What's The Solution To The One BIG Resume Challenge For This Developer？

Hi, and welcome to the résé review series where I review the résumés that you submit. In this video, we're going to be going over a senior developer resume. He has over 15 years of experience. It is in thenet space, so you know this is going to be a good one. Just kidding. But seriously, it's going to be pretty good. So, we're going to go over what I think are the standout opportunities on this resume, the thing that they've done really well. We're going to see based on some of their questions some things that they could improve and that way we can go over both the pros and cons of this resume. A reminder that in these ré review videos, I'm not roasting them. I'm not grilling them. I'm not making fun of them. These are meant to be helpful. That does mean that I have to try and offer constructive criticism when I can, but I will also call the things that I really like. If you're interested in having the opportunity for your resume to be reviewed, you can submit it to résuméser.ca. Now let's jump over to this person's resume and see some of the things that they had to say. So as mentioned they are a developer with 15 plus years of experience. They said that they're sorely lacking in AWS and Azure space. They said their career has been at smaller businesses. Uh never really made sense at those businesses to go use cloud providers. So they don't really have a lot of that their experience. They said long track record of skilling up but not the opportunity to do that at work in cloud services. So sort of that's one of the things that they wanted to be able to focus on I think and then they also mentioned that they're lacking in Angular and React but they've spent the last four years working in Blazer and I mean as a net developer you only need Blazer right? Well let's see if we can go have some thoughts about what their resume is showcasing in other opportunities. One final call out is that they say that they feel very good at being able to talk to people, selling themselves, but they have to be able to get their foot in the door. And that's another reminder for folks that your resume is this opportunity to get your foot in the door. I've heard people say like, oh, like leave little breadcrumbs on your resume to get interest and that way when you're in the interview, you can really awe them. It doesn't really work that way. If you're not standing out on your resume, you will not get noticed for the interview. Please try to use your resume as the opportunity to showcase yourself and stand out against others. Looking at the structure, I do like having something like a summary blurb at the top. I think people might have different uh perspectives on this, different opinions. I like it if it's brief. We have a skills section right below that. So, this part right here, I like this kind of thing. I like having the keywords called out. But I think if people are using different systems or if someone's reviewing resumes manually and they're scanning through and I can say great I see C I also see JavaScript they can do a bit of both. I see.net great blazer cool like our shop uses blazer that's going to be really handy. Ozero like yeah we have that for integration. Okay. And you know we're an agile shop and I see that here. So these types of things at a glance I think are very helpful and something that I wanted to note. I like kind of doing this more recently, but if we zoom out and just look at their first page in terms of real estate, we're just over halfway before we start getting into work experience. That's just a gut check in terms of like how much do you want to focus on these other things that are sort of at a glance high level before getting into work experience because I think work experience is going to be the most impactful part of selling yourself. So, just a reminder that if you're including this kind of stuff, consider how much real estate you want for it because if we scan over, right, they have two pages. I think they've done a good job in terms of, you know, uh the screen real estate. Like that's fine, but how much in terms of proportions do you want for this kind of thing versus your work experience? All right, let's have a look at their first job. They say led architecture and development of a project using .NET 8, Blazer. We can see that reducing uh recidivism, is that how you say that word? I don't know if I've ever said that out loud, but uh rates by over 90%, then they have boosting assessment management efficiency by 50%. So, we have some quantitative impact. If we keep going, you can see slashing deployment time by 95%. Right? So, they have quantitative impact across all three of these items. They have the tech that was used called out across all three of these items. I think that that's a really great start. They've also included something that's non-technical, right? Mentored junior developers, u modern development, .NET development practices, DDD principles, and effective code review procedures. So, we get some some things that I would expect to seniors doing, not just coding, but having mentorship opportunities. So, I think that's done really well. I think, you know, if I'm trying to pick on this, like I don't really know the scale of the system here. So maybe that's an opportunity to be able to say like you know for this particular project like this system is of this scale that helps me understand the type of the system without having to know all the details of the system. And then again to to pick on this a little bit more, this is over four years of experience, right? So from 20 June 2021 to now it's four years. I don't mean to minimize the work that they're doing, but let's if we have a quick look, right? Like I did say that quantitative impacts good. This rate here and management assessment management efficiency by 50%. These two things across four years of work and sorry and also uh the the slashing deployment time. I'm very curious because I suspect that they have a lot more impact in terms of the the sort of scope of work they would have had over a 4-year period. So, I don't mean to minimize what's listed here, but in my head, I'm thinking they got four years of experience. They're doing this kind of stuff. And what's going through my head now is like I see the amount of line spacing that's in here, which helps for readability, but based on the line spacing, how much content is up top here, I'm going, man, I really want to see more come out of this job because I I don't know this person, but based on what I'm reading here, I think that there's more to it, right? Maybe in a situation, I'm like, "Okay, we'll find out in the interview." But if I have other candidates that are already showcasing more of that impact up front, then if I don't have opport like the the space or the time to be able to include this person in the interview loop, they'll get passed over. So I suspect there's a lot more impact to be able to call out and I would love for them to do it because these types of things like this rate and this rate here, I think that these are sort of effects for the end user and that's great. like they're having uh they're demonstrating impact for the end user. We want to see that. But I'm also interested in understanding the scale of the system they're working in and how they're directly affecting some of these these aspects of the software that they're building because that will also translate into if they're hired with us like how can we see that they're having that kind of impact in what we're building. So I think there's just a lot of opportunity here. But I really like that they've called out tech quantitative impact and mentorship as well. Okay, in this next job, we can see that they do end up having like processing 300 plus transactions per second. So, we start to see like some scale uh quantifying the type of scale. I think that's really helpful. What else do we got here? I also made a note saying that they have the tech called out across these, right? So, we have octa, we have uh MSMQ, Windows services, REST API. So, like this is helpful. So, I think good job again. That's a pretty consistent thing across their resume. they always seem to have the tech used with the work. So, I really like that. Um, one thing that I wanted to note was that when we see something like this, implemented enterprise authentication using octa, right? I'm going to frame this like it sounds facitious and that's not the point. I just want to use it to demonstrate this like in terms of the real estate on their resume. This is a whole line item for a work experience. What's so great about this or like why is this on here versus just listing octa, right? Not not meant to be facitious, right? I'm kind of saying this a certain way on purpose to to get people thinking like when I read this, this just says I know how to use octa, right? Do they have octa up here? Octa. Okay, so cool. Like why do I need this line here? And the reason I say this is because as you think about it, you might go, well, okay, well, when I was doing Octa, here was the impact of doing that or here is why there was something novel or interesting about that integration in our system that I was able to do like some impact I had for us. Great. Call that out because the fact that it's octa like you could use one word instead of a whole line, right? So just something to think about in terms of framing up the impact or the significance of the work. Similar thing here when we talk about uh the real- time web API integration. This is connecting university systems together. So enable immediate alumni uh tracking and tripling donation opportunity capture. Great, right? So this is the sort of the the value ad that they were able to have. So cool stuff. But like what what's interesting about this? They say that they're connecting university systems. Like okay. Um, I don't really understand like what work they're doing to make that happen. So, I think that this is a good one to call out, but I think that they need to be able to try and demonstrate a little bit more clearly like the significance of that work, why it's interesting because they do have this part, right? This is helpful to say tripling donation opportunity capture. That's the sort of business impact of it. But what else is interesting? Developed real time web API integration. There's probably something interesting about the technology here that could be really helpful to call out in the last couple of jobs that they have here. Uh I think that we start to lose a little bit of the quantifiable impact except for this part right here where they're saying that they implemented strict coding standards and test-driven development reducing teamwide defects rate by 85%. Like that's great, but I think it starts to fall off a little bit with the quantifiable part. So I do think that they keep calling out technology usage which is great. I think that's really good. One thing I wanted to mention is like another line item that doesn't seem to offer a ton of value to me is this has delivered critical features. I don't know what they are. I believe this person they have a lot of experience. I believe that they delivered critical features. They're saying within two to three weeks scrum and sprint cycles. So to me that's not significant. I think they're trying to say that they do agile. Okay. I think the part that is interesting about this and what they're trying to get at is like evolving health care regulations, there's probably some strictness around how software and healthcare is integrated, delivered, shipped, and trying to do agile software development. So, I think that's probably what they're trying to call out here. But this doesn't really tell me what role they played in that. It's like this is how the team operated. Okay. But like that's not that's not really significant to me. So I think if they can call out like how they played a role in this uh that could be helpful. But this to me isn't really landing with that much value. So just wanted to mention that. Um again I'm cherrypicking a few things that I think that there's some opportunity for because there's only so much real estate on a resume and I think that you want to have the most value that you possibly can. So okay, if we check the education section, they do have a bachelor's in computer science. So great stuff, right? They actually went back for a boot camp as well. So 6 years later, I think that's super cool, right? No, I try to say this in every video. No, you don't have to have post-secary education uh in my opinion to be successful in software development, but I do think that you're going to run into places that are going to list it as a requirement. Some of them won't actually enforce it. Some of them will. So if you have it, include it. If you did go to a boot camp, get certification, anything like that, include it. I think it's only helpful unless you're trying to stuff an entire page full of like, you know, you clicked through a couple of things to get a certificate online. Maybe at some point it's not valuable, but I think if you've gone through things like this, include them if you have them. Shows growth, shows that you're trying to improve and get better. So, I I really like to see that kind of stuff. Okay. The other thing that we'll mention here is that they don't have a project section. And because this person has 15 years of work experience, having a project section might not be that valuable, right? They have a ton of uh experience to be able to draw upon. So, they shouldn't really need a project section, right? Well, maybe not in this case, actually, because if we think about what I said in the beginning of this video, they had a couple of things that they wanted to call out, right? So, they had mentioned in their notes to me, they said, "I'm sorely lacking in the AWS and Azure space." Okay. They also said, "I'm also lacking Angular and React." Okay. So, if they haven't had the opportunity in their work experience to go build that up, what's a way that they might be able to demonstrate that they're learning about that stuff if they've built systems with that kind of stuff? Side projects, right? So, I think this is the perfect example for a side project section. I would say in general if someone has this much experience and they're still interested in staying in this particular domain. So a lot of like net development right that's what I see a lot of on here if that's where they want to focus and keep pushing through on that great I think I would say I highly recommend you just think about showcasing the impact a little bit more. I would say the other thing is like the real estate on here. Like to be honest, I think that this person probably has a ton of impact across their jobs to call out. And when I reflect on this resume, like I just think that they're they're not I don't mean to I don't want to sound rude when I say this. I don't think that they're doing a good job of calling out all the impact they possibly had. Right? Four years and I I bet you there's more uh experience to call out here. This one is what is that? six years, seven years, whatever it happens to be. Like I think that there's a lot more that they can call out. They have three bullet points and one of them I was saying this is this could be one word replaced by octa. I truly think that they had significant impact. Like I believe that they did. So my biggest recommendation number one is going to be to go back over this and try to use some of this extra real estate with all the line spacing. Try to get some juicy impact called out. And then I would highly recommend if their biggest concern is that they don't have AWS and Azure sort of experience. I would just get a side project section going on and start to go build some things on the side. I would say like you don't have to go, you know, say I shipped a a product with paying users using Azure and AWS. Like you don't have to go that far, but show that you're learning and you're building with it, right? I think that there's an opportunity to be able to show that on the resume so that someone's not looking at it and going, "Oh, they've never touched it." They can see it on the resume. That might help for getting your foot in the door. Then when it comes to the interview, this person said, "I am good at selling myself." It's literally I copied and pasted it from their email. I'm very good at selling myself. The problem is getting that foot in the door. Great. Show some stuff for AWS, Azure, like these different things you don't have experience with. show that you're interested, that you've been exploring it on the resume with side projects. You could do some certifications and stuff like that to show that you're learning. You don't have it in your work experience. So, you're trying to build up that muscle. Great. Now, your foot's in the door because some of the keywords are matching. They see the interest in your interview. Now, someone's talking to you about these technologies and they go, "Tell me about when you were building with AWS or Azure, like I don't know, some situation." And you might be able to say, "Hey, I don't have formal experience doing that in my previous jobs, but I was building this side project and let me talk to you about that or I've done the certification, so let me tell you what I know about that." I think if you're good at selling yourself and you can lean on that kind of thing, then I think you'll be set up for success. So overall, I think that this is a pretty solid resume in terms of the the focus areas we have, but I do really think that they have more to offer. So I really want to encourage them to add more impact into here. I think the other thing that I would mention um and again I'm nitpicking on this cuz I I think that there's more to it. I don't get a solid idea of the scale of the solutions. We saw the one transaction per section or per second number here, right? 300 transactions per second. Cool. But like other than that, I don't really get an idea for scale. And the other thing is not just the the tech scale, but as a senior software developer, they talked about mentoring juniors, some of the projects they're on, like what are the scales of the teams, right? If you're leading a project, are you leading uh, you know, crossf functional projects with multiple developers? Like what does that look like? I think there's an opportunity for some of that on this resume as well. So, to wrap this up, I think there's tons of potential on this one. I just encourage this person to dig a little bit deeper to call out some of that impact, and I think they're going to have a a killer resume. So, thank you so much for watching. If you're interested in having your resume reviewed, you can submit it to résuméser.ca. Thanks, and I'll see you next time.