Fix Your Software Engineer Resume in Just 15 Minutes

The senior software engineer knows a lot of technologies, but how does that come together in their resume? Hi, my name is Nick Cosantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. Welcome to the ré review series where I review the rums that you submit. Now, if you're new to this series, this is where people submit résumés that I'll check out. I will give my constructive criticism. So, that's not just going to be, hey, this is all nice and it's not just going to be a roasting session either. I'll be talking about the things that I think are working well, opportunities for improvement. And keep in mind, these are my opinions. If I'm reviewing résumés, there are going to be different opinions out there. So, if you're interested in having the opportunity for your resume to get reviewed, submit it to résuméser.ca. With that said, let's jump over to this resume for the senior software engineer and check it out. All right. So, this resume was submitted to me and there wasn't really any extra background information, but we can see that they are a senior software engineer beyond all the redacted text that I have on here. So, I apologize for that. We're going to go through the structure to begin with. There are some links up at the top. We have the typical sort of technical skills tools, that kind of thing. Up at the top, that's where I like to see it personally if it's going to be included. Then, we jump right into professional experience. I'm just going to keep scrolling through. So, we'll go through it. There are two pages here. I know some people freak out about the length of the resume. I've seen single page, two-page, threepage. I don't think there is a magic number. I think that if you have the experience that's going to take two pages, perhaps up to three, that's not the end of the world. But I would question if you're starting to have that much, is there a way that you can condense it down into roughly two? Because is all of that experience actually relevant within two pages? I still think you're doing great, but we're still in the work experience here. And then that's sort of it. So other things that you might see on résumés are going to include things like any formal education that you might want to call out, certificates, that kind of stuff. Projects, so any side projects that you're building. So this person's included their skill summary at the top and then their work experience. So nothing wrong with that. But that's sort of the layout of this resume. If we start things off by looking at the professional experience, I'm going to go through each section a little bit. So the tech skills are called out per job. And I think that that's helpful. So, as we go through each of these, like I just did when I was scrolling, you'll notice they call out tools and tech as it's pertaining to each job. So, I think that that is helpful. On the first job, they do call out leading teams. I think that's very beneficial, right? So, leaving leading a team of six developers, but then they also call out that they're not just like leading those developers in terms of managing them or something like that, but we do see that they're working as a web development uh and AI subject matter expert. And that's both for clients and internal business processes. But the other thing that's pretty cool here too is that they're calling out that they work with the CEO and other board of directors. I think this experience is a little bit unique because you have some team lead type of activities. You have individual contributor type activities, but then you also have these interactions with executives or other people that are stakeholders. Overall, I think that's a really good combination of things to call out in a job. So that's I think pretty unique experience. If we jump down to the second job they have here, they listed founder and lead architect behind the product that they're working on. Again, it's redacted. I just have a lot of this stuff redacted to keep these people private. So, I think that's pretty cool. They have a patent pending R&D project, right? Uh AI call out. So, again, a lot of jobs these days, I'm pretty sure there's going to be more and more focus on having AI included. So, that's awesome work. But overall, pretty interesting to have founder and lead architect type of experience listed out. If we go down to the third job they have listed here, I think this is also interesting that they have architecture called out. So, architecting developing our client side application. But something else that's really helpful here is mentored junior developers. Now, just in terms of language, it's a small detail, but I had mentored a few junior developers. It's kind of informal to say this, but it also starts to diminish what was being done. So, to say something like I had mentored a few junior developers versus I mentored junior developers. uh one is a little bit more formal and doesn't um you're not like lying by saying I mentor junior developers, but you don't have to be like more honest by sort of suggesting it's only a few. It kind of minimizes the impact of that. So I would maybe change that phrasing up just a little bit on the the few junior developers. But overall, as we're going through this, uh, I'm trying to call out that not only is it just technical pieces called out, but some of these other types of interactions, whether it's mentorship or other stakeholder interactions, I think that's really helpful. I'm going to scroll down a little bit. I'll skip over this job, go to this one just so we can get through more full stack development. So, I think this is pretty helpful to to call out. It's full stack. We have some database admin called out. We have QA and testing called out. DevOps. So in terms of all of the pieces that go into the software development life cycle from the technical side, I think we get to see all of that called out in this contractor position. So pretty helpful. And then I think in the last job I'll briefly talk through here. So another full stack type of job that we have. They do have uh various clients I called out. So this spanned fintech, utility, e-commerce and media. But again frontend, backend and cloud architectures. The other part that's interesting here is consumerf facing and internal platforms because these types of experiences can look a little bit different in terms of the software development life cycle. Right? If there's things for internal, your timelines might look a little bit different. How much polish goes in might be a little bit different. How you're getting those requirements might look different. I'm not saying it's better or worse. It's just different. Like at Microsoft right now, I've been doing a lot more sort of platform work for internal teams, right? So yes, it affects end users for sure, but a lot of our customers are going to be other partner teams that build on our platforms. Conversely, before Microsoft, the stuff I was building was a lot more consumerf facing. So these are just different, not better or worse. Now, the number one piece of feedback that I have for this resume is going to be around the sort of impact that this individual had at these places. Um, I think that when I read through this, and I know I was kind of skimming through it and kind of just briefly summarizing it, the biggest piece of impact I have is that I actually don't know any type of impact that this person had. What we have at each of these is a summary. And I bet you that at each of these jobs, based on what this person's written, I bet you they've had great impact. The difficulty here is that I have to either guess at what that is or I have no idea or I would have to sit down and talk to them to try and extract that. When we see things like working closely with the co and board of director to gather requirements, put together technical tickets for our mission critical projects, how did those projects pan out? What what role did you play in making sure that was successful? Right? Like you did those things, but did that actually translate into impact? If we go through all of these jobs, I have literally no idea the individual stuff that this person did with respect to impact. And I don't mean that to be rude. I mean that to call out that this is a very common thing that I think people do with résumés. The reality is the person who wrote this, if they were to think through their work experience, just as an example, right? Let's take this first one. If um I were to sit down with this person and say, "Tell me about all the awesome stuff you did here." I bet you, and I don't know this person, but I bet you I could sit down with them and they could talk my face off. They could tell me about all the cool stuff they build. They could tell me about the different challenges they had to overcome, things like that. But the problem is that it's a resume. And if the resume doesn't get my attention, there isn't going to be an opportunity to go have this sit down conversation. And I wanted to again like stress that because I had someone respond to one of the resume reviews recently and they had said, "By the way, I was given some advice that was like almost like to what was the phrasing? Almost like to bait the uh the reader into going, "Oh, that sounds interesting. We should talk about that in the interview." No. If there isn't enough to hook me with the resume, there is no interview. There is no opportunity to bait people into having interesting conversations in the interview. There just won't be one. So, you need to be able to try and demonstrate on your resume all of the awesome stuff you've done and especially call out the impact that you've had because if I have to guess or not have any idea, I go, "That's pretty cool." But like I'm not going to go schedule time if there's other candidates that are already demonstrating on their resume the impact they've had. So I don't mean for that to sound too harsh or anything like that because like I said, I fully believe that across all of these experiences, this person does have some awesome stuff to call out. the fact that they have founder experience, the fact that they've done full stack, they've done architecture, you know, like I keep going back to this point here, like working closely with the CEO and board of directors, that's an interesting set of stakeholders to work with. It's pretty rare, I would say, that a lot of people have that kind of experience to be able to put down on a resume. So, talk about it more. Talk about the impact that was had. So, that's my biggest piece of feedback. The other big piece of feedback that I want to call out in case it's not obvious, this is a bit extreme in terms of technical skills, tools, and knowledge to call out just to give you a little bit of an example. And again, this isn't meant to pick on this person or anything like that, but depending on the roles and stuff that they're applying for, optical physics and astrophysics, do you need that on every resume? Nope. If you're not applying for anything that's related to optical physics and astrophysics, I would get that out of here. It just becomes noise, right? Because if I'm looking through this, I would I mean, quite frankly, I would say as a human, I'm not going to read through that. This is too much for me to go read through and really understand all the details. I might skim it, right? I see Java, um, I see Bitbucket, Jira. I'm just kind of like having my eyes glance around React Native, um, JavaScript, TypeScript, AWS. So, I'm just letting my eyes kind of quickly look around. But the problem is with that much content, it's just noise. Another little thing to call out, right, is like HTML, HTML 5, XHTML, CSS, CSS3, CS, SS. Oh my god. SS as a tongue twister. Um the like I think we're just getting into like too many little details that may not be relevant. The part that builds on this that makes it uh a little bit more sort of uh more noise I would say is that while I like having tools and tech called out, we're basically repeating all of the same things across all of these. If we look, each job uh that they have listed has tools and tech called out. Tools and tech, right? It's cool because I know that they use those things specifically in the job. But going back to my prior point, I don't know how they were necessarily applying those things. So I do see Vue 2 and Vue3 migration. Cool. That means I see Vue.js here. Okay. I see PHP, Node, and AWS and MySQL. Cool. Where was the semantic search? What was the AI development? What was like the leadership I guess is going to be the few junior devs. But the trouble here is that while it's listed with the job, I'm not able to sort of correlate it to the impact that was had. So like I don't know they have Kubernetes listed here. Okay. Like how much experience or like what type of experience do they have with Kubernetes aside from just listing it with the job? Again, as someone reading the resume, I have to start guessing at that or I would have to sit down and ask them. So, I think those two things together, just the um sort of the lack of impact called out for each job. And then I like this idea where they're calling out the tools and tech, but I don't like that we're basically just blasting terms across the entire resume without impact. What I would much rather see instead of a dedicated uh little section like this is talk about the individual impact that you had in the role and then call out the core things as part of that statement. So for example, let's go pick another um like the semantic search and AI development part, right? So you could say like you know was building out this set of features of this part of the product or service that uh you know that did x or moved the needle x amount or x% leveraging semantic search as part of our AI development efforts. Right? So you're baking in the tech into the impact. That's personally how I would recommend doing it because overall the volume of text that is on this resume is a couple of summaries and then just a ton of keywords. That's sort of my reflection on this resume. Again, I don't mean for it to be hyperritical because I do think that this person with all of the experience they've called out, if they truly have working experience with all of these things, that's a lot. They are a senior software engineer. They have been through a lot of different things. So, I think this is a great sort of start, but I think that they need to really refine how they're presenting the impact that they've had. I hope that you found that helpful. Just a friendly reminder that if you want your resume reviewed, you can submit it to résuméser.ca and I'll try to go through it just like this. If you thought that was helpful, remember to subscribe to the channel and I'll see you next time. Take care.