What's The Ideal Structure Of Your Software Engineering Resume?

Welcome to the RSé review series where I review the résumés that you submit. And in this video, we're going to go over a senior software engineer's resume. And like the other ré review videos that I do, this is going to be my feedback. It's not going to be a resume roast or making fun of this person by any means. So, I'll provide what I think this person's doing well and the opportunities to improve. So, if that sounds interesting, just a reminder that you can submit your resumes at rumsdevleer.ca. Let's jump over to this person's resume and check things out. I'd like to start by going over the format of this resume. And I think that's going to be a little bit telling about how I'd like to spend time on this particular resume because I think there's a lot of interesting good content here. But I think the format and the structure of this is going to be something that I have the most feedback on. So I'm going to zoom out a little bit and we'll see that on the first page we have professional highlights and professional skills. So an entire first page without really getting into sort of split out work experience. And then if I go on to the next page, you can see as well the first half of this is going to be about professional skills. Then we have the relevant professional experience kind of broken out into this bulleted uh list here. Let me switch over to getting some highlighting going on here. So like you can see this part here, right, is where we have sort of just the work experience. We do have volunteer experience. So that's great to see as well. And then some education and certificates. So overall, we have this format that really kind of pushes the professional experience in terms of like the timelines and organization towards the end and it almost seems like it's not an afterthought, but it seems like it's separate from the rest of what's documented here. And I think personally my biggest piece of feedback with this whole resume is going to be to change this. And I don't think that it's because it's wrong to do it the way that's presented here, but I don't think that it's sort of the common format. And I think that it makes it a little bit more difficult to understand. I will go through some of the content in here and talk about the things that I think are done really well. But the thing that I'd like to focus most of our time and attention on is that when we split out sort of the details of the work experience from a section that's like this professional experience part down here. The biggest problem is that even though in some cases we have some of these, you know, skills and experiences referencing some of these professional work experience sort of uh timelines, the challenge I find is that there's a lot of cognitive load for me to have to jump around and understand really what's going on. And I think that sort of the typical format we have on résumés, I'm calling it typical because this is the most typical thing that I've seen on résumés where we have this uh reverse chronological order of where you've spent time and the sort of contributions and impact that you've had there. I think that that does a really good job of telling sort of the experience and story that you have for all of your professional activity. and doing it in this other way organizes it into thoughts, but I can't really see the progression in the timeline, which for me is quite confusing. So overall, what I just want to sort of drive home with this resume for feedback is that I would really like to see a lot of the stuff that we're about to go over sort of added into this section. And I would really like to see this section with the details being the core focus of the resume. personally. To me, that tells the most clear story. And what this person might find is that some of these other experiences that are a little bit older, so these are going back uh at this point uh 10 to 15 years, right? Some of these things, they might not be totally relevant anymore, right? Like you can drop some of the older stuff off your resume if you're looking to get a little bit more real estate back. So having something like junior Linux administrator from 2010 might not be very relevant anymore. Or maybe I think all of these last three or uh some of these uh positions are at the same place. You might be able to collapse them and have like a small point and then focus all or most of your effort into sort of like the more recent positions where you have the most relevant experience. But having it organized in a reverse chronological format for me is going to be the most effective way to understand kind of like how the career has progressed and how you're sort of taking on usually what you would see as more sort of advanced focus areas in software engineering. And for those of you that are not yet software engineers and you might have some previous experience that's like you know maybe you're working as an intern or something totally unrelated to software engineering kind of seeing that progression and then maybe you're you are transitioning over to software engineering you can kind of see a bit of that story unfolding a little bit more naturally. So overall, that's the main takeaway, but let's kind of focus on some of the other things that we have in this resume because I think there's some really good points called out here that like highlight that this person has had some interesting experiences, right? So professional highlights, we can see, you know, being able to focus on some AI development. So AI, vector stores, LLMs, we have AI co-pilot. I'm just going to kind of scroll through here because there's a there's a lot of this where we can see market research and getting new innovative uh services off the ground for this AI team talking about a project again like I have a lot of it redacted obviously so you can't see all the details but learn and implement LLM's vector there's a typo there but minor detail obviously proofread stuff it's very easy for things to escape but vector stores if we keep going that might it might be called out a little bit more lower oh I guess in some of the technology some of these things are called right agentic LLMs prompt engineering lang chain vector store embeddings so we see that this experience is kind of uh spattered across the resume so it's good to be able to call out some of the technology some of the focus areas and of course with so many things being focused on AI now this I think is a really good thing to be able to call out and say like hey look I have some experience with this stuff but again like one of the challenges and like I see this a little bit more clearly in the unredacted version is like when some of the things are called out like those areas I was highlighting if you were to have this unredacted you could see like okay let me jump down to the professional experience and this is why this becomes a little bit confusing is then you go okay and then oh you applied that in you know these positions or in this time frame right so you have to keep doing that with some of this experience so it feels very disjoint even when it is not redacted. So, this is more of like for the reader who's trying to review this resume. It makes it challenging to understand the story when you have to jump around and kind of piece things together. So, I'm just trying to explain that a little bit further. Let's see what else we have here. Leadership, right? Manage a technical team with a $2 million budget. I like this kind of thing for explaining uh some scale, right? So, like you had influence, you were responsible for something, right? experience in planning, coordinating and execution cross team initiatives. Excellent. Right. But like even on this one, uh where was that like what what did that entail? If we go a little bit lower, if I can still find it, managing a technical team with a budget around 2 million. Um this is just a quick note that like sometimes the duplication is a sign like kind of like when you have code like this, you can go refactor things. You may not need to explain the same thing several times. It might just be an indicator that you have an opportunity to reorganize a little bit. You can't see it because it's redacted in this part. It does mention where that is, but the challenge is that like I still don't really understand that because it's not a cohesive story. So, managing a technical team with a budget of that. Cool. It's excluding people. So, what did that include, right? Is that just $2 million in software? Is that in spend for cloud compute? is that in like what's involved with that? Like what did you have responsibility over if it wasn't for people? Again, it just makes the story a little bit less cohesive to go navigate. We can see like communication. If we have leadership and communication, this kind of stuff called out. Uh these will tell similar stories about the type of impact you were having sort of at a larger scale. And sometimes we can see like I mean this one is talking about leadership, peers, vendors, potential clients. I think always really awesome if you can call out as a software engineer where you were interfacing with leadership roles and especially with clients if you have any of that experience. I think it's pretty unique because not a lot of developers will have that. Some developers especially in startups and things like that may get some of that exposure but I think some people go their entire career without it. So if you have it, include it for sure. But on the communication part, if we go down a little bit lower, I'm pretty sure mentoring. Yeah, like mentoring associates for personal and professional growth. Like this kind of thing, I think is really awesome to see if you have it as well. Recognize an informal team leader providing direction, clarity, and confidence and decision-m. So there's a few things that if we tie that back up to the communication up here and the leadership, like this starts to tell a story. But as you can see, I'm jumping around on the resume. And I would really just like to see that story told a little bit more cohesively. That's all. I think that might be it on on that one. So, let me get rid of those highlights and go back up. And then we have like more technical stuff, right? Innovation is is part of the technical part, but we also have just a straight up technical thing called out here. And I think what's great that this person's able to showcase on their resume is experience in software development as an S sur design for scale high availability. They talk about I mean it's not called out right here but they talk about DevOps like DevOps team uh leader of the DevOps team. They have in my opinion a nice sort of spectrum of coverage for different parts of software development which is great. Even if we go back to their their work experience, right? System administrator, DevOps, oops, DevOps, DevOps. They have a founder position. So, they've started something on their own. We have more DevOps, more DevOps. We have a technical lead. We have a senior product developer. This person's been able to kind of show that they're going from like what I might call like managing resources to managing some infrastructure into more of like a software development focus. It's not that these things are mutually exclusive, but you can kind of see the focus kind of changing as they're going along, but again, like we have that information here. I know I'm repeating myself, but it would be really nice to see some of like the the technology and experiences kind of working in that reverse chronological order. Let's get rid of some of those highlights. I think the other thing I just wanted to focus on is like this part right here. I think it's great when you can call out, you know, having like a section where you have your skills or technologies and stuff like that because depending on where you're applying to, they are going to have systems that will look for keywords. Even if it's a human, someone who is a recruiter or going through a lot of resumes, they might be kind of going, okay, like I know that I'm trying to look for a developer that has some experience in these areas. So, keywords can always help. I don't think that you want to just like, you know, stuff a resume with tons of keywords until it's really nonsensical and someone can't make sense of it and not understand what's going on. I don't think that's happening here. That's not how I feel when I read this. But what I think again would go really well, and I've said this on other resume review videos, let's just pick one for example, like uh authentication and authorization right here, right? Where do you have this experience? Like what kinds of things were you building? because I can't tell when it's listed in a section like this. It's good for having like a keyword get identified, but I don't know where you had AWS single sign on or Azure Active Directory or OOTH or I app like I don't know where you had that and like what that's related to, right? You know, just to pick on this one and it's not my intent like I'm not making fun of this person or anything. I'm just trying to demonstrate broad virtual uh infrastructure experience like let's just pick Kubernetes right Kubernetes I don't know what you did with Kubernetes was this like a one-time thing that was like a you know in a week you turned on Kubernetes for something or like is there a project that you can sort of show in your uh work experience going back down here right if can you show some of that work experience calling out a project that leveraged some of this stuff I To me, that's the most clear way to show just how much experience you have with some of these things. I realize that's not trivial all of the time, but I think that it tells a more clear story because when I read uh some of these lists or sections that have a lot of just technical skills called out, right? Software development, for example, C, Python, uh it says, etc. I don't like I I don't I'm left kind of trying to assume what this means. Again, I've said this in other ré review videos. If you're leaving the reader to start assuming things about your experience, there's other résumés that will be making things more clear. It sounds kind of silly, I guess, but like when you have to put a little bit more effort on the side of the person interpreting your resume, it's just extra cognitive load. And odds are they're probably not just going to be assuming, oh, C and Python, they must have, you know, decades of experience with this. right? Like I don't know that there's no there's no way to call that out. And yes, of course, in an interview we could dive into this a little bit more, but like I've tried to remind people if you have resumes and they're competing against each other. If someone else has been able to make it very clear, you know, they also have C and Python and maybe we're looking to hire someone with C and Python experience. If someone else has made it very clear that they have lots of C and Python experience and the related projects compared to having a line item that's like this, I have to sort of assume or try to, you know, make up what this person might have done or wait for an interview. If that person might not have that chance for the interview if there's other people that have resumes that have been more clear with that experience. I think there's a lot of good stuff in here. I think this person, you know, based on the amount of content and different technologies and these different roles that they have, I think they probably have lots of great experience, but I would really like to see it kind of tied together more cohesively in a story and making this section sort of the biggest focus by pulling in all of this stuff that we see in the rest of the resume into this core section. And then maybe, you know, a small very brief section that tries to like, you know, even maybe maybe this much, right? Kind of calling out some highlights I think could be pretty interesting. I've mentioned before I do like having a little brief summary like this. But we have a summary, like a brief summary, then we have another brief summary, and then we have like this is summaries across different sections, and then we have skills called out in a list. So, it's almost like not a lot of storytelling of experience and a lot of little summaries. So, I think we have a lot of the right ingredients, but I think the format, like I said at the beginning of this video, is uh probably my biggest recommendation for this person to revisit and I think they have a lot of solid experience that they can tie together. So, I hope that you found that helpful. I hope this person has some takeaways uh to consider. And again, I'm just one person. This is my perspective when I read through this and uh in terms of how clear it is uh when I'm going through this person's experience. So uh if you want your resume reviewed in a similar way of course just submit it to rumsdevleer.ca and I'll be happy to try and go through it. So thanks so much and I'll see you in the next one.