Can This Resume Get a Developer Job in 2025?

Welcome to the RSé review series where I review the résumés that you submit. And today we're going to be looking at a new grad's resume. So disclaimer, this will be pretty lightweight, but that's going to be a common thing that we have for people that have just finished up school. So the way that this works is that people send in their resumes. I will give constructive feedback. So that means if there's things that I don't think are working well, I'll call that out and I'll also call out the things that I think are working well. So, you'll get both sides to this because it is a new grad's resume. Like I said, this will be pretty lightweight and then I'll try to give some general advice for this person and others that are sort of new grads trying to get into the industry. So, let's jump over to this resume and we'll start with the structure. So, the thing that I like seeing on résumés, uh, if it's kept really lightweight is just like, you know, a little summary at the top, I think this is great to have. Of course, if you do have links like your LinkedIn, GitHub or a portfolio like this person has done here, I think definitely include that. My reminder for folks is that the links themselves, if you're trying to like put all of the good stuff like, you know, on your GitHub or only in your portfolio, that's a mistake. I think if you have it, definitely include it, but make sure that you try to capture it in your resume. And the reason I say that is that if you don't have your resume standing out, then the likelihood that someone's going to start clicking on links to see more is just probably not going to happen. So, I do recommend that if you have awesome stuff on your GitHub and on your portfolio, think about that. Try to make sure it's captured in the rest of your resume. But let's keep going. I think a skill section is really good. Again, if you can keep it pretty lightweight, but call out some things that you know, technologies or keywords and stuff like that, I think that's definitely helpful. Of course, education, uh, if you have it. Some individuals will not have like college or university or anything like that. If you have a boot camp, include it. Certificates and stuff like that, include it. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think work experience and that kind of stuff will be the most important part, especially long-term. But, of course, if you don't have that yet, that's okay. So, let's keep going. Projects for this individual are going to be sort of the the meat or the where most of the information is on their resume as a new grad. And just something to keep in mind as well, if you are a new grad and you haven't actually, you know, built any side projects or anything like that and you don't have work experience, your resume is going to feel really light. This is just my reminder. This will come up again in this video, but just a reminder that you do want to make sure you have side projects where you can be investing your time building skills and learning things. Include those on your resume. even if you don't have like professional work experience or internships and that kind of stuff. So, finally, this person does call out some languages at the bottom. I think that's great if you have them, right? English, Spanish, and they also have some Japanese. They say not native, but proficient. So, awesome. I don't think that for like most jobs, this is going to be like a a deal breaker or the thing that actually like seals the deal, but there could be some positions where they are actually looking for something like this and that could be really interesting. So again, if you have it, call it out. Especially when you are a new grad or you're very junior and you're not trying to like, you know, reduce as much content as you can to fit it onto like a couple of pages, like you don't have a ton when you're starting and that's okay. It's expected. But the more that you can put on that's relevant or could be helpful, get that on there. Again, high level, I think this is the right pieces. I like the flow of it. Um, it doesn't seem like it's too busy or all over the place. Formatting's consistent. These are all like little details, but I think from reading a bunch of these, like that actually makes a big difference because when you see résumés that are not consistent or, you know, the formatting is kind of all over the place, it really feels like it was tossed together super quick and then that can have like a bit of a negative impression as you're reading through stuff. So, I think overall this is pretty solid. As I was saying, and I said everything's consistent, like this is tiny detail, but like even if we look at the bullet points here, right? these bullet points, the way that this text is indented compared to this one compared to this one. The uh first and the third are actually consistent, but this one has a larger indent, right? It's tiny detail, but like it's a little detail, but this is the kind of thing, you know, small detail like that on here is fine. I've definitely seen résumés where like the capitalization and stuff is all over the place. So, I think this person's done a good job of like just making it coherent. Let's have a look at the projects that they have on here. And so we can see again, I like this a lot. I've said this for work experience, but this works really well for projects. When you call out the technologies, even when you have like a skill section like this, when you call out technologies alongside your work experience or your projects, I think that this is a great thing to do. The reason I say that, let's just kind of pick on like Postgress for example, right? You call it Postgress as a skill. And then if I'm like okay but like how much Postgress experience does this person have if I don't see it alongside work experience or I don't see it alongside a project kind of like well I I actually can't really tell right and the same thing if I want TypeScript or React I'm like okay well I can see React I can see Postgress um I can see TypeScript I can see React I can see down here there's Python fast API right so I can get a bit of a feel for like the different projects and how this person has like spent time on different technologies it's just a highle idea obviously from reading this I won't know all of the details but you want your resume to tell a story like that so I think in my opinion the more that you can kind of correlate these things the less guesswork I have to do as a reader just to give you another example if the three projects they had each one of them said Postgress and React like just to make it even more clear postgress react and TypeScript if that was on like all three of these projects I would say great this person has experience working with these three technologies across three projects. It's not like a fluke chance that they like tried something, they like followed a tutorial. It's like, well, maybe that's possible, but it it feels a lot less likely and a little bit more likely that they've actually spent some time working with these things. So, again, you kind of want your resume to tell a bit of a story with your experience and skill sets. Let's read through a little bit of this though. So, design and code developed a lightweight noode automation platform. That sounds pretty interesting, right? with a React flow-based drag and drop interface. Okay. For building trigger action workflows. Built a modular workflow engine with Google API integration. Okay. Step-by-step debugging. Cool. So, like this seems pretty interesting. The challenging part with projects and maybe this is worth like touching on for this resume review. When I talk about work experience in general and trying to call out like how you share work experience, a lot of the time I say like try to have quantitative impact as much as possible. If you can't quantify it, at least stating the impact, even if it's qualitative, can help, but like you want to kind of drive towards impact. Like I worked for this place, here's the impact I had. With projects, my personal opinion on projects is a lot less about impact. If you can demonstrate impact, if you wanted to say like I was working on this project, there's a really cool optimization problem and I like I don't know I you know optimized the database to be 100 times faster or something like that's super cool, right? That's interesting. It it highlights, you know, uh some type of skill or something that you were working on, some like experience that you have with that. What I think is most important with projects is just demonstrating that you're learning. Like that's my opinion on it. Again, this person is fresh out of school. They don't have professional work experience yet. That's what I would expect for someone, you know, fresh out of school. If they had internships, great. Add those on. By the way, it's worth pausing here for a second to say if you have other work experience that's not developer experience, put it on here. This is your first time trying to apply for like developer positions. If you, I don't know, you worked at some place in high school, right? and you worked there maybe through high school and throughout going to college or university and you worked there for I don't know somewhere between like you know a couple years up to like I don't know however many years that is like up up towards like 8 years or whatever however long you were in high school and college some amount of time right building up experience at some place even if it's not developer experience odds are you worked in teams right like what kind of teams did you work in even you know I'm just want to give you an example that seems like it's very detached from development, but you know, I worked in a a grocery store very briefly, but like if I had been there for a long period of time, I could perhaps talk about how I coordinated with different departments, how I coordinated, maybe I kind of moved up as a ger at the grocery store and I moved up to being able to like help, I don't know, do some of the the floor layout and coordination and working with the other more junior grocerers or helping ramp them up in like kind of mentoring and teaching them, right? like someone had to do that for me. I wasn't there long enough to be able to do that kind of thing. But those things have like on the surface nothing to do with development, right? We're not coding. We're not building software. But there's opportunity for mentorship. There's opportunity for planning and coordination. There's opportunity for working with different stakeholders, working with customers. These are skills that can absolutely benefit developers. And sometimes people will look at their previous work experience, especially if they don't have any like, you know, relevant developer experience. They're just like, well, I won't include it. But then you have nothing, right? I would say something is absolutely better than nothing if you have it. If you don't, that's okay, too. I'm not trying to tell you that you, you know, you're never going to get a job if you don't have any work experience on your resume, but if you have it, include it, right? You can always try to spin some of that experience to make it more and more relevant for working in developer teams. Okay. So, projects though, I really like highlighting the things that you're learning. So, you know, the what's a another uh sort of inverse example. I don't think that this person's doing it necessarily, but I would say try to caution against like making a sales pitch. Maybe that's like a good way to put it. If you're trying to explain your project on your resume, and I've actually been guilty of this on my own resumes, which is why I'm trying to call this out, is like you might be working on something and you're very proud of it, but like you're not trying to like pitch the person on the product or the, you know, the project that you're building because that's not the goal of this resume. You're not like trying to get a customer from doing it or to get another user. you're trying to demonstrate to individuals reading this what you're learning and and your experience and skill set. Try to think about it through that lens when you're talking about your projects, not like how do I make it sound like go sign up now and try it out cuz that's not the goal here. I think the first one's pretty interesting. I think that's a good example to work through. If there are interesting things about the technologies that you're working with that you can call out, I think that would be helpful. So just as an example, this one calls out Postgress up here. Is there something interesting about Postgress? And maybe there isn't, and that's totally fine, but if there is, like maybe call it out like what were you doing with Postgress? Like why did you pick that versus some other database engine? And maybe you could say like I use Postgress. I was hosting it in Azure, AWS or in Google Cloud. Like I think there's maybe a couple of other little opportunities with this to call out and you can talk about how you're leveraging some of those technologies. again just to be able to talk about them more. Right? This is a onepage resume for you know a new grad. So like you can go a little deeper right try to call out the different things you're learning with these technologies. Let's jump to the next one. Personal portfolio. Um I would this is a small thing I would just caution against like words like mastering. And the reason I say this is like June 2025 to present it is currently October. You weren't mastering anything in this period of time. It's the It's like the wrong It's the wrong word, I guess. I understand the intention and I'm kind of nitpicking here, but like I'm calling this out because I have had an experience once upon a time where I remember saying something like in an interview where someone was like getting me to rate my experience with programming skills or like programming languages and I think for like C or Java or something and I was an intern at the time or going for an internship and I was feeling very confident about myself and I think I had said something like maybe it wasn't master but like my level of experience was like a nine out of 10 or something for Java or for C. And I remember they like asked me like two questions right after and I was like I have no idea what you're talking about. It was just a a humbling experience to be like oh yeah like not not mastery it's not the right thing. So I'm nitpicking a little bit here but I understand you know the idea behind it. Build a cache progress uh API using upstach. Cool. Like that's neat. leverage for self functions, serverless, right? So, did we call out, you know, maybe serverless is another thing to call out up here just as an example as I'm reading through this react 3 fiber. Cool. And I I didn't really uh redact that. I don't think that really matters, but anyway, I think that they built something interesting. I think they've called out a couple of the things they're using, but I just kind of go back to the previous advice I was trying to offer up is like where possible, try to talk about how you're using these. and they they do, but like you could always it's not really concrete advice at this point. It's just like you can always maybe add a little bit more or try to like touch on the details. The question that I would get you to ask yourself for every line, sorry, maybe for every line and then also for everything up here, depending on how much that they're they're overlapping. So, for example, if you wrote React up here and you didn't talk about React down here at all, then I would kind of go through this list and say like, well, have I talked about how I'm using React, right? Have I talked about how I'm using TypeScript? And then the inverse is like when you're reading through each individual line, what is the the skill or the experience that you're highlighting? And if that's not really coming through, get rid of the line and add something else that will demonstrate that. the direction I'm trying to to head here. Um, Capstone project developing a multi- lingual translation tool for NATO use cases. Okay, this is like fine for like a oneline kind of like this is what the thing is. If everything in this uh section down here was kind of a statement like this, it's not really telling me like the things that you're learning or how you're applying the technology, but I think it's fine to like have a oneliner like that and then built back in. So, you know, here we're using fast API, we're using MVC async translation. Cool. So, again, this is like, you know, a little detail, but it's kind of telling us that like someone has to think about how that translation's working and they're doing it asynchronously. So, that's kind of calling out. It's one little detail cuz they could have just left out the async part. They could have just said to handle translation using hugging face models, right? But async, at least when I read that, I'm going, okay, like they thought about this experience and then they had to come up with something asynchronous to handle it better. And then we see like like AI obviously is very popular right now. So being able to talk about integrating with AI, selective fine-tuning. So again, a little bit more detail with AI, I think that's great to call out. And then here, this is an opportunity where maybe you could do something quantitative benchmarked output with blue. I don't know how to you would actually pronounce that blur if we're speaking French. And comet scores. I've never I actually I don't know what these are to be honest, but some sort of uh benchmarks or standards. Cool. Like you benchmarked them. Like what were the results? Like what did you do to try and improve them? Like you could kind of go into this a little bit more and I think that would be super cool to see. And then wrote technical documentation and collaborated using J for structure development. Cool. Collaborated using Jira. So how many people worked on this? Right. That's an opportunity. What was your role like in that group? That's an opportunity, right? So, these are a couple things that aren't coding, but like you could talk about that in more detail if you were like the person that was coordinating a lot of this or like, you know, sort of like the project leader. This is a time to shine. If you were working on a team and like no one was really pulling their weight and you were trying to motivate people and get everyone to rally and like taking initiative, like call that out, right? That's the role that you were playing in this environment. So I don't know if this person was in this case, but these are things that you could think about that are not just code. But overall, I think that this is solid to have a few projects like this. What I would advise this person to do is like depending on the types of jobs they're going for. You know, I see like React, TypeScript. If they're doing like if they want to work in web development, full stack, they have full stack right up at the top right. If that's what they're going for, like cool. Like go look at some of the jobs they're trying to apply to. Look for what experience, technology, skill sets, and stuff like that and then cross reference it with your resume and then go cool. Like I'm just making this up, but if you're like, "Hey, I see most places are actually not focused on React. They're like the places I'm looking at, everyone's using Angular." Again, I'm just making this up. Cool. Do you have Angular on here at all? No. Okay. Well, that might be something. Go build, you know, go build a project. Go take one of your projects that you have and go migrate it. It doesn't have to be a brand new thing, but you just want to be able to use projects to show your interest and learning. I would highly recommend you take what you currently have and then look at the delta between that and the jobs that you're interested in applying to that are, you know, junior uh developer jobs in the space that you're interested in and just try to close the gap by building things, right? So, I would say as you're applying to places and networking, don't stop building stuff and try to steer in the direction of the jobs that you want to be doing. And I think that you're on the right track with this kind of thing. So, thank you so much for watching. I hope that advice is helpful. If you're interested in having your resume reviewed, you can send it into résumés at devleader.ca. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.