FORGET The Generic Resume Fluff! Focus On Impact As A Developer!

Hi, and welcome to the ré review series where I give you feedback on the rums that you submit. My name is Nick Oantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. In this video, I'm going to be going through a ré that was submitted to me and like with all of these videos, I'm going to try and offer constructive criticism and that does mean that I'm going to try to be objective. I'm going to call out things that I think have been done very well. I'll try to call out things that I think can be improved and explain why. And of course, a disclaimer that I always have to add is that my goal is not to try and roast anyone's resume. I'm not going to be making fun of people. I'm just trying to help. So, when I do have to give constructive criticism, the goal in mind is that I'm helping. That's why these people submitted their resumes to me. If you're interested in having the opportunity for your resume to be reviewed, you can submit it to résuméser.ca and I'll try to see if I can schedule that in. Now, let's jump over to this person's resume and check it out. One thing that I'd like to note right from the beginning is that this person submitted their resume and they were also offering some extra context for behind the scenes, a little bit more information for what's going on in their career, why they're looking to do the switch. And that's something that I'm going to be addressing on my other YouTube channel called Code Commute, which is a vlog format. So, I recorded that video right before this one. And that way I can kind of navigate and see what they're trying to get up to and why they're switching. So, the extra context helps me understand what they're trying to achieve. Now, this person in particular is trying to move over into something that is a little bit more AI focused. They were starting to dabble with some AI things before the big wave of LLMs kind of hit the market like within the past few years. So, they actually have a little bit more experience with that. But, I think what they've been primarily focused on is not exactly grounded in that. But that's just some framing for the direction they're trying to go. Now, one more quick note. Because the camera is blocking half the screen that I have the resume pulled up on, I will be glancing over to my left and trying to read some things. So, if you see me looking off into space, that's what I'm doing. But, let's start from the top. I think what's really interesting is they have a little bit of a section, a little paragraph kind of trying to describe them, right? So, like in plain English, just trying to say here's what's up with me, trying to call out some highlights and sort of here's why you should be interested in me. And I think that's sort of a unique twist. I don't think that that's super rare, but also I know that I've seen other people's resumes where they're completely trying to jam-pack it full of just experience or keywords. So, a little personal touch like this, I think, is nice. They do have a couple of their core things that they want to call out, right? Like AIdriven automation, test-driven development. I think this is helpful, especially because we get a little bit of keyword things going on here. There's a section later which maybe I will kind of skip to in just a moment. I think personally when I look at this resume and I'm realizing now that my cursor is a little bit kind of crappy to see. There we go. I think that this just from a formatting perspective just to call it out. We got this big area doing not a whole lot of anything. This was sent to Word doc. I converted it to a PDF. I checked the word doc. It also has this gap. But what I think would be super helpful. So if I scroll to page two, you'll see this part. Um and it does say page two of two. So I don't think that this is a formatting mistake. But I think that having this part like right at the end, I think having that pulled up right up to here would be kind of nice. And then we can see sort of at a at a glance like all of these skills and kind of focus areas. So I think that's kind of nice. I've said in the previous videos as well that I do like having some technical skills called out, right? We get a bit of keyword action going on here. I'll talk more about the keywords in respect to the other areas that we have on the resume. One of the reasons that I like this and what I call out again on the other videos and probably all of the other videos going forward is that when we consider the volume of résumés that people are going through, we're going to have to consider that there's a lot of volume and people are trying to look for optimizations to sip through them. whether if you're not using some type of automation to do that, some type of system that's looking for that, even as humans, the recruiters or the hiring managers just to get through the volume are probably going to lean into some type of keywords, right? They're probably saying, ideally, I'm looking for an engineer that has some of these skills. A,000 people applied. If I don't have time to go like super detailed on a thousand different résumés, I might just start looking for the ones that have some of the things that stand out right on the surface. I realize that's kind of a crappy situation because you might say, "Nick, that's not really fair because if I applied, why is it even if I had, you know, better skills, better experience, I am a better fit than someone else that got looked at, that's not fair." And I get it. And that's one of the challenges that we're seeing right now. I think with a lot of the volume for job applications, it's like a bit of a gamble in terms of whether or not you get noticed. So, I think when you have some of the skills called out like this, this can just help increase the potential for being noticed. So, I would personally pull that right up into this nice big section that looks like it could fit it perfectly. Otherwise, let's start going through the professional experience. And I think what they've done a good job of is highlighting things that are quantitative. And you'll see that it might be a little bit difficult to see in the video, but certainly like I can see this part is bolded. We have bolding here. you know bold like they're calling out some of the things that are quantifiable which I think is helpful. If we start going from top to bottom Excel does a cross functional team member to guide and execute product and business strategies launching new features to 20 million active users. So I think this last part the launching new features to 20 million active users is very helpful. Kind of says like hey look I've been part of releasing stuff that is not just you know couple of uh users. It's not something like a product that never got anywhere. It's actually if we think about what goes into launching a product and having to support many users using the product or the service, there's a lot that goes into that. So I think that's a helpful thing to call out that they have some experience with that. One thing that's not super obvious and it's kind of like a balancing act that we have to do. But when it says excelled as a key cross functional team member to guide and execute product and business strategies, it's a very wordy sentence. I will always try to call this out, but like what am I supposed to take away from that is sort of the question I would ask, right? Like I understand that you worked crossf functionally. That's great. But like what did you do? This person probably has in their mind, I know the things I did. I know how I played a role and I realize that they're trying to summarize that succinctly and that's okay. But when I read it, like I don't get the extra value that they're probably thinking about. Just something to mention. But of course, this is going to be a balancing act. So I think having something like this called out when it's a little bit general and it's like okay cross functional teams you know they're thinking about product they're thinking about business strategies that's helpful but if everything ends up being sort of generalized like that then we're losing some of like the sustenance of like what they're actually having an impact on. They say resident state m uh resident state machine expert awesome okay and longest tenur member uh of the team. I kind of crossed out like some of the specific parts here. Delivering educational talks and mentoring. Like right here, this part, delivering educational talks and mentoring junior developers to bolster team capabilities. That part that I just highlighted, that's almost the only thing I care about in that sentence. I think it's awesome. But the rest of it, like resident state machine expert, I don't know, cool, I guess. um longest tenure member of you know this specific thing like unless and it's crossed out so you can't see it but I think unless you're applying for a very specific job doing that to me like that's not going to have a like I would just get rid of the rest of the sentence honestly cuz I think the part that I just highlighted the delivering educational talks mentoring others this is like a multiplier effect I'm having impact making other people better that's the part I care about here personally spearheaded performance improvements to achieve 4x speed increase boom love that because we get something that's quantitative, right? For example, I don't I don't have included here what they've actually worked on. But I think anyone reading this where they say a four times speed increase in high performance input handling, you have an idea what that's going to mean, right? You don't need to know the exact domain. You don't have to have the details about the product specifically, but you can recognize that that's going to be impactful. And then they talk a little bit more about some specifics. again with this kind of thing. Oh, that was terrible highlighting. Um, with this I can't highlight that long across the the page, but um, when they talk about requiring analysis of browser paint cycles, event handling, again, I've talked about this in some of the other videos and I will continue to call this out. This is a very specific thing. Analysis of browser paint cycles. If you are going to try and go in the direction of doing more of this work, call it out. it's very helpful based on what they're trying to do, based on the email that they sent me in the direction they're trying to head. And I would say like, does this kind of thing matter? And if not, then maybe you have a couple of versions of your resume where you're calling out some very specific things for front-end development, really focusing on that. That way, when you're applying to front-end roles, you're like, "Hell yeah, this stands out. This is great." And otherwise, you know, calling out this analysis of browser pain cycles, if they were applying to one of the teams that I've managed that's doing only backend work, I might say it's it's almost uh it's not that, you know, that's not valuable experience at all, but it's not something that would ever stand out to me, right? And I think they could probably the reason I'm calling this out is they could probably find other things that they could call out that aren't front-end specific. So something to think about when you're calling out specific things like this. It can be a blessing when you're trying to, you know, go for similar roles or it could be something that maybe is a little bit of a detractor or not a value ad and it could be replaced by something else. So something to consider. So applied high attention to detail and analytical skills to resolve long-standing and critical bugs, slashing total issues by over 65%, boosting product stability, earning a reputation of improving uh system reliability. this to me seems like like I think that's nice again we have some something quantitative because if that was really I think what's holding this uh this point together is we have something quantitative to be honest without that high attention to detail um software engineer I would hope so uh analytical skills you know software engineer I would hope so these are things that I would just expect anyone has and for you to write them I go yes like it would be like saying I program. I'm going, "Yep, I hope so." I'm saying that, you know, not to to tell this person like, "I don't believe you or anything like that, but it's mostly to say that in terms of your real estate on your resume, I think that you could fill this with something that potentially has more value than that." But this part, you know, slashing total issues by over 65%, boosting product stability, earning a reputation for improving uh system reliability, like I think that whole part is something that could be expanded upon. Personally, the high attention to detail and analytical skills for me isn't uh like for someone that's a senior engineer with over seven years of experience like yeah it doesn't it's not adding much in my opinion. Steer product development and transformation in key areas. This is one of those things where like I said at the beginning like it's a little wordy. Um such as redesigning rewriting critical yet bugprone vanilla JavaScript component and spelt this whole thing just to give you an example. They have this much that I'm highlighting right now. I should probably use different colors on this. That's really just to say like I rewrote a component. This person might say, "Yeah, it was the literally the biggest most important missionritical part of the entire application." I don't know that. I see that you wrote a uh rewrote a component, right? It says it's critical and bugprone, but like I don't I just don't know anything about it. There's something being conveyed here or sorry, I should say there's something that they want to convey and to me it's not landing because I just don't have enough information. So my word of advice and this is for everyone thinking about this kind of stuff. If you're in this person's situation, you know that that was really important, right? How can you try and message that to someone who knows nothing about it? It's not an easy task. So, I don't mean to try and say like, "Hey, this person like this is so easy for you to try and convey it differently, but truly like if I'm reading this, I have to act as the person on the outside, right? Like I don't know the details about what they did." And I still don't have a really good idea by reading that. exterior product development and transformation in key areas. Okay. Right? Like that's good, but I don't have I don't really understand what was going on here. So, the challenge with this whole sort of part here is just that I don't really get much out of it. So, I would recommend that this person maybe revisits this, tries to think about specifically what they're conveying or what they would like to convey because I I believe them. I believe that there's something good there, but I'm not really getting it through that uh that single line. Okay, next job played an integral role in transforming executive visions into successful project implementations. This is one of those examples like I kind of said near the beginning. These are some great words, but I don't I don't get much out of it personally. Uh led project planning and execution for the successful development of a seamless onboarding flow and integration with Stripe payment processing. Cool. I think that's a good thing, right? Um but really integration with Stripe payment processing. I think we had a bunch of other words uh led project planning and execution. We got some project leading which is good. We have some keyword that we can call out which is helpful right payment processing. We have stripe like this is something that if we don't even know what this person's doing, we can understand what's going on at least and then they say that's really what's enabling the company to begin generating revenue. So that's a milestone to call out. Overall, this one is is decent. But yeah, I think maybe there's we we start getting into some like I I feel like the words are fluffing it up. Not so bad, though. So, let's keep going. Pioneered the transition of the flagship artificial intelligence. So, this is probably um again, this one's pretty good so far. Let me let me explain why though. This is an example of them saying transition of the flagship artificial intelligence AI powered Chrome extension prototype to production baseline standards for the codebase and securing access for paying customers. The space that they're trying to get into is AI related. Right? This is so far like the number one thing on the resume that I think is contributing to being able to work in that space. If you were a hiring manager or recruiter that was looking for people to help with building AI tools or whatever else, I realize this is maybe a little bit generic. We have a Chrome extension, so maybe there's uh that could be applicable for some other jobs, but this is like the one thing so far where I'm like, this is where you said you wanted to go, right? Here is something to call out that really helps there. Now, of course, we talked about some speed optimizations and stuff, so that's a general thing that could be pretty helpful. But I think that this is something that stands out for the direction they're trying to head in. Demonstrated strong problem solving skills in diagnosing and resolving production issues, reducing downtime, ensuring continuous products, ability to optimize customer experience. This sent this whole thing, I think this is one where they put some numbers in some other spots. I would say like reducing downtime, cool, by how much? I literally had a my my one of my teams at Microsoft was responsible for reducing downtime of machines and I could tell you like here's the types of optimizations we did here's the time savings because that was my team's charter and that was something that I was tasked with doing so I believe this person right I I bet you they did reduce downtime so tell us like what was the impact of that ensuring continuous product stability how how did you ensure that what does that mean again like I trust that they know this and they're like yeah hell yeah that was high impact. How do I know that reading this? Right? Optimizing customer experience. Cool. Like how how so? Because I said product stability. How was it measured? How do you know that that actually had an impact? Tell me how because I don't have that detail. You do, right? Like I think it's a really good opportunity to showcase that. Same with the operational efficiency, right? You know that. I would love to believe you, but it's not conveyed in the resume. So find a way to bring that out. So overall, uh, I like the AI part that's mentioned there, but I really think that this one could benefit from like like especially that last bullet. It's like that's I feel like there's a lot of value that's potentially packed in there. They haven't conveyed to me what that is, but I bet you they know it, right? So, I would love to see that kind of refined and they could really showcase some impact there. This last one from what I recall when I was kind of scanning over this, I feel like this one is suffering a little bit from this uh last bullet that we just reviewed, right? Collaborated between teams and departments to develop, implement, test new features, ensuring timely project delivery and adherence to technical specifications. Um collap like teamwork and cross team stuff. Okay, that's good. Um, but that's like the that's personally the only thing that I'm pulling out of that. Develop to maintain web applications and system improving system functionality. What does that mean? Uh, and performance by how much? What kind of performance? Like what's the impact of that? Optimizing database queries. Cool. That's something that's helpful. Again, I don't have to know the specific project or the system that this person's working on, but they mentioned that they spent some time optimizing database queries. Okay, that's a helpful thing. But I think what could be extra helpful is they're talking about performance. What kind of impact did you have through doing that? Because I think that could really help amplify that message. And then ensuring seamless integration with front-end technologies. Which technologies? That was the other thing I was thinking. I think there's some opportunity in kind of a bunch of these spots where they have all of these technical skills called out at the bottom. I feel like there is a graceful way uh without being like all over the place to start putting in some of the keywords and the technology. So, what kind of database, right? Uh, which front-end technologies? I feel like that could get sprinkled in because one of the challenges when you have a section that looks like this technical skills section is like if I saw a couple of database technologies that were listed in the technical skills and I don't see sort of relative to how much experience you have using them professionally, I'm kind of left guessing. And that's like I realize that some people might be saying, "Yeah, like you're going to have to ask questions about it." But my perspective is that when you're putting resumes together, you want to try and eliminate as much guesswork as possible because as soon as people have to start guessing and making assumptions about what's being done, there might be another candidate who happens to be showcasing that and then already they're moving on and kind of looking at that candidate. So I think that there's some ways that we could improve this resume by adding a little bit more like technology and stuff throughout it. analyze and resolve software issues and proactively identify and address bugs. Okay. Resulting in more stable software for county employees to operate critical municipal functions. I don't really get a lot of uh understanding of the impact of this last one, right? Being proactive. That's nice. Um more stable software measured by what? And operate critical municipal function. So it seems like again one of these situations where they're like I know the work I had had an impact and I think that's important. And I don't mean to like minimize that as I'm trying to offer constructive criticism here. I'm saying that legitimately because I truly believe this person understands they had impact. It would be a bad spot to be in if you're writing your resume and you're like, "Oh man, like I actually don't know what kind of impactful work I've done. I feel like this person really does understand that." That's good. Now, find a way to convey that to me, right? Without telling me all of the super nitty-gritty details because I also don't got time for that. How can you try and message to me at a high level, this is the type of impact I've had with my work? Overall, I think that there's a bunch of good stuff on here. I honestly think aside from a little bit of formatting, my biggest piece of feedback here is or two parts, right? One is to maybe sprinkle in some of the technical skills throughout because I think that would be helpful in explaining a little bit more what's going on and how your skills tie into these experiences. And then honestly, the biggest takeaway or the biggest sort of suggestion I have is that for these areas where you're like, man, I know that was a big impact. I'm really proud of that. try and find a way that you can explain what that impact looks like to someone who doesn't really know anything about the work that you've done because I feel like this person has it in them and we just need to find a way to convey that. Big thanks to this person for submitting this. I hope that feedback can help guide them in making some improvements. Of course, this is just my perspective on this. You go ask anyone else on the internet for their perspective. You might get a completely different list of things, but these are the types of things that I would be looking for to make this really stand out to me. And of course, if you would like your resume reviewed, consider submitting it to résumé[email protected] and I will try my best to try and make a video for it. Keep it fully anonymous like this and that way you can hopefully get some helpful feedback. Thanks so much. I'll see you next time.