I have a lot of "creative" friends. I suspect you may be like them. I have to tell them: Your resume gets you in the door. It's not about being original. It's like the gas in your car that gets you to an interview. The individuality will start to come out in the cover letter (but not too far!) and then fully in person.
I have no doubt that you're a skilled person, but if you don't choose to comply with the simple standard of resume-writing, then how can an employer count on you to follow other conventions and rules?
Now if you'll graciously accept my critiques, you'll find you'll get a lot more impressed reactions than bewildered reactions:
That resume is very non-standard. The PDF version isn't congruent with the web version.
Overview is too long.
Bolded first letters are weird and non-pleasing. Too much space between heading letters: same.
You have a mixture of phrases, sentences with omitted subjects and full sentences. Swapping between those is uncomfortable. Pick one style a stick with it.
Reasons for leaving not useful on resumes.
Key Points has good info. C for 30 years, but no C++? Why not?
Linux distro: what's it called? You've listed custom distros about 4 times on your resume. It's worth one mention.
Your education is listed twice. Only list it once.
Overview should not have specifics such as the census and Adobe projects.
Languages are listed twice, no three times. Only needed once.
Good luck and I think if you make my suggested changes, your responses will be much higher quality! As I said, I think you have a lot of great experience and would improve many work situations!
Disclaimer: Every employer is different. My advice may be completely out of phase with someone else. But during my career I've had to unfortunately interview a lot of people (as I think anyone in this field has), and frankly this is a really bad resume. Even in non-tailored format. I don't mean that in a bad way, I just think this person could really improve his prospects with some changes.
To nitpick one example, I've always felt that after your first job you should drastically cut down the importance of your degree on your resume. As far as I'm concerned your degree/major/whatever is a poor indicator of the kind of developer you're going to be, to be used only as a last resort when you are young and haven't had the chance to demonstrate yourself in the workforce. After that, your previous job titles/accomplishments are way more telling.
This guy is in his 50s and he's still got individual line items for honors and high honors. I don't care. I don't even know what that means back when he got his degree. He points out he has a double major. Then tells me his majors individually. Then tells me how he did in each major separately. This after the fact that he's already told me all this in his overview. This reads like a recent grad's section (look at me, I graduated!!!!). I half expected him to list projects he did in school (hell, maybe some of those projects at the bottom WERE school projects -- that's the mindset I'm put in by the schooling section).
Then he tells me his hobbies. This isn't as bad as telling me he likes to ride his bike or something, but "working on a couple of books" sounds so "I've been working on that big idea in my spare time for 10 years..." It conveys zero useful information to me. Clearly he has no finished books (because then he would have listed them, but somehow he is working on more than one at once). The ONLY thing interesting to me here is "Open Source projects". But thats lost in a bunch of stuff I don't care about. This should be ONE LINE which has specific github projects where I can go check out what he's done.
"MS-DOS, Win 3.1 through 7" Ugh. Unless your goal is to maintain old systems or something this just seems ridiculous.
Then you've got gems like "Voting Software; 50% of U.S. market" LOST in the stockpile of buzz words. Something like that should be a bullet point under the employer you did it under in the top section.
People go through hundreds of these things. This thing is visually exhausting. It doesn't read like a list, its jam-packed with information in different styles: top looks like an essay, then a list of short answers, then "how can I maximize information per square inch" at the bottom. I'm intimidated to read it.
Your overview should MAYBE be 3 sentences. Then immediately drop into the jobs you've had, with bullet points about interesting standout things done in them. Then ONE LINE with your degree to prove you have one, then maybe "skills" or whatever to fill out the bottom. If you've done your job right no one will be reading by then, you'll already have been placed in the "follow up" pile.
Based on another comment you made, I looked at your resume, here are my thoughts:
* Skip the crammed-together logo crap and links on the left.
* More whitepace, it's hard to read.
* Don't jam the position/company/location/dates all on one line.
* It's impossible to figure out what you (think you) know without reading everything: without a summary section you likely won't get past many automated or human systems.
* Even after reading your experience I have almost zero clue what languages and environments you know, have familiarity with, prefer, or enjoy.
* Stop with all the freakin' icons, flags, and pictures.
* References on request.
* Elide all/most of the "Personal Interests"
* Nobody cares about your iBooks in 2005
* I would keep the language, education sections; academic awards, meh; as a hirer, I don't care.
* Add a better summary section.
* Add usable, relevant info to the job history (e.g. "I wrote this", BFD: what did you use to write it?) or add an overall technology section, and don't lie, because if whoever is interviewing you is anything like you, I will ask about the weirdest shit you put on your resume.
Bottom line: lots of wasted space, way too light on actionable data. No clue what you actually know, what you want to do, how any of your experience is relevant to what I'm hiring for.
Tangential: For better or worse, your religious views will raise certain feelings in certain people. And if your life was predetermined, then this is all what's supposed to happen anyway, right? So why complain? Just sayin'.
So, honestly, my resume is pretty lackluster compared to most. It's simple and factual. I have 4 sections: a summary (a couple of sentences), my experience, my education, and "proficiencies" (coding languages, software, tools I know, etc).
Most of what you hear in terms of resume rules is kind of nonsense. The whole "one page only" thing I think works fine for the start of your career, but I'm not going to limit myself to it. I also believe that talking about specific metrics, while it can be helpful, is really the opposite of what matters.
I believe that what got me my first couple of jobs was my cover letter (or the content of my website - they're usually pretty similar). Resumes don't usually excite people. There are a few extremely clever resumes out there that make you take notice, but the rest are usually a collection of bullet-points, and bullet-points aren't exciting.
If you want to to get noticed, don't tell people WHAT you do (every resume does that), tell people WHY you do it; this is what will make you stand out and has a much better chance of creating excitement. Specifically, talk about ethos. If you and your potential hiring company align there - on your beliefs and motivations - they're going to be excited for you.
This generally goes against the normal advice people give for cover letters where they tell you to focus on talking about what you can do for the company and how you can be an asset. That advice is bad advice for this community (development, design, anything at all in the creative field). Instead, convince them that you care about the same things; that the passion that drives them as an organization is the passion that drives you as an individual. That's how you stand apart from your competition.
And if you can't, with a straight face, say how your values align with the values of the company you're applying to, you're applying to the wrong company.
There are many problems with your resume, and lack of fancy design is not one of them.
- Half of your CV is empty space
- Dates are formatted really badly, no one would be able to get a good grasp on your project and work timeline quickly
- You have a game project that spans several years, and you sum it up into one sentence. Why are you doing that? It's one of your main selling points, and you don't expand enough on it.
- The prioritization is not sound. I'm reading about your proficiency with vim (pretty much irrelevant) before I even know your work history.
- You mention Linux administration. That's pretty broad. You should specify more. Did you deal with network config? systemd? FUSE?
Overall your resume looks lackluster, unprofessional and bare-minimum. It's been more than 7 years now, and you still see nothing wrong with it? Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I'm doing you a favor by giving you a reality check.
To me at least it reads as a bit unfocused. You've clearly got a mass of experience but for any individual job much, if not most, of it isn't relevant. It's a CV that says "look at all the experience I've got" but doesn't really do a great job of saying why you'd be good for any specific role.
I'd look at three or four resumes, each more focused around a specific skill, industry or problem type. Maybe one as a hardcore Linux developer, one with a more web / multimedia focus and so on. Pick out three or four projects relevant to each one and write a few lines about them. While the fact you've got 35 years of C is impressive and maintain your own Linux distro, it's not going to be relevant for roles focusing on a higher level language and is just distracting from your abilities which are relevant.
Also, personally I'd put it on two pages and space it out far more. Larger font, larger borders, more white space generally.
TL;DR: You're probably better than 90% of devs out there but you're not selling it well. Overall aim for less content but with more punch and make it nicer to read.
Here's some unsolicited feedback. Sorry that it's public, but I hope this helps other people as 1:N broadcast format:
- Bold is good, but it's too much.
- Never use underline in a CV. Lines and boxes are OK if they break up sections.
- Color tends to get lost and could trip-up some document scanners.
- Two columns is kind of cramped and doesn't work well with résumé scanners. Instead, put that stuff at the bottom.
- Center name (first and last), title, and city. Make the intro tagline shorter.
- English copy writing - Reduce use of hollow adjectives and adverbs like "actually", "really", "especially".
- Tech differentiation - Name specific, hot frameworks beyond just what everyone else lists. 2010-2015 it was C++, Java, JavaScript, and SQL on every darn résumé. Zzz.
- Business impact - Excellent! This is what makes software engineers valuable. Try to introduce specific cases where you solved a problem. Especially gold moments are where you saved the business significant money, shipped features fast, or were the hero.
- Github links - Awesome! If it finally makes its way to a real hiring manager who coded or a tech lead, they can get a sense of how clean and understandable your code is.
Remember that if you give a technical recruiter your résumé in .docx or .txt format, they're probably going to edit it before sending it on to hiring companies. Please ask the recruiter to let you see and approve changes because you don't want them to exaggerate or lie about your qualifications.
Also, you can disintermediate the role of a technical recruiter if you have good social and sales skills to work with HR and hiring managers of hiring companies. This requires a bit more ambiguity navigation, patience, assertiveness, and finesse than is customarily expected of a job candidate. Remember that if you go this route, you're there to deliver a helpful, assertive, customer service approach facilitating their hiring pipeline to fill their open jd's/req's. Follow-up, ping gently with exponential backoff, and inject a little humor to keep life interesting.
Bring good vibes and find a situation that's most interesting and comfortable for all.
PS: What really helped me early on was a life lesson where my parents forced me to sell candy bars door-to-door in residential neighborhoods. Thousands of doors. Rejection is a muscle to be built up with numbers while being careful to create and nudge interest towards "yes" with care.
I'm not the one who offered advice, but I've had to review plenty of resumes in the past, and I have a couple of comments.
- I really like the layout and design of your resume. I find it easier to read and follow than 90%+ of the resumes I've seen over the years.
- Your objective is pretty vague and non-specific. Don't feel bad about that. Almost every 'Objective' section I've seen on resumes is the same. Consider replacing it with a 'Summary' section instead. In this section, tell me who you are and why I should hire you. Don't be afraid to sell yourself a little!
- Your experience points are a bit vague. 'Development of web content utilizing HTML 5, CSS 3 and Javascript' doesn't tell me much. What kind of content did you develop? How many people used it? Also, writing 'Assisting in the development of new technologies as they arise' doesn't really add to your resume, because using new technology sort of comes with the territory when you're working as a developer.
Don't take any of this as harsh criticism, because it isn't intended that way! You've got valuable experience, and I love the design of your resume. When I'm reading a resume, each sentence or bullet point is a chance to convince me to interview you. As you read through each point on your resume, ask yourself if, after reading that point, someone would be more inclined to interview you than before. If not, try to add some detail or context that explains the business value of what you did.
Got it, thank you. Maybe part of the problem is I just haven't seen many 'good' resumes. If you google 'resume examples'—most of the examples are pretty laughable. I'll rethink it in the light you've presented. Thank you!
To add to the great advice you got by davelnewton already, you should consider a few more things.
It's obvious that you're at the point of frustration, and you're taking it personal. It's either affecting your style of communication, or your style of communication is combative as a whole.
Speaking of personal, your resume is very personal, where it should be professional. Reading your resume should be a succinct representation on your professional skills. Your personal style and hobbies are something that co-workers learn during interviews and after you start your job. As other people have said, less is more in this aspect.
Hiring managers find objectives in a resume mostly useless. Even if you insist on including an objective, the current one is weak. It's about as generic as the label you'd find on white bread. It should be a summary of who you are (professionally). For example: "A Software Engineer with over 10 years worth of experience with a track record of delivering exceptional quality on time with a focus on electrical engineering"
Your resume should sell, and you are the product. With that in mind, you should write it in a manner that describes the value you bring, not a laundry list of things you've done at your previous positions. It's great that you wrote driver software, but what impact did it have?
Everything on the resume that adds no value can be removed, that includes all of these 1-2 month long internship (it's ok to combine it into 1 "job" with multiple bullet points demonstrating value). It also includes everything that's extracurricular, hobbies, interests, languages, GPA, etc. (Use judgement here, if the job requires multi-lingual proficiency than you'd want to keep that)
References should not be on your resume. If someone wants a reference, they will ask for it.
You should list major roles and describe you VALUE and not day to day tasks. 3-4 bullet points each one a paragraph elaborating on how your contribution was valuable. Small roles can be combined, but the same rule applies - the place/title doesn't matter only the value.
* Your layout is a bit confusing. It's kind of difficult to figure out what title is the company name and your job title. I suggest you keep the EXPERIENCE and EDUCATION labels on the left and move everything else to the right. I've done a rough mock: http://imgur.com/a/g2t0c
* I'm not a fan of the design, but that's just my opinion. You can search for better resume templates
* Add a section where you point out what languages you know
* Another section for all the frameworks, tech stack, experiences and etc.
* "Netted over 700 hours...", I'm not sure if quantifying something like that is a good thing. 700 hours is kind of arbitrary, even as a developer I don't know that that really entails. You should just say you know how to build web apps, you're a full stack eng. and etc.
* "After learning about this word from a friend...", totally irrelevant. I don't think a recruiter cares about this. It is a good story to tell in an interview, but just not an a resume. Just get to the point as fast as possible while describing what the app does
* Overall the resume tells me what your projects do but it doesn't tell me too much about you. Tell me what you did, what you learned, obstacles you overcame, etc. This is a good area to quantify things. i.e. "Used CSS to develop convolutional neural network to improve efficiency by 100000000%"
* I'm not sure if your other two work experiences are relevant for a web dev, but you did a good job in making it sound relevant to who you are
Just going to throw everything out as word vomit, remember that this is a work of iteration. There's tons of advice out there about how to write a resume, but at the end it's a very personal document to write.
Some of my per section recommendations:
Technical Experience
Remove side projects from the header, it's not necessary
Remove KLOCS, instead opt to add descriptions of your experience. Built something you're proud of? talk about it!
Your experience should speak at your capabilities, saying you know linux and git adds nothing but something like "Built a linux console application that utilizes git to achieve *" has more value.
Education:
Trim trim trim, anything before college doesn't matter, unless you have something super awesome to put in. At your level of experience, maybe list some relevant courses or a current GPA if it's really high
Languages: not relevant to your professional experience, so it doesn't belong in your resume
Professional skills: I'm mostly against giving a laundry list as these are mostly shallow. "Responsible"? "Analytic ability" what do they actually mean to the person reading your resume? You have about 1 paragraph worth of space to put something more personal in your resume and those words can be part of that: "A Passionate team-worker with great attention to detail with X amount of experience" Note that even that sounds kind of impersonal.
Other:
Doesn't belong on your resume
References:
Ditto, it's obvious that you have references upon request, why waste space on your resume?
Some general recommendations:
The text on your resume should speak about your RELEVANT professional experience and nothing else. The rest can be represented in a cover letter/interview
Anything more than 1 page is tiresome to read and messy to handle. Don't forget that this is going to pass several hands (hopefully)
Your resume is usually the only thing representing you between a stack of dozens more, it should be informative and interesting enough to get noticed.
Always tailor your resume to the job - Are you applying to a position that requires Java and Linux experience? Show that off and remove your prolog/lisp/asm experience.
[Deep breath]
Your resume is terrible. Not in the sense of not covering off your skills and experience, but in the sense of making you seem like you care about what I need as a hiring manager.
First off, it gives no sense of the importance to the business of anything you've done. You could produce the best-engineered code in the world, but if it's not fit for purpose or it doesn't help us achieve definable and verifiable goals it's junk. You need to show that you understand that. The best way to do that is to include accomplishments like "Wrote a Perl simulator that improved test throughput by X% and saved Y hours of development time." Even better are ones that include "made $Z million dollars". You have to relate your achievements to the goals of the business.
Second, it's got things that would make me worried about even calling you for an interview. Why do you feel the need to specify reasons for leaving positions? That makes me nervous. Why do you need to tell me that your phone handles SMS? That's weird.
This feedback's based on building and leading teams over the past decade or so. I'm younger than you though not by too much. You will probably be dealing with people of my age or younger who are going to be focused on the relevance to the company if what they do, more so than its technical sweetness. You should tailor your message accordingly. I do not advocate dumbing down your resume. I do recommend focusing it on relevance to the business.
I also recently struck out again first as a contractor and then in a purely technical (no people management) full-time role. I got some time with a career consultant which helped immensely, though they were useless when it came to actual recruitment. I'd recommend you do the same, as they could help you tailor your message to the industry.
(I also built a Linux distro back in the day btw (early 2000s), for an PC104-board-based embedded systems project an acquaintance of mine was working on. It's not on my resume, because that project didn't go anywhere, and isn't really relevant to the kind of jobs I want now.)
You've coded and done tech work for all these years and rightly earn't your stripes. Your resume reads as if it's like please hire me I can do much things. What it doesn't say is what you really are seeking and who you are as a member of their team.
My suggestions
- Include a paragraph summarising your philosophy to programming and the way your approach achieves success.
- Say outright what makes your ideal client. I would be worried in hiring this guy, that he's too advanced for what we need and too experienced for my little project.
- Add more narrative at the top and tell a story. Sure you've done many things and are a generalist, but why hire you, boil down all this info into what it means I'll get from you.
Words like these make good headings.
Who I am
My approach
What Im committed to
Boil down the essence of all this experience is my recommendation.
"Fluent" "Proficient" "Substantial" "Professional experience" are all "filler" words/phrases that add no value, remove them.
A resume should be clear about:
1: exactly what sort of job are you wanting? "Seeking full time salaried JavaScript/Java developer". Be clear so that the reader knows if you fit that job that they have in mind whilst they are reading your resume.
2: What are your current, primary technical skills that you have substantial skill with - do NOT list every technology your have written a few lines of code with. Focus.
There's no right or wrong about this, but I don't like ultra short resumes. If you spent time getting educated or working on large projects then this is your opportunity to sell me on yourself. I feel like short resumes mean you haven't done much or are not very good at articulating technical topics.
It makes no sense to me that someone would have a dry, ultra short, black and white resume which includes a link at the bottom to the folio of an apparently entirely different person. Why not have screenshots and discussions of your projects in your resume.
Where is the phone number? Hopefully you are not applying for jobs by sending a link to this online document. When you apply for a job, email the resume document in PDF or Word format and make sure it includes a phone number. As a recruiter I am far too busy to be bothered emailing people who provide only an email address as their primary mechanism of contact. 999/1000 resumes include a phone number.
A/B tested on who? I see hundreds of resumes throughout the year and your resume is one that I would likely pass over because, frankly, it looks like something a young student slapped together real quick in MS Word compared to the average resume I see.
When it comes to design, I immediately notice that the font size for your name is much too big (especially compared to the email address). Then there is the page header (Qualifications) which takes up around 10% of the page on its own. Under the 'Related History' section, the name of the projects take up way too much space while the font-size of your job title and duration of stay are hard to read. Why do you need that empty white block next to the name of the projects? All this wasted space not only makes the resume's layout ineffective but also makes it look very unprofessional.
Content-wise, the core of your resume should be what you have under 'Related History'. I want to be able to get a good idea, quickly, of what you did in your past positions. Based on that information I can get a good idea of pretty much everything you have under 'Qualifications'. I would cut all of 'Qualifications' out and summarize everything in there into 3 - 4 bullet points/short sentences. Also, why did you bold seemingly random words like 'CMS' and 'infrastructure'?
Honestly, I would just stick to something like https://www.careercup.com/resume. Remember, the key point of your resume is to quickly communicate your past experience and highlight relevant information.
So I checked out your resume. And as a graphic designer, I found it a little jarring. But your not applying for design jobs, so thats not a huge deal. It's an interesting idea, a great idea probably. But if you're going to do something like this you need to establish a flow of information.
It's not the avg business person's resume, cause I'm not a business person. Anyone can have a resume like this tho.
a) I feel like a sentence/phrase formatted layout for your resume is interesting and effective if they read it. If they read it, they'll get the info they need.
b)Yes
c)Why not?
d)I have no reason to assume otherwise, imho. Nothing seems out of the ordinary.
I just worry about a TL;DR. sentiment when seeing this.
If you're gonna go with the phrase format, then you need to follow through the pattern throughout the piece. dont capitalize first letters. And add periods at the end.
Hmm, as a recruiter who looks at hundreds of resumes a day, this kind of non-standard resume really annoys me. Just tell me who you are and what you do. Do so clearly and succinctly.
Summary: If your goal is a software development position, I would move "Highlights" above "Experience", move "Professional Skills" to the bottom of "Highlights" (who doesn't say they have excellent communication and teamwork skills?), and use either a nice resume template or a more favorable creative presentation.
I had to look at it three or four times before I could get past the presentation to actually read the resume.
The codepen presentation shows me that you are able to write basic HTML and CSS. These are useful skills, but not enough to get you in any door that I might be operating. If the design was good, this method of presenting might work to your advantage, but it's neither pretty nor easy to read and it shows mainly that you have not yet developed valuable design sense or taste. There are lots of jobs (development and otherwise) you can have without those, but it hurts your resume to draw attention to your probably-irrelevant weak points.
Alternatively, if you'd written it all in JavaScript using some trendy framework, I would at least see you as a programmer. If the code was clever or elegant, I would be interested even if the output wasn't very pretty.
I had to look back yet again to get past the experience section. The experience section made me think of you only as a sysadmin/network admin. I've looked at this five or six times now before I got to anything that would make me think of you as a possible developer.
I have a lot of "creative" friends. I suspect you may be like them. I have to tell them: Your resume gets you in the door. It's not about being original. It's like the gas in your car that gets you to an interview. The individuality will start to come out in the cover letter (but not too far!) and then fully in person.
I have no doubt that you're a skilled person, but if you don't choose to comply with the simple standard of resume-writing, then how can an employer count on you to follow other conventions and rules?
Now if you'll graciously accept my critiques, you'll find you'll get a lot more impressed reactions than bewildered reactions:
That resume is very non-standard. The PDF version isn't congruent with the web version.
Overview is too long.
Bolded first letters are weird and non-pleasing. Too much space between heading letters: same.
You have a mixture of phrases, sentences with omitted subjects and full sentences. Swapping between those is uncomfortable. Pick one style a stick with it.
Reasons for leaving not useful on resumes.
Key Points has good info. C for 30 years, but no C++? Why not?
Linux distro: what's it called? You've listed custom distros about 4 times on your resume. It's worth one mention.
Your education is listed twice. Only list it once.
Overview should not have specifics such as the census and Adobe projects.
Languages are listed twice, no three times. Only needed once.
Good luck and I think if you make my suggested changes, your responses will be much higher quality! As I said, I think you have a lot of great experience and would improve many work situations!
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