How to Create a Great Resume 📋
What to write, how to write it, a review of all the sections, useful tools, and my very own resume!
Because of layoffs and uncertainty, I have several friends who are on the market right now.
I speak with them often, and sometimes they send me their resumes for feedback — which, of course, I am happy to give.
In my career I have seen thousands of resumes. I started hiring engineers about 12 years ago, when I was a 24-ish CTO, and I have done so almost non-stop ever since.
So, I have opinions.
The goal of your resume is to get you to the first interview call, which is likely the screening. Then, of course, it’s on you — but a good CV can easily bring you 3x the interviews than a mediocre one.
I know otherwise formidable engineers whose CVs are a complete disaster. I would have passed on them, which is a tragedy.
In this article I will tell you my exact thought process when going through a CV as a hiring manager. I will cover the main sections, comment on their usefulness, and give my advice on how to write them.
I will also include my own CV at the end—created for the occasion—that you can use as a template.
So here is what we will cover:
🎨 Format — length and structure.
✉️ Cover letter — is it that useful?
📋 Personal summary — your short bio.
🖼️ Picture — should you include it or not?
💼 Work experience — the heart of your CV.
🎓 Education — does your degree matter?
💻 Skills — how you should list your tech chops.
📣 Testimonials — people who can speak highly of you.
🕹️ Side projects — blogs, open source contributions, and your garage band.
📃 My Resume — which you can use as a template.
📚 Resources — the best readings to learn more.
Let’s dive in!
🎨 Format
Importance: 4/5 🟢🟢🟢🟢⚪
Hiring processes vary wildly based on roles and company sizes, but here is some evergreen advice that is always valid:
1) Make it short and easy to read
Hiring managers scan hundreds of resumes for a position. When you are lucky, you have ~20 seconds to make a good impression.
So, your resume should be max 2 pages. 1 is better, 1.5 is still good.
More importantly, though, it should be easy to scan. Recruiters do not read resumes linearly, they scan them. If they find something interesting, they scan again and do multiple passes, each time more in depth.
So, add headings, use bullet points, put important things in bold, and organize information clearly.
2) Make it easy to pass around
Resumes are passed around a lot. Recruiters send them to engineering managers on specific teams, who again may share the good ones with senior engineers.
They are also often converted to different, text-based formats, e.g. because of algos that scan for keywords.
So, choose a fail-proof format, like Word, or a simple PDF that can be converted into text. Web can be fine, too, but make sure it looks good when printed to PDF.