A checklist and tips for engineering resumes

engineering-resume.md

Engineering Resume Tips

Template

Use an old and boring template. It should be black text on white background with a classic font. You can use this google docs template. It looks like this:

Resume Checklist

1. Contact Information and Links

• Do you have a photo on your resume? Remove it.
• Does your resume have your professional email? It should
• How many contact details and social profile links do you have on your resume? You should have no more than four. Do you need all of these?
• Do all the links work on your resume? Click through each of them.
• Do all the links point to professional pages on your resume? When you click through, will people see well-formatted, well-written content that conveys the type of work they can expect from you? Ensure this is the case also for your:
  • Blog
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • Any other links you provide

2. Readability and Scannability

• Is your resume easy to scan? Give your resume to a friend and ask them to take a look at it for 5 seconds, then tell you their immediate impression. Did they see key details? Did they think it’s:
  • Too crowded?
  • Too little information?
• Is your resume simple enough? Are you using any “fancy” designs? If so, is this kind of “fanciness” getting in the way of readability? If it’s not in the way of readability, that’s great. However, if it’s making things harder to scan, consider going with something more simple. Note that for:
  • Frontend
  • UX
  • Design-heavy positions, some nice flair can be a great touch.

3. Content and Formatting

• Is the resume concise and to the point? Are you using:
  • Short sentences?
  • Bullet points with rarely more than two lines?
• Are you bolding too much? Aim to not bold anything inside a sentence. Only bold important things like:
  • Job title
  • Company name
  • Date
  • Headers
• Is formatting consistent? Are you using:
  • Standard font sizes?
  • Aligning with tabs, over spacing things to be approximately close?

4. Language and Content

• Are you using internal company jargon? Do you have project names that only people inside the company would understand? If so, consider changing them to describing the project.
• Do you have a:
  • (Spoken) languages section?
  • References section? You can probably remove both of these.
• Do links stand out with a different color or formatting? They shouldn’t. They take away space and attention.