Software Engineering Resume Tips From a Big Tech Hiring Manager

Key Takeaways

hey everyone welcome back to the channel today's video is all about helping you land your dream Tech job as you know I'm really passionate about giving back to the tech community so every now and then I do a free resume makeover offer on my LinkedIn and today's winner is recent graduate from a boot camp and she has absolutely no experience working as a paid full-time engineer but eager to break into the tech industry unfortunately she has been getting rejection after rejection but today I'm going to be transforming her resume from a point of view of a big Tech hiring manager so grab your resume and follow along okay the first thing I notice when I look at this resume is that the formatting is just all over the place and I have an easy fix for this I have it written down and laid out all in our resume handbook so I'm going to reference that most big tech companies use this scanner called ATS ATS stands for application tracking system most big tech companies they get so many applications it's impossible for for a human recruiter to go through every single one of them most large companies build this type of tooling inous so every company has a slightly different ATS scanner but the basic idea is that it scans for text right so you want to make your resume as simple as possible one of the tricks that people talk about is try to copy paste your resume into a text document a regular. txt document or or if you have your resume open it in a text editor and then convert it into a txt file and see if your text is readable and I guarantee you with this particular resume from amido we're going to call her amido because she's using so many different type of formatting font especially the columns are going to really confuse the ATS scanner so we don't recommend using that so first of all we talk about the font size think of an average recruiter or hiring manager we are often look staring at the screen for so long I cannot read anything smaller than spont 11 so please help out the reader right like you're writing your resume so that the reader can easily access the information one of the ways to help with that is to use a font that's easy to read second thing I have listed on my resume handbook is the date format so if you look at the resume here circled in red here she doesn't have the date format for her projects Atara and new TCH Foundation she needs to add her date and you want to do it in a date format right over here she only has the years 20121 that type of date format May Fail some of the ATS scanners because they do look for the month and year format and it could be either written out like January 2021 or written out as a number like 01/ 2021 either format is okay but just pick one and be consistent with the date formatting and use it everywhere throughout your resume another thing that I do want to note on her resume is that objective is often not necessary the reason why she needs an objective here is because her work experience is full of things that are irrelevant to her work as a software engineer here and that's really confusing for the hiring manager or recruiter right they're only spending 6 seconds on your resume and if you have a big section or a big chunk of your resume talking about irrelevant work that's really confusing for a human brain to process so you want to make it as easy as possible and I'm going to show you how I did that as outlined in the ultimate resume handbook we're going to look at first the contact information the skills education work experience personal projects and then other sections I have a whole chapter about just contact information chapter three captivating reader with engaging contact header section first you want the name you want to place the name prominently at the top of your resume s do is the pseudo name for her um and then you want to add your email address you want to add your phone number you want to add your LinkedIn profile and then the location even if you're applying for remote roles people still want to know what location you're in but you don't have to add a whole address or anything you just need to add city and state you're in optionally you can add GitHub or portfolio but like I said earlier recruiters are not necessarily going to click on it so it's up to you next item I have in my resume handbook is the skill sections I did not like how her skill section was listed out skills is one of those things that you want to show not tell so it's not too helpful to be listing out every single language that you have ever touched under your skill section what's more helpful is to use the keywords and weave it into your resume bullet points I'll talk more about that in the work experience section okay next is the education section you use initials BMCC and you can't really assume that everyone's going to know all of the initials that you use so I spelled out the college name I would also like to add ba in graphic design that information is absolutely necessary if you did get a degree next is the most important part of your resume the work experience section she told me in our intake form that the projects that she has listed here new tag Foundation she has been working with them as a volunteer but she has been their software engineer building the website for them so I'm not going to count this as a project I'm going to change the section and call it work experience section and then also for the project she did tell me that um the IOS app that she has built is not in the app store yet ideally if you're building an app you want to put it on the App Store because once it's on the App Store it's official it's public you got official users using it then it becomes a work experience not a personal project and this advice doesn't only apply for apps but it could also be a website right if you have a website that is hosted on the web and people are actually using it then it becomes a work experience whereas if it's only living on your GitHub and it doesn't actually work then it's a personal project right there's a survey that asks a lot of big tech companies what are the things that you're mainly looking for when you're hiring and interviewing people number one thing that people look for is past work experience and I was surprised to see that number two was school and then number three was your technical skills things like your Le code or data structures when you do the technical coding interview but you don't even even get to number three if you don't have any work experience and the best way to build work experience is by volunteering for um Amy though this case she's been volunteering at new Tac Foundation that's a really great type of work experience that you want to have on your resume so I'm going to put this first thing on top of the resume that's really going to Showcase her as a good candidate if possible to put this app on the app store then this can be the second item on your work experience it is a little tricky to get iOS apps on the App Store because a review process is a little bit more um difficult to pass so if you are building an app it is slightly easier if you build an Android app to get your app in the app store and that's just another way to really build that work experience on your resume section please don't waste your time building personal projects that no one is actually using because as a hiring manager or a recruiter they get so many of these resumés and there's research showing that in average recruiters only spend about 6 to 8 seconds just scanning through your resume looking for keywords and they are most likely not going to actually click on your GitHub or look at any of your personal projects and I know there's a lot of advice out there from influencers or gurus or whatever you call them saying Oh best way to find the job is by working on personal projects well working on personal projects is a good way for you to practice being a software engineer and build up your skills and experience but it is not the best way to find a job because that is not what hiring managers are looking for what we are looking for is your professional experience so let's beef up this um professional experience I'm going to list the title software engineer and new tech Foundation I don't know where this assist but you would add the location city and state and then month and year and and she said that she's still working here so I would add the word present so first thing you want to do when you're writing the work experience section is especially for a company like new tech Foundation you can assume that most people don't know what that is so what I did is I found a website of new tech foundation and then I copy paste that website address into Bard and I ask Bard give me a oneliner mission state statement explaining Utch foundation so this is what Bard gave me and I U modified it slightly Utch Foundation empowers indigenous people immigrants and refugees fostering unity and support for successful integration of diverse communities migrating to the United States that's so good I love that she initially had these four bullet points outlin so I copied that and then pasted it into Bard or you can also use chpt the simple idea is if you have a website and you want to do mission statement based on the website it's just easier to use Bard or alternatively you can go to the website go to the about section copy paste the mission statement or the about section of the website and then paste it into chat GPT if you prefer to use chat GPT I do share the exact prompts in my resume handbook and this is what chat GPT gave us and earlier I talked about how I want you to weave in the skills um and the language or the technology that you know how to use and um you want to demonstrate that you have experience in it spearheaded the Redevelopment of new tech foundation's website using typescript react CSS and AWS instead of you can also just like list all of these things in your skill section but it's more relevant when you weave it into your bullet point I also says spearheaded you want to start all of your bullet points with an action BB and then what's most important is to back it up with impact and I have a whole list of ideas in the resume handbook we have a whole section about how you can come up with ideas to um show impact of your work because this is something that a lot of especially Junior Eng Juniors struggle with um so you can look it up in the book If you have the book but basically this is just one of the ideas you could say you um improved the overall website performance by 30% I don't know if this is what Amy did but this is just an an idea or a suggestion that she could think about as an example but another idea would be maybe you increase the donations for the first quarter after implementing the website so that's the second bullet point 40% increase in donation and the next thing I added in her work experience section is her boot camp experience so I asked B again to write me a mission statement because I don't actually know what Pursuit is and this is the result I got Pursuit is a nonprofit that helps underrepresented communities launch careers in Tech partnering with Fortune 500 companies startups and VCS I highly ENC encourage you to always use chpt and Bard when you're writing a resume and the third thing that I added in her work experience section is remember there was a big section of non software engineering type of work it's great that you have been supporting yourself I've been there myself I started working at the food cord when I was in high school and I worked throughout College to support myself as well these are all great but you don't want it to dominate your software engineering resume because again it is confusing and it's irrelevant so what I like to do is if you have experiences like this you can just merge it all into just one bullet point so I made a section for her because she was a bartender server and a barista so I just said server and bartender at various establishments also I did not come up with this myself I copy pasted all of her um work experience section into chachu PT and I asked Chach PT to give me a better improved version of this again she was able to save like 10 12 lines of bage that was not related to actual software engineering and I was able to condense it down to just three lines the last part I want to work on for her resume is the personal project section similar to the work experience when you are talking about something that people are not familiar with you want to add a oneliner statement explaining what the overall project was about or what the overall goal was about I looked at her website and then I asked again bar to give me a mission statement and we came up with is an iOS application that revolutionizes consumer Habits by promoting eco-friendly shopping practices and a heighten focus on environmental impact that sounds really interesting when I read something like this I might be enticed to click on the actual project and take a look at it that's why mission statements and project overviews are very important you want to always have that on top of each project again you want to showcase the different types of um languages and tools that you have used by incorporating it into your bullet points so for example you can say crafted the userfriendly app interface using JavaScript and react native leading to this is the impact part a 30% increase in user engagement among eal conscious consumers so again I I don't know if this is the actual impact that had she has had but this is another example that you can have for your impact increase in user engagement you could could also have um reducing search time could be another one leading to a 20% Improvement in user convenience or reduction in app downtime these are all great metrics to have in your bullet points and I encourage you to brainstorm ideas on how you can showcase your work it's just another skill that you will have to develop and if you need help doing that check out our resume handbook because I have a whole section of 12 different ideas on how you can show your impact for your resume I hope that was helpful and now if you want to learn more about if AI engineering is the right path for you watch this video otherwise this is the video that YouTube think you should watch next I'll see you in the next video bye