I’ve been going through a thick stack of engineering resumes recently. Here are my notes about what not to do when applying for a job at NetMesh; well, I think few hiring managers will disagree with much of what I’m saying here.
- One typo can happen in a resume. Three or more automatically disqualify you, regardless what else the resume contains.
- Have you actually tried to print your resume? It is surprising to me how many Word resumes are corrupted or unprintable on normal printers. No, I don’t want to change the margins of your resume or figure out why some characters look so funny in the printout. If you don’t do that formatting work for me, I question whether the work you want to do for me will ever be in a form that I can use.
- More on printing: one resume I got keeps hanging my print server. I have no idea what would cause this, but that’s also not a good way of making a best impression. This is the third time I had to reboot the print server.
- Every developer says they can learn new technologies very quickly and have excellent communications skills. So don’t say that — I know already that you believe that, and I also know that most likely it won’t be true. What about instead of claiming it, you provide some hard evidence (e.g. "I had no idea about PHP before this project, but managed to release the new version within 4 weeks anyway." Or: "the customer implementation project was stuck, I parachuted in and, within two days, communicated a better architecture to the customer and their systems integrator, and the project successfully completed within six week afterwards. This led my company to give me a special bonus.").
- I’m sure that if you liberally insert terms such as "amazing" and "perfect match" into your cover letter when describing yourself, I simply have no choice but to hire you (this is meant sarcastically, just in case, but these are actual quotes from actual cover letters). Even if you were the one perfect match out of millions of others, please let me decide that, okay?
- For people with less than 2-3 years of experience: please don’t extol the virtues of class A, B and C on programming you took in college. Most experienced engineers have a fairly dim view of what actual programming skills are taught at colleges. If you think you learned most of what you needed to know about software development in college, you may want to check your assumptions and the impression you are making to the hiring manager.
- For recent grads: state briefly and concisely what actual relevant work experience you have, and then state what you aspire to. Everybody knows that you don’t have 15 years of experience, so let’s not pretend you do. But you can tell the hiring manager where you want to be 15 years from now. Also, if you’ve created software since you were 12, by all means, talk about this — it proves that you like building stuff, are tenacious, and probably able to figure out just about any technical problem that comes your way (otherwise you would have given up when you were 13).
- Don’t say "very experienced engineer with more than 2 years of experience". I hope you don’t believe that.
- I very much recommend you write your resume from the perspective of results, not activities peformed. At the end of the day, nobody cares what you did to get to the result, as long as the result mattered. Nothing is as convincing as a resume that says: "was lead engineer for the development of N major software products for M employers over my career, all except 2 of which were successful in the market. Here is some press coverage."
- Don’t say "participated in a leading role". You either led something or you didn’t. There is nothing wrong with not leading anything; leadership requires a different skill set than engineering, and if you want to be an engineer rather than a leader, that’s perfectly fine. (Imagine a project that has only would-be-leaders on it and no engineers)
- "To best utilize my skills and leverage my experience" is not what I’d call an objective. If you don’t have a specific objective other than to find paid work, leave out the objective or call it "software development position" or something like it.
- As an engineer, if you want to stand out, one idea is to list publications that you had a hand in. Very few engineers do. Same for talks you gave somewhere, whether it is at a conference, among your homebrew buddies or for a customer. Along the same lines, if you have a blog and one of your posts got a lot of in-bound links from other blogs, mention it! You must have said something that resonated. In our case, that could immediately separate you from the pack and make you a very attractive candidate, even if we don’t necessarily agree with what you said.
- By all means, list your involvement in open source projects, if you have been involved. Preferably with a URL pointing to your check-in history or something like it. (Side note for students: that would be an excellent way of building a reputation during college that will be invaluable to you once you graduated.)
Finally: try to get your hands on as many resumes of other people as you can, and try to objectively compare your’s with other people’s. Some resumes I get look like the author had no idea what to write and what not to write in a resume; from my perspective, it’s okay to be different, but you should at least be aware how you are different from everybody else and be intentionally different instead of oblivious to the world, which is not the impression you want to create.