What is a good resume?

- 6 mins read

I’ll be going over what makes a good resume. Of course, take some of this information with a grain of salt, but for the most part, it should be correct.

What to do

Ultimately, it’s keeping in mind what the purpose of a resume is. It’s to get a quick rundown on you as a candidate for some reader who doesn’t have a lot of time. Sometimes, the reader is also a machine

This means a several high level guidelines:

Prioritize the most important information

Resumes are about getting your relevant information to the recruiter efficiently. This means that you should put the most standout information at the top. This is either your relevant job experience, or if none, your education.

Going for an order like

  • Name
  • Contact Information
  • Experience
  • Skills
  • Education

Would make sense if you’ve been in the field or have relevative job experience.

If you’re fresh out of college (or in it), you might want to put your education first. If you’ve had internships, they might be more relevant than your education, but keep in mind that a recruiter might not realize how valuable your internship was as some internships are just “coffee fetching”.

Talk about yourself and your abilities

Resumes are about selling yourself. This means that you should talk about your abilities.

As a general guideline (but not a hard rule!), start each bullet point with past or present actions (Engineered…, Led…, Programming…, Writing/Wrote…, etc.)

There are two main ways to do this:

Talk about your experience

  • Speak about the projects you completed at your job.
  • Speak about the hard assignments you completed at school.
  • Speak about the large scale coordination you did in your club.
  • etc…

The core idea is simply talk about what you did. Not the company / school / club. You.

Talk about your skills

  • Speak about the difficult problems you’ve solved
  • If there are keywords that someone in the field would understand the difficulty of, use them
  • List the tools you’re comfortable with
    • A note for programmers, don’t list your editor. It’s not a skill, it’s a preference.

Make sure you talk about soft skills

Soft skills are important. They’re the skills that make you a good person to work with.

A client with 5% worse performance but 50% better attitude will be hired over the other, all else being equal.

List things like:

  • Communication
  • Organization
  • Teamwork

This is not a big section, but rather, list them at all. If you have good experience from a job or club, you can use that as an easy example.

Keep the format machine readable

A lot of companies use software to filter out resumes. This means that if you have a weird format, it might not be read correctly. Avoid inscribing meaning to things like images, icons, and other non-text elements.

Tailor your resumes to the job you’re applying for

This doesn’t mean sweeping edits necessarily, but if you’re applying for a job that’s more about your technical skills, you might want to speak more to your skills / difficult problems solved. If you’re applying for a job that’s more about your ability to work with others, you might want to speak more to your soft skills.

If you’re applying to a web developer position, backend projects (while still useful) are less relevant

Details should be used as attractors, not as content

Details are good, but they should be used as attractors or as hooks. The perfect detail is something that an expert on the subject would recognize, but have further questions about.

Your resume does not have the capacity to go into your abilities in depth or the difficulties in depth. Don’t bother trying.

This is extra important because bogging your resume with technical details would harm you whenever a non-technical person reads it.

What not to do

The easiest way to make a bad resume is to make it not worth reading.

Some high level guidelines here are

Don’t talk about irrelevant things

The company you worked for’s product or history is not relevant.

Keep it on what you did or learned.

Don’t make it longer than a page

This is supposed to be short and sweet. Also, this is a pretty standard expectation.

Don’t mention skills that won’t be applicable to your position

If you’re applying for a web developer position, you don’t need to mention that you’re good at making coffee.

This is a small thing, but if you’re giving a resume to a person, you don’t want blue text with an underline. It ruins anything else you’ve done to make your resume look nice, and breaks the usefulness of bolding.

Don’t list experience / education that isn’t relevant to the job you’re applying for

If you’re applying for a web developer position, your experience as a cashier is not relevant.

Don’t waste space and keep it concise

This is supposed to be short and sweet. Don’t list your contact info on anything more than a line

Notes on formatting

Realistically, you should probably use a template or a derivative.

  • Use bolding and italics to make things stand out, but use them sparingly and consistently. You shouldn’t have a single word bolded in one section and a whole sentence bolded in another. Don’t bold once.
  • Skill bars are meaningless, don’t use them.
  • Don’t use a photo. It’s not relevant and it’s not useful.
  • Avoid using lots of color. Some accents are good and encouraged, but don’t make your resume a rainbow.
  • Use a font that’s easy to read. This is not the time to use a fun font.
  • Use a consistent format. If you’re going to use bullet points, use them everywhere. If you’re going to use a period at the end of your bullet points, use them everywhere.
  • Use correct tenses for your verbs. If you’re currently working at a job, use present tense. If you’re not, use past tense.
  • Use a consistent date format. If you’re going to use month and year, use it everywhere. If you’re going to use just the year, use it everywhere.
  • Contact information should be at the top / by your name, and not bigger than your resume text.
  • English is read from left to right, so list the important information on the left and things like dates on the right
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