How to Write an Effective Resume

DISCLAIMER: the views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies I work for.

WHAT IS THIS?

Writing a resume (or Curriculum Vitae*) is something everyone does, but which only a few do properly.

Far from being just a plain list of skills, academic titles and working experiences, it represents the single possibility to introduce ourselves to someone that, statistically, will dedicate it no more than six seconds** before deciding to trash it or to give us a chance.

It's our first business card, our key to join the match; no matter how good we'd be at the technical interview, if we get this wrong, the game will be over before even starting to play.

On top of that, we won't get any feedback and, without even knowing what's gone wrong, it’ll likely happen again the next time we'll apply with that same resume to a similar position.

Due to my two decades of working experience, but above all to the resumes pre-screening and technical interviews I’ve run during the last years as a side gig for top players of the recruiting market, I’ve often been asked by friends, relatives, and colleagues to review and improve their resumes.

I’ve soon realized it was crazy to point the problems out singularly; nonetheless, this is an interesting topic for everyone, not only for those I know and who are willing to ask... hence, I’ve decided to create this small memorandum about what I think is the right way to write an effective resume, to avoid the common pitfalls, and hopefully move towards a new job.

Remember, there’s no silver-bullet here: the following advice might not suit every case (being based on my experience, my knowledge, and my personal taste), and are aimed at both simplify a candidate’s goal (getting to an interview) and our goal (getting resumes easier to read).

Enough talking, let’s blade ;)

* Some countries differentiate between Resume and CV; in those cases, we're talking of Resumes here, not CVs.

** A 2012 study from The Ladders was conducted by applying eye-tracking technology to thirty professional recruiters for two months and a half.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT RESUME TYPE

Many don’t know that there are several kinds of resumes out there. Choosing the one whose structure suits us best is a fundamental starting point.

The Chronological Resume lists our working experiences from the newest to the oldest. It’s a good choice if we’ve done a lot of interesting things, progressively, in the canonical ways and timings, but it might not be suitable for beginners, or for those who have changed many employers in a short time frame.

The Functional Resume it’s more vague about the temporal order of the events and focuses instead on our skillset, experiences, and accomplishments. It represents a valuable option for those with delays in their academic path, time gaps in their working history, or wanting to move to a different field than their current one.

The Combination Resume blends the best features from the other two, opening with a nice summary and a brief list of skills, but still ending with a chronological and skinny list of working experiences. It’s what I’ve used for mine, but I’ve found out that it’s the best choice for the majority of the profiles, especially in the Information Technology field.

The Infographic Resume tries to impress with unique artwork, but let’s leave it out of the games unless we are a Graphic Designer, a UX Designer, or a very creative Front End Developer: many recruiters will be annoyed by a CV looking like a painting, others will be confused about where to look, and so on. It’s nice to show Photoshop skills in a CV if we’re into graphic design; in all the other cases it denotes a lack of context awareness and is likely to backfire.

FILTERING AND HIGHLIGHTING THE RIGHT CONTENT

While the form is important, the substance is fundamental, so let’s take a look at what we should consider including, what to avoid, and why.

First of all, however trivial it may seem at first glance, we should put in our CV what makes us special, the peculiarities of us as a person, no matter if we don't recognize them as skills, no matter how many other people out there have them too.

I've found out that, almost always, things we're good at are the same things making us happy.

If we're good at repetitive works, we might find it stressful to change a programming language every month, and maybe relaxant to do some product management instead, or even data entry. If we're methodical, testing can be an area of interest, while the chaos of managing legacy spaghetti code could scare us to death. If we're creative, we’d like a carte blanche instead of a short leash.

For the same reasons we should do what we like (and are good at), we should also highlight that into our CV.

Other than elegant, very short, well-formatted, well written and structured, a good resume’s summary must be captivating and reflecting our real essence; it must arrive on the other side, it must be evident so that if it’s what the company is looking for, we've more chance of a ride with the interviewer, and if it's not, nobody will lose time on it.

Believe me, we don't want to apply for a job we don't like, the company doesn't want it either, and above all, we definitely don't want to get hired for a job we don't like, realizing it six months later, or six years later (this applies to companies too: in an ideal world, the offers should also be crystal clear, from the salary range to the job expectations).

SHAPING AND POLISHING

We should strive to create something harmonic by playing with the empty space, with some bold and italic, with indentations, with bullet lists (usually better than numbered lists), and eventually with a few icons and small graphical elements.

Beware of creating a Christmas tree, though: too many colors and widgets could lead to the opposite effect.

AVOIDING TYPOS

Let’s pay attention to avoid typos, grammatical or lexical mistakes, wrong cases, and pagination issues: a couple of glitches could be fine, more denote a lack of precision and represent an easily avoidable downside.

If we’re not willing to give a second read to our stuff, why an employer should think we’ll act differently when working for them?

NEVER LIE :)

Never try to lie on the resume!

People with good memory is not necessarily the most skilled one, no matter the field; IT nowadays is that big that even small niches are impossible to resemble by memory, hence the tests in my interviews are not intended to give absolute grades based on the answers, but also to look at the approach, at the reactions when something is not known, or known partially, at the behavior under pressure.

On the other side, if we claim ten years of working experience, and it turns out we don’t know anything about the topic, alarm bells start to ring loudly! Either we hid all the time having others doing the job in our place, or we worked in some really bad way (cargo cult programming, copypasting all the time, etcetera), or we lied.

None of this is something we want to pop up randomly, blowing up in our hands as soon as getting interviewed, hence it's better trying not to hide eventual problems, but instead to shortly explain them to the interviewer.

Beautifying a resume is fine, lying is not.

DON’T GET FOOLED BY COGNITIVE BIASES

We should always remember that we are not perfect and that our brains are vulnerable to a mountain of cognitive biases. Knowing why we are failing at something gives us the chance to overcome fears and flaws.

When applying for a job, two biases are more important than others: the Impostor syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Impostor syndrome happens when we think we’ve fooled everybody, that we’re not as good as employer and colleagues think, and that soon we’ll get discovered and eventually fired. Well, the reality is the opposite: if we’re subject to that bias, it means we’re above the average on that topic, we are simply bad at judging ourselves. Real imposters don’t doubt themselves.

The Dunning-Kruger effect, instead, affects mainly people below the average, misjudging themselves as more experienced than they are in that particular job. After some time, they’ll quickly discover everything is harder, and eventually get better with time. On the other side, it also affects good people, which will tend to overrate the noobs, making the whole thing an Ouroboros.

What can we do now that we have this information? Well, first of all we can pay attention to not be too shy, to not avoid putting something rad in our resume because we think we’re not good enough. Unless we’re in a toxic environment, let’s look for help by asking our coworkers to judge us, if we think we’re under Impostor syndrome (hoping they’re not under Dunning-Kruger :).

At the same time, let’s double-check if we’re really good at something we should not be so good at, because relatively new to us: if we’re not there yet, it’s better to understand it from ourselves, showing we’re skilled enough to self-rate our (lack of) competences, instead of letting an interviewer the burden of throwing a bucket of cold water in our face.

Our minds are funny and scary at the same time, and definitely worth some deeper knowing.

GONE THE EXTRA MILE? BE SURE THEY KNOW IT!

If we’ve certifications or special accomplishments, it’s important to give them the right visibility; other than trusting our knowledge, they show we’re still able to study and commit ourselves, and in many cases, they’re also functional to the companies, which often need a bare minimum number of certified employees (like for AWS, Salesforce, …)

If we’ve some interesting online activity (for example open source projects, blogs, whatever), it’s a good idea to include them too, in an appropriate section.

Even sports are important: they prove we care about ourselves, we like the hard-working, and we’re good at team play, or at playing solo, whichever the case. 

Volunteer experiences demonstrate empathy, and the numbers show that volunteers get hired easier, so let’s be sure to not forget to mention our pro-bono stuff.

Finally, side gigs, hobbies and family duties all have their pros and should be included: running a B&B on the weekend proves entrepreneurship, working as dog sitter proves trustworthiness, crosswords and Sudoku show we like problem solving, delivering on a bicycle for the gig economy leaves no doubts on our abnegation.

WHAT ABOUT THE PICTURE?

Putting a picture or not is a matter of taste, there’s no wrong answer here.

Obviously, if we put one, we must pay attention to what it is, since a picture is even more eye-catching than the Summary section.

It’s been scientifically proven that the first impression is visive (the picture triggers it, while the text doesn’t because it must be interpreted), it happens in the first 60 milliseconds after we’ve seen something, and it takes months to go away from our brain.

For this reason, we must ensure we’re using the right photo, which is not the one we’ve on Tinder or Facebook, but also not the one from our brother’s wedding, if we dress casual every day (it’d be a lie, remember? And in the end, we don't want it to become reality).

If we have a nice standing it’s an advantage, so let’s take a good, focused, balanced, face-only picture, with a tenue background. Otherwise, let’s stick to the summary to tell our story, and avoid scoring an own goal.

CALCULATING THE RIGHT RESUME LENGTH

There are things orthogonal to every resume, no matter the structure we’ve chosen.

The Summary, a really important section of the resume, should always be present as a headline and should ideally have a size between two and ten rows.

Each working experience block should not reach the ten rows, dropping to five rows for each academic accomplishment.

Personal and contact data should possibly stay within one row: they’re useless metadata until we’ll be called back, there’s no need to pollute the CV with a left column or a big head block.

Overall, let’s try to always keep our resume within the TWO pages.

Very few will read up over the second page, and they won’t be happy to discover that the reason behind the size is just a bad, unsatisfactory signal-to-noise ratio. I do it, and doing it I understand why many full-time recruiters don’t.

If paragraphs are too close to each other and we can’t absolutely reduce them, then let’s add another page to give them the right visual spacing.

If we’re on four pages and we’re not sending rockets in space, though, there’s something wrong.

CONCLUSION

This was my humble 2 cents, my attempt at "giving it back".

I hope you enjoyed it.

Feel free to Like, Comment, Share, and come back to let me know if this helped you somehow.