.

Pre-requisite

The pre-requisite would be to build a well balanced profile by

1. Working on value-adding projects.
2. Gaining experience through internships, research programs.
3. Participating in competitive coding contests, hackathons and others.

Author’s note: The second point is slightly controversial, I’m aware. But the overall topic is referring to a full-time job, and this in particular is referring to part-time internships, student programs, freelancing contracts and other intermediary forms of work experience.

Overall structure

1. Should be one-pager for most people (<5–7 years of experience). Can be more only if you have unique & valuable content.
2. Can be one or two columns so long as it’s modular and organized. Use free templates, it’s very easy.
3. Sections to include and their order (top to bottom) — Experience, Education, Projects, Skills/Courses, Awards & Achievements. This is because Experience is usually mandatory whereas Awards may be good to have.

Section-specific content

1. For Education, you can keep only UG (under graduate) and above (PG, MS etc) as the rest don’t matter much when applying for jobs. Do mention your grade/percentile as cut-offs are there for jobs in some cases.
2. For Experience, write about your recent roles (reverse chronologically) and the top 3–4 projects which are most relevant to the role you seek. Use STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result) for projects, with 2–3 lines per project. In Action, mention your individual contributions more than what the team did (not what “we did”, what you “individually contributed” or “led the team to do”). In Result, use quantitative metrics wherever applicable (x% accuracy, $y cost reduction, n% ROI etc).
3. Projects section for new grads will be similar to Experience except academic projects may not have much metrics to show. You can instead add tech stack used and learnings briefly for Results. Only keep top 3–4 projects most relevant to the role you seek.
4. Skills and Courses can be from college courses or done on your own with online resources (add only very reputed ones). For skills, don’t add something unless you have hands-on experience.
5. Awards and Achievements is a good to have, here you can add Competitive Coding contest ratings, Academic prizes, Hackathon rankings and other Prestigious research programs. Write these precisely and briefly, for example “X rank/percentile in y contest”. These should be in your domain (like software) of relevant job role to have more consideration.

That’s it, good luck and happy job hunting to the reader! For more information and resources go through below links.

Useful links & References

• Résumé key points video (mainly for new grads)
• Bad résumé examples
• Résumé templates generator
• STAR Résumé description