How To Write An Effective Software Engineering Resume

This 1 single document can make or break your career

A recruiter reading your resume is the first step of the funnel for any job opportunity, making this 1 document arguably the most important one for your professional life. Unfortunately, it seems like many struggle creating an effective software engineering resume as I have clearly seen across my 5+ year career. I have read hundreds of resumes for a variety of jobs, and I have tossed out the vast majority of them within 30 seconds. In this article, I will teach you how to write a strong resume that doesn’t get immediately thrown in the bin.

Keep It Short And Focused

Every decent software engineering job has way too many people applying to it, making the recruiter behind it stressed out, overloaded, and only able to spend a few minutes tops on any given resume. Please don’t make this poor recruiter’s life even worse by having a 5 page, meandering resume that talks about the bronze medal you won in a karate competition in 6th grade. Your resume needs to make a tremendous amount of impact in a very short amount of time; remember that you need to edge out dozens if not hundreds of other candidates for any good job. Similar to what I talked about constantly with my side project apps, quality over quantity is absolutely vital for resumes.

My rule of thumb is to have 1 page tops for every 5 years of experience (and please don’t hack this by making your font size tiny). Of course, if you don’t have 5 years of experience, pad your resume until it reaches exactly 1 page; otherwise it will look awkward and barren. So how do you keep your resume this short? Here are some tips:

1. Strip out non-software information - The most common way I see people break this rule is by treating their resume as a college application. They will put down all their extracurriculars and school accomplishments, which can easily generate several pages. Unless you won a massive hackathon as a school activity, leave this stuff off your resume. It gives absolutely 0 signal as to how well you perform as a software engineer.
2. Strip out non-accomplishments - You can tell something is a non-accomplishment if it’s something you naturally achieve from minimal participation. For example, if you are an Android developer, the following are non-accomplishments: “Used…