Can I Break Into Tech As A Developer With This Resume?

Are you wondering how your resume will perform when it comes to breaking into tech? Welcome back to the ré review series where I review your rsums that you send in. My name is Nick Cantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. In these videos, I talk about the pros and cons of the rums that you've sent in to try and help make sure that you can land your next job. If you're interested in having the opportunity for your resume to be reviewed, you can submit it to résumés at devleader.ca. Now, a disclaimer before I jump into this resume is that everyone who submitted these résumés wants my feedback, and I'm not going to be roasting or grilling or making fun of anyone for sending in. My goal is to call out the things that I think are working really well and the opportunities for improvement. Of course, if there's something that stands out that I think is a big no no, I will call that out as well. For this individual, they mentioned that they were trying to break into tech. So, when we go over the resume, we will notice that it is quite light, and that's going to be the reality for basically everyone who's trying to get started. That's the first thing that I want to call out because if you're comparing this resume to other résumés that you'll see in this series, you might say, "Hey, this one's really light. This one's really heavy. What's the difference? Why do they look different? Is that okay?" And the reality is, yeah, when you're getting started, you're going to have less experience. If we go over at a high level for what this person's included, they have some skills and technologies at the top. They have education and training sort of as the the meat of their resume. And then at the end they have a little bit of experience. If we want to go through this at a high level, we can see that clearly they don't have, you know, much experience because they haven't been in the industry yet, but they did include some other work experience that's not exactly specific to software development. And I don't think that there's anything wrong doing that when getting started. Basically, if you have some working experience, that's probably better than zero. So, I think that there are opportunities where you can call this stuff out. However, if you are in a position where you've had multiple job opportunities and you're not just getting started, you probably don't need to include everything that you've ever done, just the relevant pieces. Let's go ahead and start from the top. I do think that it's helpful to call out skills. Having some keywords and stuff like that right at the top can be useful. The thing that I always mention with this is that if you're having your resume reviewed by either automation or someone that has to go through a ton of résumés, they're probably looking to optimize their time. So, if they can identify keywords that stand out for the position that they're looking for. So, say that they're recruiting for a front-end position and they need React developers, then they might be looking for the keyword React to stand out, right? Or if they're uh looking for C developers or someone who's familiar with ASP.NET net core. Calling some of that stuff out can just make it really quick for someone's eyes to be drawn to it. Or again, if you're putting it through some type of automation, I'm not saying that this is the right thing to do. I'm just saying that if you're trying to optimize, then including some keywords can be helpful. So, if we start looking at these a little bit more specifically, I think there's a couple of things that stand out as being positive and some that kind of just seem a little bit like keyword stuffing. For example, if we're going to call out things like SQL or Postgress, um having them in also the word databases, databases is kind of redundant. We can see that they know some database stuff from SQL and Postgress. HTML 5, CSS3. Um I don't know like that. I guess that's probably helpful for someone who's entry level, but it might seem kind of basic. I see grid just called out here. Maybe not so helpful, but I think that there are some helpful things, right? like we have JavaScript, TypeScript, so some languages being called out. Familiarity with git. Um they have GitHub and version control separately from that. I might just say Git to be honest or if you knew other version control systems like Subversion. I don't really know who's using a lot of other things other than Git, Mercurial, I guess, but other than that, not a whole lot. Um which is fine. If you know them, call them out. I see React. I think that's good to call out. Kubernetes, Azure, AWS. So I think that's good, right? But when we have like backend web development as like a thing in addition to like some of these backend pieces, I don't really see that being a huge benefit. For example, like why wasn't front end called out, right? And I don't think that would be helpful. I'm just saying the consistency here. I would probably keep it more towards the technologies. That way it's a little bit more specific. That's my take on this. But again, there's something that's really positive to call out here is that we do have a breadth of different technologies and skill sets that is helpful. You know, we can go across clouds. Uh we can work with SQL, we can work with React. I think that that's helpful. No.JS, like so there's some good stuff here. I think that's helpful, but make it a little bit more succinct to really just make the other pieces stand out so that it's not just a little bit too generic mixed with some technologies. Let's go to education and training, though. So again, this is the the core part of this person's resume, right? It's the entire centerpiece. Since education and training is the entire core part of the resume, this is where I'd be hoping to see some standout things, right? What makes this individual going to be someone that stands out against the other candidates? Now, at this point, it's probably worth mentioning, and I try to call it out on every resume review video, but there are two things that I always like to mention. And the first is going to be that we want to find ways that we can stand out against the other candidates. So that's going to be one part, you know, what makes you unique. And the other thing is that for every single line on the resume, we want to be asking ourselves the question, why should the reader of this care? What's the point of it? And again, that's not to sound facitious or sarcastic or make someone feel like they're, you know, dumb or silly for writing something. But when you are writing your resume, why should the person who's reading this line care? There needs to be a point for it to be there, right? And if you're on the fence about it, then take it out. replace it with something else that's more valuable. When I look at the education and training part, I can see that they have essentially two sets of coursework which are going to be the first part here and this part here. So the third part down, I can see that they have a boot camp and I can also see that they are going for their uh degree in accounting and finance. So sometimes people will say well oh no look like we have accounting and finance that's not CS that's not computer engineering that's not software engineering. Oh no that's the end of the world. then I don't think that's the case. I think that having some type of education can be helpful. I'm not saying that you need to have it. I think that it can be helpful to show that you're going through and trying to uh better yourself in different ways. Yes, of course, having something like, you know, computer engineering, computer science, software engineering, those types of things for some recruiters will stand out more and some people will say altogether that they don't even care about college or university. I think it's nice to include if you have it, why not? But in this particular case, it's going to be hard to call out what sort of benefit that might be adding for the jobs that they're after. I think if you have it, include it. Same thing for boot camps, right? If you have a boot camp, I think that is helpful to call out. Same point around the college and university part. Some people will say, I don't really care if there's a boot camp involved. But I would say for my personal opinion, if you've gone through some type of education, whether that's college, university, boot camp, I think it's great to call out. I think that that to me demonstrates that you have an interest in learning and bettering yourself. And for me personally, when I'm hiring engineers, that is a trait that I like to look for. To me, it's not as important as which college or university you went to, right? If you had Harvard written down versus some other college or university I hadn't heard of. I'm not going to be sitting there judging you going, "Oh, not Harvard. Like, shame on you." No. Like, you did something. You went to some other education system, and that's great, right? I think that's helpful for you to be able to grow and get better and for me that stands out. I think that's beneficial. It doesn't have to be college or university though. If you have a boot camp that's great, too. If you don't have any of those things, that's not a deal breaker for me either. I am trying to see personally how you try to approach your learning. How are you trying to get better and improve? So if you have other ways to call that out with projects or other things that's going to demonstrate to me that you're interested in learning, I think that's very helpful. So they do have a boot camp here as well. And again, if we're looking through what we see here, like keywords, right? I think it's great they included some keywords. HTML CSS, we see that in the first part, the second part as well. Um, and then we see Tailwind CSS, right? So we can see across three of them, we have like some front-end stuff going on. see JavaScript. I see backend and front-end development in the boot camp. Again, JavaScript, Node, React. Again, I think they've done a good job with calling out keywords across all of these. One of the things that's hard for me to understand here is what was the significance of this? Just to kind of put it into perspective, I think that it's helpful that they did some additional coursework. I think it's helpful they did a boot camp. And I think that it's helpful that they went for post-secary education. All of these are positive things, right? These are good things to include. However, when I read this, what I'm taking away from this is some keywords. I don't have any idea of the significance of this, the impact um and sort of the level of experience that someone was able to gain through this. And that's going to be a challenge. I'm not here to say, oh, this is bad. This person has done a bad job in in their education or their training or anything like that. But as someone reading the resume, I am not able to gauge the impact or significance of that work. I don't know how lengthy was the boot camp. Is this a twoe boot camp? Uh the course work, is this something that was done over again a weekend, a couple of weeks or something like that. I don't know to what depth that this person went to. This might be something that I could uncover in an interview, which is totally fine, right? Something to again put into perspective is that as the writer of this resume, you may have the perspective like I'm just going to pick the boot camp for example. You might say this was the complete web development boot camp and this was actually something that was 6 months long. We worked in teams. We got to uh build all sorts of different projects. We had a capstone. We had to present things. We had to do different code reviews. You might have all of these awesome things that you were doing over some period of time and in your mind you're like, "This was so awesome. I learned so much and then when we look at what's written, is that coming through?" I don't know as the person reading the resume any significance of this. What I could do if I had time, which by the way, people that are likely reviewing résumés probably don't have a lot of time. And you don't want to put yourself in this position where you're either making someone guess or invest additional time when reading your resume. But if I had extra time, I could go research this and see what it's all about. But if I had, you know, 900 other applications to go through, probably not doing that. When I read this, I cannot tell. Again, it doesn't mean that it's bad experience that this person, you know, spent the time doing it. In fact, it could be quite the opposite. It could have been the most amazing boot camp and the most amazing learning experience. I simply cannot tell from reading this. So that would be my major feedback for this middle section. And going back to one of the points I said earlier for each line that you have written here. Why should I care? It's not a facicious question. It's not for me to point at this person and say this is bad. What I want you and the person who wrote this to be thinking through is like when you say that you completed the coursework in here like why should I care about that and what makes that stand out compared to other applicants and if you think about this for just a moment if there's going to be a lot of other people competing to go get a you know entry level front-end position or backend or even full stack based on what I'm seeing here I'm assuming that this person might be gravitating a little bit more towards front-end development just from what they have written I am speculating a a little bit here. But if that was the case, right, how many other applicants are going to be listing things like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript? In terms of the volume of applicants coming in, this would not the way it's written would not stand out to me. I would say yes, this is one more person that also has that, but here is another list of people that also have that. Now, if we're kind of as a recruiter or someone reviewing resumes, if I have to compare these things, whoever has something that's going to stand out will continue to sort of move along in the pipeline. This is why it's really important to answer the questions, why should the person reading this care and how is that going to help me stand out amongst others? I'm going to be repeating myself if I sort of dwell on that anymore, but I hope that that makes sense. I would always remind people like if you are the person who wrote this or if you're looking at your resume either while you're watching this or after you watch this and you're like, "Hey, my resume is kind of in the same shape." You might be thinking, "I have all of these other thoughts that I could have been expressing." But if they're not coming through clearly to the person that's reading the resume, then it's not really going to have the impact that you think it might. If we jump down to the last section here, this is where they have some work experience that is not related to doing any software development. And like I said with the education as well, that's totally fine to include, especially if you're going for an entry- level position. A lot of people will be concerned where they're saying, "Hey, look, like I I haven't had a software development position before, even if they've had, you know, different part-time jobs and stuff before that." Or even for people that are switching careers, right? There are people that I've talked to, people that have have submitted resumes, people that I've interviewed on podcasts and such that are career switchers and they might have 5 10 years of experience and they're like, I want to get into software development and then they have concerns around well all of these other people maybe they're younger than me, they have this head start where they've been building programs for longer or they've had development jobs and then they're questioning like all this other experience I have that's going to be worthless. But it's quite the opposite because if you have other work experience, being able to work somewhere and have accountability, being able to demonstrate that you were taking ownership of things, that you were working in teams, there are plenty of other things that go along with building software that happen when you're actually working somewhere instead of just, you know, building projects or doing assignments for school. Being able to call some of that stuff out can really help you stand out. This goes back to differentiating, right? for someone else that submitted a resume that had zero work experience. How might I, as someone reviewing a resume, try to gauge if this person is going to have good, you know, interactions with other people? Do they have experiences in teams? Like maybe in some of their schoolwork, maybe in a boot camp, but if I'm reading through and I can look at what they were doing at their job and I could get the understanding that they've been doing something in Teams, that could be very helpful. So if we go through the job responsibilities here. So assist with the day-to-day accounting functions including preparing journal entries, account reconciliations, analyses, and assisting with monthly monthly uh close processes. Um okay, so this to me is demonstrating that this person had some responsibilities that they had to carry out on a regular basis. Something that I am not gaining from this is sort of what the impact of that was. But that's going to be probably a little bit too critical for someone who's just getting started. But I do want to mention it because I think it's good advice to carry with you if you're trying to get your resume polished up. If you can think through this work and how that might have had an impact on the regular functions, being able to demonstrate that in a quantitative way could be helpful. Right? So at least at a high level from this first point I can understand that this person had regular responsibilities that they were accountable for and that is helpful. That might be something in an interview if this person made it to that phase that I would be saying hey tell me about that right tell me about how you were able to demonstrate accountability and ownership and what that looked like and this could lead into some good behavioral interview questions and answers for this candidate. So they say responsible for vendor onboarding, handling incoming invoices, obtaining necessary approvals, facilitating payments to vendors. So this is an example, and this might not stand out to some people, but this is an example of having to work with different stakeholders. Some people that have never had to do this before are going to be in a position where perhaps their communication skills and understanding how to navigate work with others doesn't really stand out as much, but this person does have some of that experience. This is a really good thing to call out especially for someone who is just getting started. The final point, prepare account reconciliations and bank reconciliations ensuring that general ledger activities ties to the bank. Overall, I think that this is um you know, good stuff to call out because there are some other skill sets and experiences that are not exactly software development in terms of like the technical pieces that we always think about, but these do tie into being able to work in teams and sort of regular activities that we're going to be doing in general. Personally, I would not ignore this kind of stuff, especially if you're just getting started. If this person had a ton of other work experience, especially if it was more related to software development, I would start pushing this kind of thing off of the resume. But for getting started, I think it's great to include. So far, I've gone through the different sections of this resume, kind of called out different pros and cons, but there's one thing that really stands out to me that is missing from this resume that I think would help a tremendous amount, especially given where they're at in their career journey, and that's going to be side projects. On this particular resume, I don't see anything called out about things that this person's built. I've seen that they have some experiences with different technologies, but I have no idea if they've been trying to practice and build things outside of I can't even say really outside of work because they don't have software development experience, but outside of school, right? Are you trying to further your learning and experience by building things? Not everyone has time for this, but what I would say, going back to what I said earlier, if you have other people that are applying for these types of jobs, that's going to be your competition. If other people are creating the time for side projects and things like that, that's something they can include on a resume that is even more experienced that can help them stand out. The person that submitted this may have some stuff that they are building on the side, right? It doesn't have to be something that they're selling for money or anything like that, but just trying to get more experience, build things, that can be super helpful. If they do have that, I would absolutely include it. And if they don't have that, that is something that I would say you might want to try and find some time to carve out because that's going to be something your competition is doing. So, overall, I think that this individual, especially for someone getting started, has included some some great points here. I do think that there is a little bit of ways to go here in terms of being something that does stand out more. And I think like I said, one of the biggest things that would really help is taking some of these experiences and trying to demonstrate through calling out on different projects that they built and having a section for that would help a lot. So that would be my feedback for this individual. And if your resume is in a similar sort of uh format or state that this person's in, then that would be my recommendation to you as well. So, if you're interested in having your resume reviewed, remember that you can submit it to résuméser.ca. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time.