Resume Review from your Hiring Manager

Key Takeaways

you work hard on your resume to apply to your dream roles but is it good enough to get you the job watch this video to see an expert critique of a software developer's resume there is a big secret to getting past the ATS scanner for every engineer even if you're a junior engineer with limited experience I'll share that secret with you today so if that sounds good give it a like and let's get into it [Music] hey everyone welcome back to my channel where we uncover your true software engineering career potential and set you on the path to success my name is Gene and previously I was an engineer and a hiring manager at Facebook for eight years where I've evaluated thousands of resumes there are a few common mistakes that can keep you from getting an interview especially at Fan companies who use ATS scanners today I'll be taking a look at a resume of a real life software developer and giving you tips on how to make it stand out now this person is a junior engineer with under one year of experience working in software engineering even with his limited experience there is a way to make sure his resume gets passed the ATS scanner to get a better chance at Landing his dream job with large companies what is ETS scanner well ATS stands for application tracking system this is software used by employers to scan and filter resumes based on specific criteria most Fortune 500 companies including fangs use an ATS scanner filter resumes so if you want your resume to even get booked at by human eyes it needs to pass the ATS scanner first studies show that only about 10 percent of resumes get past the scanner so it's important for you to optimize your resume for this if you're not getting an interview or an introductory call at all it's likely your resume is not passing the ATS scanner I recently wrote about how to write an ATS friendly Bang ready software engineer resume on my blog and it kind of blew up first I'm going to go over Alan's resume to give him tips on various sections like education work experience and header then I'll share the secret tip I have for getting past the ATS scanner so let's get started education the first thing I notice in this resume is his education the education section itself looks good but as I mentioned in the intro Allen is not a new grad he has some work experience and this should be reflected in his resume unless you're a student your work experience should go on the top of the resume because this is the most important information recruiters and employers are going to look for if you want to one of the top schools that recruiters are dying to recruit from like Stanford MIT Caltech sure you can keep your education at the Top If you've graduated recently and it would be a good idea to bold the school name but in this case I would not build the school name but instead hold the Bachelor's of computer science since he did graduate in 2021 I would put professional experience first then the skills then the education and there's no need to indicate the graduation in front of the date it's self-explanatory if the date is in the past we know that you have graduated Allen's skill section looks pretty good so I'm going to skip this today work experience the work experience is really the meat of the resume the work experience section should include all the relevant information like job title organization name location and dates the dates should be months and year format and a lot of people miss this you can either spell out the month or use number format to indicate the dates for whichever format you choose to use just keep it consistent throughout the resume it doesn't have the location listed here and I would recommend adding it he uses some good data and numbers for example reduced troubleshooting Time by 25 percent mentored over 100 students 45 increase in student involvement those are great numbers and I would recommend adding these impacts to as many bullet points as possible for example the first bullet point developed various hardware and software testing tools so what did that achieve did you increase the speed by X percent reduce the bugs by X percent or make the process easier for X number of Engineers adding more quantifiable impacts to the resume will help it stand out when recruiters are reviewing your resume this is a pretty important topic and I can probably talk for hours about this if you have any questions or trouble coming up with impacts for your own resume bullet points drop them in the comments and I'll try my best to help you out but going back to the mentoring experience it is not super relevant for software engineering roles so I would recommend having just one bullet point instead of two you don't want to have too many things that are not directly related to the role you're applying for but since this is a nice experience with a good cause it's fine to leave it in but just keep it to one bullet point the header the header looks pretty good here I like the format of the header font is 20 for the name and 11 for the contact line and that's great um the only thing I would add to this resume is a location simply add city and state to the contact line how to get past the ATS scanner I haven't reviewed Alan's highlighted project section yet and that's because for students or recent graduates who have limited work experience this is the key section you have to work with to get your resume past the ATS scanner ATS scanners are essentially looking for keywords related to the job or the industry you want to include as many keywords specific to the role you're applying to in your resume what do I mean by keywords if you look at any job description you'll notice that they have a lot of unique phrases acronyms and more specific to the industry or the company so for example this is a description for a full stack python developer I found on LinkedIn you'll see keywords like python.net react restful services and apis agile environment python JavaScript typescript HTML and CSS so I recommend scanning the rules you are applying to and finding the most important relevancy words you can use in your resume the best way is to really include them in the professional experience section but for students or new grads who have limited work experience it's going to be difficult to hit all the keywords in the professional experience so that's why this is really your best bet to find ways to include those crucial keywords and get past the ATS scanner and get your resumes looked at by actual eyeballs and not by computer software there are also ways to use chat GPT to help with this process and I'll try to make another video about this now when I do actually land the interview you would still need to demonstrate your knowledge in python or any other keyword you included in your resume so when you do actually work on a new project make sure to learn and understand the concepts and the Technologies you are using but at least the ATS scanner won't reject you immediately because you're lacking the keywords this tip is really for people who aren't even Landing any interviews you won't even get a chance to demonstrate your skills if you can't get a single interview plus when you scan for keywords it'll give you an idea of what employers are looking for so for people who want to learn more about software engineering and gain more experience this is a great way to gain relevant experience that will help you land your dream goals that's all for this one hope you guys enjoyed it if you found this video helpful in crafting your resume please give it a like And subscribe to our Channel thank you Alan for sharing your resume to help others learn it's really appreciated if you'd like to get your resume reviewed let me know in the comments and we'll try to set something up good luck with your job search and I'll see you in the next one foreign