Software Engineer: Requirements for [Resume]

Technology companies are booming despite the pandemic, and technology professionals have never been in higher demand. So now’s the time for software engineers to update their résumés to take advantage of this extraordinary hiring environment.

Here are a few quick tips for making a more effective résumé for the year 2021.

Purpose: Remember that the purpose of your résumé is to generate interview requests. It’s not your bio, your academic CV, an exhaustive list of everything you’ve done, or even a good representation of the complete you. The purpose of a résumé is to get interviews, and everything that isn’t essential to that goal should be jettisoned.

Scannable: Your résumé needs to be scannable. When it comes to your professional summary—the top? of the page of your résumé—it needs to be easy for the reader to digest in only a few seconds. As a first pass, they’re scanning it as quickly as possible to determine whether or not you belong in the “read more carefully” pile. That means they’re skimming through your résumé at top speed to decide whether to send you along to the next stage, whether that’s a quick Zoom screen or a full interview with the engineering manager.

Paragraphs won’t cut it. When résumé readers lose their train of thought in your paragraph or are distracted by complex sentences, they move on. You must keep their attention with short words and phrases that attract their interest.

Headline: You’ll need a professional headline that sums up your role and level for easy comprehension. This concise statement encapsulates your professional standing in a few words. Great professional headlines include:

·       Passionate Open Source Engineer

·       Top-performing BI Analyst

·       Innovative Machine Learning Expert

·       Successful Front-end Engineer

·       Dedicated DevOps Professional

For the HR professional or engineering manager reviewing résumés, this clear professional headline grabs attention and serves as a ready shorthand summation of your career to date.

After your professional headline, you’ll share four job titles you’d accept for your next role. These are not necessarily past roles or job titles you’ve already had. Instead, these are the job titles for which readers of your résumé ought to consider you. It may seem very obvious to you what your next step in your career progression will be, but it is not at all obvious to HR or your future boss. Make it easy for them by being explicit about it.