Play the game

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INTRODUCTION

As part of this and some upcoming blogs, I intend to help the fresh college grads, starters, or experienced folks in the tech industry, gain some perspective into how resumes are supposed to work.

In the time of virus scare and job losses, this will be my 2 cents of help. Contrary to the ideas like – get good grades, work hard and you are set, this world has a few different rules.

To avoid only the ‘Gyan’ … I will build my own resume per the instructions I share. Hopefully, the step by step approach and the details will help all readers.

The blog is spaced into 3 parts:

●The “what” of resume making, discussed in this blog.

●The “how” of resume writing, discussed in the next one.

●The “beautification” of the resume, discussed in the last part.

Let’s get started …

Why bother?

In the year 2020, is another blog about resume building, really needed ? Isn’t all information available online already ?

A few years ago, I started looking for a change, and the simple answer for me was : No.

The information was available … but in a very scattered form.

●Specialized template websites did NOT help with content.

●Content knowledge was too complex for a first-timer, and did NOT help with the templates.

●Good content text was NOT the highest rated on Google searches; hence out of reach of most.

●Despite having read the content, I needed to digest the information to be able to create valuable content from this.

All the above points seemed like too much work, so I did what any good software engineer would. Being trained in the skill of Copying a resume, and NOT being taught the skill of Building one, I just looked around and copied from the next guy with the well paying job.

Did not work out well :D, more importantly … wasted a bit of my time.

Once bitten twice shy, (Hindi : Doodh ka jala, chaach bhi phoonk phoonk ke pita hai) 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 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 an amalgamation of – books, blogs, experience, feedback, many failures and few successes. Importantly – IN A MANNER THAT IS EASY FOR A LAYMAN TO UNDERSTAND.

For this reason, all good things shared in this blog series are due to others’ knowledge, and all mistakes are on me.

Success for me would be :

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

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.

The Basics

So, let’s start with some basic questions ….

●What is a resume ??

One way to answer the question is: resume is the face of my professional experience. This face should be clean, crisp, and attractive.

●Why a resume / what should a resume do ?

The resume ( as a face ), should present me to be attractive enough to allow the recruiter to take me on a figurative interview date ! ( How the date goes through, how do I perform, and does the interviewer fall for me … a whole different story )

But, in the first place – my face should be attractive enough to elicit a response. Period !

At the cost of sounding too teenage-ish, let me ask you a question – out of the many girls or boys, you might see on a typical day, for which one’s do you turn around ??

My guess is – the attractive one’s !!

Finding whether she is a good fit for you … is the step 2.

Well, pretty much the same way …. a resume should have both presentation, to trigger interest, and content, to help a good match.

●What would a recruiter look for in a resume ( after the resume has triggered some interest ) ?

Relevant content .. of-course ! but also in an easily digestible manner.

Let’s talk a bit more about the example we used above … what would happen if you were to spend time with every single girl or boy, you see a given day, until you either find them to be a good match for you, or reject them.

My guess is – after spending some time and effort, you will get tired and will start judging folks by their first impressions. As an example …

–You might take dressing sense as an indication of culture, social groupings etc.

–You might take the choice of words as an indication of attitude in life.

–Smiling or NOT smiling, as an indication of introversion/ extroversion, nervousness etc.

Now another question – would you be right all the time ?

Nopes …

But you and I, both know that you will be right MOST of the time, with the LEAST effort.

And that is the point !!

What do recruiters look for : What have you done ! No more and no less.

But they also look for it with LEAST effort, accepting to be right MOST of the time. This also means recruiters are okay being wrong sometimes, but aren’t willing to invest a disproportionate time into a single candidate/ resume.

So, as a job seeker, my job should be to make the recruiter’s job easier by …

–Using simple language

–Less text

–Avoiding crowding the text

–Using industry keywords ( for software industry : deadlocks, race conditions, throughput etc )

–Highlighting the keywords.

Software engineers, by virtue of their work, tend to focus mostly on content, that too NOT in an easily digestible form. This is the part I intend to make shine some light on, simplify, and help folks understand better.

That’s it, once I take care of both presentation and content, my work in a resume is done !

Sections in a resume

Moving on let’s talk about the different sections in a resume. Not just how to build them, but also the thought behind a section, its value, and more.

Objective

DON’T WRITE THIS SECTION !

Common mistake people make is writing a senti type objective or mission statement. This is a plain waste of resume real estate. Please remove this section.

The discussed mission statement might go on to explain the work experience, education etc.

Some examples will be:

To do great in life in a high powered environment …

Give my best to a dynamic organization …

Become a valuable contributor ….. Bla bla bla

Essentially – these are abstract explanations.

Now, don’t get me wrong … Abstract is good at the right places. So, abstract might be good while explaining to your lover about ‘how much you love him/ her’, or your child about ‘how much to behave’, or creating art !

But while applying for a specific job, at a specific company, with a specific salary and specific work schedule. I don’t believe an abstract statement is a good idea.

A lot of people in the software industry write these ‘mission statements’. These statements seem to be the typical case of ‘nakal bina akal’. ( a common meaning – copying without thinking )

Don’t get me wrong – if you are applying to a charitable organization or an NGO. This might be a good section to use …. But not for a technical job. To me, this is common sense.

The software industry recruiter does NOT care what you want to do in your life ! He wants to know what skills are relevant to the position. That’s all please !

Instead write a Profile summary, like:

5 years software industry experience in the retail domain, with Unix admin …

Senior editor for ABC magazine, with 2 years experience. Managed team size 200 …

Area sales manager for million-dollar business in the XYZ district. Bla bla bla

Hobbies

A resume is a high-value real-estate, and hobbies that do not add value to the job application simply aren’t helpful. Quick trivia ! Which of the below hobbies should go on a programmer’s resume ?

1.Listening to songs

2.Programming for a charitable organization

3.Playing cricket at national level

4.Teaching English at a college

5.Teaching Data Structures at a college

6.Cooking authentic dishes

7.Contributions to open-source projects

Answer key: #2, #4 and #7.

For obvious reasons, these are the only hobbies associated with the work being applied to. So, only these are relevant to a resume.

Also, the lack of this section does NOT matter. If you do not have relevant hobbies, please do not feel pressured to add a few.

At the cost of being repetitive, unless your hobbies are relevant to the job, DO NOT add them. Make better use of the resume real estate.

Education

A lot of companies DO NOT care about your college scorecard, but many others do. Even the ones that do …. DO NOT care about the name/ city of your college.

So, unless you are from Tier 1 college, you can put the resume real-estate to better use.

Nobody cares about : Happy college at Joytown, affiliated to Merry University 😀

Skills

This section is IMPORTANT !

One could add the core skills in this section and leave the details to the project section. Alternately the section could be a completely independent one. Which pattern to choose, is a decision I defer to you. There is no right or wrong decision.

The section should crisply explain your key skills:

–Programming languages – Java, C++, C#, Golang …

–Frameworks & libraries – Spring, EJB, Groovy, Jersey, Interceptors etc.

–Tools – Charles, Git, Jenkins, Docker etc.

A good idea might be to have your high proficiency skills separated from your average or low proficiency skills.

There are 2 perspectives of looking at this section:

1.With more experience, a programmer should have had the opportunity to work with more technologies.

So lots of technologies should be added to this section

2.If a programmer literally adds all his technologies ( Java 7, Java 8, Java 10, Java 11, Java 12 ), GIT, Eclipse, IntelliJ, Toad, Squirrel, CVS etc

Too many technologies make the list very repetitive and worthless

There needs to be a balance between the big list and the value they add. I would collate all ideas of one time into a single section e.g.

1.Java 7, Java 8, Java 12 … get collected to Java

2.DBeaver, Toad, Squirrel … get collected to Relational DB Tools ( DBeaver )

3.CVS, GIT, Jenkins, Sonar, Maven … get collected to CICD process and tools.

Beyond the above, the specific tools and technologies can be written at the project level. More on this in the next sections.

Work Details

Remember what recruiters look for : What have you done !

No more and no less.

But they also look for it with LEAST effort, accepting to be right MOST of the time.

Help them, by not making them look for your most valuable work !!

So, what would a recruiter look for ?

This is a very subjective question … much like asking what a girl/ boy would look in a partner. My best guesses are the following:

1.When did the person work ?

2.Overview of the project.

3.Exact nature of the individual’s contribution.

I understand the first two to be obvious and easy. Most people get these right. #3 is the one where I personally slipped for a very long time. My mistake was NOT quantifying my work. The book : The Google resume was very helpful to me.

The book explains NOT to be abstract with words like : managed, worked, lead team etc.

Instead use specific words like : lead 5 member team which implemented a 5 million $ project, improved performance by 20%, budget allocation of 100k $

Note that the above sentence has 2 important parts:

1.The verb that describes the work like improved, enhanced, coded, designed, implemented, written program, oversaw, changed, altered, etc.

2.The quantity of impact like 40% performance improvement, 15 mb of memory leak fixes, 2 gb of memory reduction, N^2 to N reduction of time complexity etc.

The quantified ‘result’ created by my ‘effort’ – is what recruiters look for !

Most engineers admittedly aren’t too focussed on these numbers. But these numbers are important to sell one’s profile to the recruiter, therefore important.

Facing problems writing the work details ?

Writing my work based on the template mentioned above ( verb + quantity ), was difficult for the first time. It took me up to 3 iterations to get meaningful information on my resume. Following are a bunch of questions, to ask yourself to get a feel of what could be added and how ..

Ask yourself these questions:

1.What part of the project involved hard work or discipline ?

–Was it learning new technology ? What did you learn ? How long did it take you ?

–Was the new within or outside your technology domain ? e.g.

## Spring and hibernate fall within the same tech family

## Android and Spring belong to different tech families

## Angular and React are from the same family

## Angular and Postgres are from different tech families.

–Did you create a tool or utility ? How much time did this save ?

–Was it understanding the basics of the business ? If yes, then what was it about the business that was difficult ? how long would an average person have taken to reach your level ?

–Did you work over and above your responsibilities ? e.g. despite being a manual tester, you developed a testing tool

–Did you recognize a problem ? and provide a solution ? How did you reach a solution ? how did you ensure that the solution was correct ?

You get the idea …

2.How many other people (both in and outside the organization) could do the work, you did ?

–If you find that no one else, in your organization, could do the work you did. Ask yourself why ?

Do you know more about business ? or more about technology ?

–How many others from outside your organization can do the same thing ?

Again, why ? better tech knowledge or something else ?

3.Did you or your team receive a specific reward or award ?

–How many people from the team/ organization get recognition.

–Is the recognition given away in an ad hoc manner or is it awarded with a timed schedule ?

–How much the reward proves your worth to the industry.

If you can answer these questions, you will start to get an idea about what should be introduced into the resume.

Having noted, all the above details, you should now be able to put them to paper and have the first draft of your resume. Let’s not worry too much about ironing the creases … we’ll do that as we go.

In this section just write, write write …

In the next blog, I will use the instructions here to create my own resume. Hopefully, this will help give you direction and confidence in the content.

Happy learning !

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