Your value in the market determines the size of the contract you can secure.
And market value is the result of the following two abilities:
Your Market Value = Intrinsic Value x Expression Ability
Some people have an intrinsic value of 0.8, but their expression ability is 1.5, so they can open up to 1.2 in the market.
Some people have an intrinsic value of 1.2, but their expression ability is 0.8, resulting in a final market value of 0.96.
In terms of ability, the former is far behind the latter, but in terms of treatment, the former may be the leader of the latter.
Why such a big gap? Because the weight of expression ability has been overlooked! Many people only focus on intrinsic value and forget about the importance of expression ability.
Writing a resume is a manifestation of expression ability. Some people write beautiful resumes, and HR's eyes light up as soon as they see them. Some people's resumes are like garbage, and looking at these resumes for more than 5 seconds is self-abuse.
In the span of two months, I reviewed over 3000 resumes, incorporated content from books and blogs, and sorted out how to write a good resume for everyone. I hope this will be helpful.
Purpose of a Resume
The purpose is to allow recruiters to quickly understand your professional capabilities, providing them with sufficient information to make recruitment decisions.
Key Points for a Programmer's Resume
You must demonstrate your professionalism
Imagine if you were the boss, what kind of programmer would you want to find? Is it someone who is cheerful and talkative, or someone who is stress-resistant and willing to work hard?
None of them. Most bosses hope to recruit professional programmers. Being professional means reliable, capable of problem-solving, and able to help the company achieve its goals.
Bosses spend a lot of time and money on recruitment just to find professional programmers.
Therefore, you must show your professionalism in your resume. You have to give people an expert attitude and make them believe that you have the ability to solve problems.
The cost of a wrong recruitment can be 1 to 1.5 times the annual salary of the post. Therefore, the selection of social recruitment always has many difficulties. You must give recruiters confidence that you are the best candidate.
Strong goal orientation, all for getting a job
The sole purpose of writing our job-seeking resume is to get a job. For this, you must show a strong desire that you really want to get this job.
So don't write irrelevant nonsense on your resume, employers simply don't care about these things. All your resume needs to do is clearly list all the information they need to make their decision, nothing more.
The Framework of a Resume
Actually, our programmers' resumes are quite easy to write. We can break it down into several sections to write the resume, with corresponding modules in each section.
Section One: Basic Information
This part records your basic information, allowing recruiters to quickly determine if you can meet the job requirements.
Personal Information
Job Objective
Summary
Technology Stack
Section Two: Experience and Background
This helps recruiters further understand your development skills.
Work Experience
Project Experience
Educational Background
Note that our experiences should be written in reverse order, with the most recent experience at the forefront.
Section Three: Supplementary Information
Honors
Publications
Others
This part contains information showcasing your work capabilities, such as award certificates, links to PRs in open source projects, and attended open source events, etc.
I. Basic Information
1 Personal Information
The most basic personal information: name, phone number, email.
You can provide more content based on this, such as gender, age, place of origin, photo, etc., but your name, phone number, and email must be accurate and correct.
I once saw a resume with a coded phone number, I don't know if it was intentional or unintentional.
In addition, you can provide your GitHub homepage and blog address, which are significant plus points because they reflect your professionalism. The prerequisite is that you have maintained them well in normal times. If your blog is empty, the interviewer may be a bit disappointed when they open it.
2 Job Objective
The job objective is very important and it's best to write it next to your personal information.
If an HR manager and interviewer are looking at your resume, your job objective can succinctly express what type of position you want, clarifying your goal to save others' time.
HR receives resumes through many channels, among which internal referral is a particularly important source. Your resume may be handed over to HR by an employee. If you have clearly stated your job objective, that's great; HR only needs to check if there are relevant positions in the system to move you to the next stage. However, if you didn't write one, HR will need to read your resume to find out which positions in the system are suitable for you. Keep in mind, an HR manager might receive more than 100 resumes per day, they simply don't have time to read and analyze which position you are most suited for.
In addition, even if you can handle multiple positions, you shouldn't write multiple positions in one objective (remember, there can't be multiple job titles). It's better to create several independent resumes, customize them according to specific job requirements, and apply for each job separately. Each job should have a unique resume. In order to get an offer, these preparations are all worth it.
3 Summary
Resumes need a summary, which is an overview of your career and abilities. Reading the summary can quickly give an insight into a person's capabilities and professional background.
This is your introduction as a professional, listing all the contents that can support you in getting an offer, with priority given to importance.
At the same time, don't write a long paragraph of text here, and don't copy other contents of your resume as your summary.
Some examples:
Proficient in full-stack development and agile development methods, with over 10 years of software development experience.
Passionate about solving complex technical problems and possessing excellent coding and debugging skills.
Served as a core developer in multiple large-scale projects, successfully delivering high-quality software solutions.
Have good teamwork and communication skills, able to closely cooperate with team members from different backgrounds.
Possess excellent leadership abilities and team management experience, adept at coordinating and motivating cross-functional teams to achieve common goals.
📎
By the time you reach the third step, you will have a pretty good-looking beginning:
4 Technology Stack
💡
Many resumes fail at this step, don't write the terminology wrong.
Before you write terminology, please Google the official standard terms first, don't write from memory. Common mistakes:
python ⇒ Python
Mybatis ⇒ MyBatis
Mysql ⇒ MySQL
…
I won't say anything else, but among the posts asking for resume reviews online, 8 out of 10 have spelling errors. Please make sure to check carefully.
There should be no errors on your resume. Once there is one, whether it's a minor punctuation error or a major logical inconsistency or incorrect technical term, it can be a reason for your elimination.
In addition, you put a lot of effort into writing your resume, and if you don't check the terminology spelling, you might not pass the system screening. If the system recognizes a misspelled word, it will directly eliminate the resume, which won't even get into HR's hands.
The role of the technology stack in a resume is to showcase your technical capabilities to recruiters. It can help recruiters quickly understand your development skills and judge whether you meet their candidate requirements.
It's best to categorize when writing the technology stack, striving for simplicity and clarity. Within each category, your skills should be sorted according to proficiency, and similar skills should be grouped together.
At the same time, there are generally two ways to write a technology stack. The first is to simply describe your skills, and the second is to detail the level of mastery of the skills.
1 Simply Describe Skills
If your project experience and work experience are written well, it will naturally reflect your mastery of technology, so you can just list the skills you have here.
This is also a good way to write. It's targeted towards professional interviewers, allowing them to question you accordingly.
II. Experience and Background
5 Work Experience
Hint: There are many ways to write about work experience and project experience. Here I only introduce one way, which is not to focus on projects in work experience, but to just state the key points of this job. The larger projects are put separately into the project experience to show your technical ability.
Work experience should consist of the following parts:
{Summary of your job content and achievements you made}
Key point 1
Key point 2
Key point 3
What is a key point? A key point is a one-sentence summary of your work experience that can lead to countless follow-up questions from the interviewer.
If your key points are well set, it's easy to pique the interviewer's interest. You should act like a skilled fisherman, using key points as bait to hook the interviewer into asking you questions. Then you can use pre-prepared responses to answer these questions and leave some room for expansion in your answers to continue enticing the interviewer to ask more questions. If you spend 80% of an interview answering questions, and the remaining time is the interviewer questioning and affirming you, there's no doubt that you have taken the lead in this interview.
A small trick for writing key points is: start with a verb to strengthen the tone, and use a verb and quantifiable indicators at the end to show your work value. If there aren't any, don't force it, and don't make things up. If the interviewer asks how the indicator was calculated and you can't answer, it will be very awkward.
Work Experience and Project Experience are Very Important
You should:
Summarize each key point in one sentence.
For each experience, you should record the most difficult problem you encountered and how you solved it.
We all know to use the STAR method to describe our work and project experiences, but did you know that interviewers will also use STAR to ask you questions?
STAR Method: Situation, task, action, result - Wikipedia
The situation, task, action, result (STAR) format is a technique[1] used by interviewers to gather all the relevant information about a specific capability that the job requires[citation needed].
Quoting Musk's recruitment strategy, he often only asks two questions to the interviewee:
Try to summarize your work and projects using the STAR method, enticing the interviewer to ask you questions.
Hint: This also serves as a warning not to fabricate work or project experiences. You can't handle follow-up questions if you do so. The consequences of fabrication are severe. You can embellish projects, but you cannot fabricate them. Please be aware of the difference.
💡 What if I can't find quantifiable metrics for my job, like how much improvement in percentage, how much time saved, what should I do?
Ask your product manager. Sometimes, when reporting, the product manager needs to write about the purpose and effect of a requirement. Ask them about the results and calculation methods.
Make good work records, logs, and event tracking on a regular basis.
7 Educational Background
As before, we write it in reverse order, putting the most recent educational experience first.
If you're applying as a fresh graduate:
If your GPA is good, include it; otherwise, provide the percentile.
If there's a course you did particularly well in (related to the job), mention it.
For campus recruitment, it's best to indicate the period of study to help HR quickly screen candidates.
If you're applying as an experienced candidate:
There's no need to include your GPA - it's been many years.
It's sufficient to just list the graduation date.
8 Honors
Anything that can demonstrate your professionalism.
Presenting at technical forums.
Submitting PRs to public repositories. Provide PR links so the interviewer can find your PR content.
Personal blogs are best accompanied by a readership count.
Work-related certificates
Avoid mentioning things like fishing, long-distance running, marathons, and other certificates unrelated to work. These are more appropriate for your personal blog, not your job application resume.
9Publications
If you don't have any, feel free to ignore this. Essentially, it's to enhance your professionalism.
10 Other
This serves as additional information to the content above.
Resumes Must Be Revised Repeatedly
The first draft is like something hastily written in the last half hour before leaving work on a Friday.
But by the tenth draft, HR and interviewers will instantly recognize your professionalism and respect it.
This is a process of continuous optimization. The more time you invest in it, the better your resume becomes, and the higher the chances are of getting interview opportunities.
When I was doing my master's degree, I revised my first academic paper more than 20 times. Eventually, it was condensed into an 8-page double-column paper that was published at an international conference, enabling me to graduate smoothly.
What left the deepest impression on me was when I walked into my advisor's office with the first draft, he just glanced at the title and abstract, put down my paper, and told me seriously:
"Do you know? There are conventions in writing papers. You can break your paper down into different components: title, abstract, body, experiment, etc., and each component has its own established way of expression."
"From this title and abstract, reviewers will immediately identify you as a novice. Do you know why? Because you haven't grasped the convention. Your rhetorical techniques, your storytelling style, your expressions, they all differ from the usual norms.
"You don't need to write a shocking paper. All you need to do is to package the information you want to convey according to the conventional format. When a reviewer sees it, they know instantly that you are professional, that you 'know'."
I took the first draft back to the lab, and over the next two months, I referred to many papers, studying their writing styles and their ability to tell stories, and revising my paper repeatedly.
By the time I had revised it more than 10 times, my advisor finally started reading the main text.
With more than 20 revisions, my advisor finally let me sit beside him and started explaining sentence by sentence what was wrong, how to correct it, or why it felt off.
In the end, after numerous rounds of proofreading and revisions, the paper was finally accepted. Looking back at the first draft after submission, I couldn't even stand to glance at it.
I'm telling this story to let everyone know that creating a resume is just like writing an academic paper. We need to revise it repeatedly. Our first draft will definitely be hard to read. We really need to spend time revising it.
Tools
Below are some excellent resume templates that can save you time in adjusting the format:
Use this checklist to review your resume, and repeatedly modify the content of each module according to the suggestions I've provided. We can certainly create a good resume.
