INTRODUCTION

As part of this and some upcoming blogs, I intend to help the fresh college grads or new joiners from any industry, gain some perspective of how the real world works.

Let us polish my resume for beauty.

Disclaimer

Neither do I claim to be an expert in the field of resume building ( if there is indeed such a field ), nor have I consulted many HRs or recruiters.

I have appeared in and have conducted multiple interviews. The following information is based on my own experiences, knowledge gained from the experiences of my juniors, peers and mentors, and some brainstorming sessions with friends.

Picturing

Experience:

This is how I went about adding a picture and timeline to my experience:

This format worked for some time. Then I edited, both the content and the format:

I like both formats. At the same time, with the addition of a new name, the second format made more sense to me.

Work locations:

I believed that I could showcase my onsite work experience to my leverage … and added this image of my work locations ( Minneapolis, US | Bangalore, India | Delhi, India ) :

Frankly, this depiction indeed works a few times. But not many … I ended up removing this after a few months.

Skills:

I really spent some time on this …. An image-based, timeline leveraged depiction of my skills.

Notice, I have attempted to use images containing text. This is supposed to help the non-technical recruiters. Once again, this format worked for some time. Then I edited, both the content and the format.

Here is the presentation that suits me better now. It’s simpler.

The constant upgrade in the depictions are more to show that “ITS OKAY TO KEEP IMPROVING” and not “something went wrong the first time”.

Projects:

This is the final version after multiple edits:

Project	Client Onboarding – Performance and Code refactoring
Tech Stack	Android, Couchbase, LeakCanary, Everit json schema validation
Description	Task: Refactor code and improve app performance – Resolved memory leak of 18 Mb from the app. – Reduced method call duplications, method chaining, and eager loading to improve app performance by 10%. – Un-nested the UI view hierarchy and reduced UI overdraws. The result was a 70% performance improvement and an appreciation from the organization CEO. – Reduced unwanted object creations like “new Gson()”, reducing method time from 44 ms to 3 ms. – Rewrote AsyncTasks to use executeOnExecutor, allowing for better performance with hardware. – Reconfigured data structures to appropriately use, to reduce memory and CPU consumption. – Integrated magnetic swipe hardware into our application
Role	– Individual contributor/ programmer.

Note:

●The table helps give previously missing structure to the paragraph. It helps the reader.

●The numbers and other important ideas are underlined for highlight.

●The main idea of the project has been described in less than a line with highlighted text.

Finish Line

With these descriptions, we come to the conclusion of this resume-building series of blogs. I hope the information shared was helpful and helps you understand that this is NOT a complicated exercise.

Hard … sure, but complicated … not really !

As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog series, I had a long and hard time learning the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of writing a resume. The challenges I faced were multifold:

1.On one hand, I wanted to spend more time with technology, to polish my skills. On the other, I was required to spend elaborate lengths of time reading resume books, blogs, trying templates, thinking about, and designing images for my resume.

I ended up putting in a disproportionate amount of time learning the ‘right’ way of making a resume.

2.After knowing the ‘right’ way of writing a resume, I did NOT immediately have the mental muscle to think of ideas like – brevity, quantification etc.

Low in the food chain, and never been trained to look for the $$ or size of a project – I had a hard time understanding how I could deduce quantification of my project, understand my contribution in the bigger picture, etc. All this was done without any mentor.

Once again, I ended up putting a healthy amount of time developing my mental muscle on things like vocabulary, ideas to quantify my work. All IN A MANNER THAT IS EASY FOR A LAYMAN TO UNDERSTAND.

What comes up below is a concentrate of – books, blogs, experience, feedback, many failures, and few successes. Importantly – IN A MANNER THAT IS EASY FOR A LAYMAN TO UNDERSTAND.

Success for me would be :

You as a non-expert being able to understand the core concepts about creating your resume, creating the resume, and having reasonable confidence in the end result, all within a few days’ time of reading these blogs.

I hope this helps … and happy resuming!

The next two blogs will each be:

Sample of what my poorly made resume could look like.
A well-edited version of my Resume.

Hopefully, the contrast will help highlight the value of our discussion here. Let’s move on …

Write back, in case you have an opinion. Like what you read – do like, comment and share.