NAILED IT! What Makes This Software Engineer's Resume Stand Out？

Welcome to the RSé review series where I review the résumés that you submit. My name is Nick Cosantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. In this video, we're going to be going over the resume of a mid-level engineer that's worked at Honeywell. Now, a quick note before I dive into the resume itself, I just wanted to remind folks that if you want the opportunity for your resume to be reviewed, you can submit it to résumés.devleer.ca. All right, let's dive into this resume. So, as I mentioned, this engineer works at Honeywell. They are midlevel. They did go to university and they had two repeat internships at Honeywell. And if you have a quick look across their resume, you'll notice that it's Honeywell, Honeywell, Honeywell, and Honeywell. Nothing wrong with that. I think it's really cool that they were able to have two internships and then go back fulltime. With that said, I want to start by looking at the structure of the resume. So, they have their LinkedIn at the top. I think that's great. We have work experience rate uh from the beginning, right? Personally, I really like this, especially when we're going to see how much awesome quantitative work that this person's called out on their resume. I think leading with that because it's so strong, is going to be super helpful. So, kudos to them for doing this. We can see a little bit lower below the work experience. They do have their skills section called out. I've mentioned this on other videos. I do really like having a small section for skills, especially skills, languages, different technologies you've worked with. I think that could be helpful especially for tools that might be scanning for things automatically or for someone who is reviewing a resume and at a glance they just want to see has this person worked with X and if that's listed that's a good start. Okay, little bit below the skills section, we have their education. And I think that uh what's really good here is that for their relevant courses, they've called out not just the course codes because I don't know what those are, but they do have the names of the courses, data structures and algorithms, intelligence systems, operating systems, right? I can relate to what these things are versus CS302. No idea what that is. So, I think they've done a good job with that. They have their projects called out below that. So again, I do encourage everyone as much as possible to have side projects. That could be things that you built at school. That could be things that you're just building on the side to go learn. Anything that demonstrates that you are building stuff can be a huge benefit. So please do find opportunities to include that. And then at the bottom, I think this is also great. They called out some type of extracurricular activities and awards, right? So campus involvement. So they have association of computer machinery. They had an acronym for it. uh the ILE E group, ice hockey club, investment club, cryptocurrency club. This just shows that this person is interested in other stuff and I think that that's great. Um so I think if you have stuff like this, call it out. Helps, can be really interesting in conversations during the interview. I just think that if you have things like this and you have the real estate for it on your resume, it's a good thing to include. Also, like I mentioned, they have an award at the bottom. So they have uh this Honeywell employee recognition award. Sorry, this thing will not go away unless I keep my cursor clicked. Honeywell employee recognition award for delivering quality software on schedule while saving 11.5% of the budget. Keep in mind that 11.5% of the budget because something they've done here is they've bolded the quantitative part. And as we go through this resume, you'll notice that they have bolded the quantitative part on most lines of the resume. Actually, I don't know if it's statistically most, but many, which is super awesome. And that's going to be one of the standout features of this resume that I really like. As I mentioned, if we start looking at the work experience, they do have two internships, right? So, intern, intern, and then they have their software engineer one, software engineer 2 part. I think it's really cool that they were able to show the evolution of their role at this company. Now, as this person is advancing in their career and they have different job experiences, different companies they've worked at, I think that they can eventually collapse this kind of stuff and just call out the primary things. Even the fact that they have so many quantitative items that they've listed here, which we'll get into, some of those might even kind of fade away over time because if they're keeping up this type of impact across the different places that they're working, some of these just won't be shining through as much. But being able to eventually over time, depending on how long they want their resume to be, I would say one or two pages is fine. I've seen three-page resumes, whatever, it's not the end of the world. But I think having it into one or two pages is probably a good length, but at some point, um, having like your internships drop off is totally fine. So, you don't need to at a single company split them all out like this. But for where this person's at, I think they did an awesome job with that because it shows role evolution and they're able to call out the different things. I'm just I'm super impressed and I want to dive into these other items in just a moment. Before the quantitative part, I just wanted to also call out if I highlight a couple of things like they have their skills and tech that they've used mixed in, right? So they have the skills section and the tech listed here but you can see QNX Nutrino uh real-time operating system TCP IP we can see C++ C++ Java Rob Rabbit MQ we have the tech called out in the different work experience. This is super helpful because as I'm reading through this and going oh what did this person do? Not only can I see their impact, again, we'll get to that in just a moment, but I can see what they were using to go deliver on that. For me, that's very helpful because if I'm trying to figure out and gauge at a glance what kind of experience this person has in these different technologies, I can see that throughout their resume. Okay. Now, the part that I'm super excited for, and I'm not going to go through every single line item that does it, but I did mention if we go all the way down to the bottom, we can see while saving 11.5% of the budget, and I mentioned that they did a really good job bolding the quantitative part. In other videos, I've talked about every line item that you have on your resume, you want to be able to try and answer the question, why should someone care about this? And I think that they've done an outstanding job with that because they've been able to illustrate the different impact they've had across so many different lines on this resume. Starting things off, led a $1.2 million warehouse automation recontrol project, right? Saving 11.5% of the billable budget serves 100 plus users. We can see that on this line, team productivity by 20%. down here. Output by 15% employing skills in these areas. I'm just kind of scanning through, right? In-house emulation tools saving 46% of budgeted hours for project worth $800,000 there. Like every single part of this resume has some awesome quantitative part. They forgot to bold this part, but I guess that's not really the impact. I'm just like again, my eyes are just jumping to the bold parts. um customized QNX nutrino real-time operating system 50% less production lead time to original hardware and having the project turnover time right these are real impact that this person's had and they're calling it out quantitative is even better sometimes it's really difficult to try and quantify the impact especially if you're trying to reflect on something that happened years ago or something like that so a good reminder that if you're you know working on projects delivering on them, landing them at work, and you know the quantitative impact, maybe go update your resume. So, to summarize the different types of impact that this person's had, I just want to remind you, go through everything that you're seeing on this screen. Look for the bold. Try to look at your own resume and see, can I call out different types of impact that I've had? If I have a line item on my resume, why am I including it here? Is there impact? And can I quantify it? Right? If you can't quantify it, but there's still impact, get that impact listed. Otherwise, you should be asking yourself, why am I listing this here? Like, what is the benefit? And I'm not saying that there isn't a benefit, but if it's not obvious to the reader, you're going to want to try and revisit what that looks like. But I think that this person did an absolutely tremendous job. To be honest, when I was reading through this, I was just kind of like, "Holy crap." Like, this is really, really good. because my eyes are drawn to the quantitative impact. I was literally able to just sort of scan and like look for bold because I knew based on their formatting, the bold was going to draw my eyes to quantitative impact. So, I think if you're looking to enhance your resume, I think this is a great tactic to do so. Okay, diving down to projects. They have projects listed, which I think is great. And then what I would say is I don't know if it's just because they have so much awesome work experience and with quantitative impact called out but then this section now feels a little bit underwhelming just maybe it's the comparison that I'm drawing here. I think that if we look at these two different projects I took a couple of notes on them. Um I was saying the chessbot right so this part here tell me what it's built with. Right? I don't really know much about what was done here. So if we're trying to answer the question you know why is this valuable to the reader? Is it just that you have a project? Because I don't really know what you were doing with this project. What did you build it in? Was there some type of algorithm or something interesting you were doing with it? Because otherwise, I don't really know. And I think if I were to read this, I could imagine, especially based on all the other stuff they wrote on their resume, I can imagine there's some really cool stuff they did here. It's a robotic arm. It plays chess, right? So, there's some algorithms involved. physical chess pieces controlled with voice recognition. What did you use for that? Right? And physical inputs, like what were the physical inputs? How did that work? Right? I think there's an awesome opportunity to try and expand this one and really illustrate what you were doing with your project on the birthday bot. This one says that it's coded in Python, but that's all. I don't really know when I read this one again, like why should I be interested? Is it just to call out that you had some experience working in Python? that might be okay. But when I read this, I don't really know like sort of I don't know the benefit of it. I don't know what you learned from it or why it was impactful. So, of course, I had to offer some criticism here because the top part of this resume with the work experience was just so awesome. But now, let's talk about the opportunities. And really, I think that beefing up the project section is one spot that could use uh a little bit more attention just because it's in contrast with the work experience up top. It feels like it's lagging a little bit behind. It's not to say that the projects themselves aren't good or can't be used here, but I don't really get uh the understanding behind why these are valuable. And even if it was just learning experience, I think that's awesome. But are there other projects or could these ones be enhanced? I would love to see this section built out a little bit more. Personally, I wrote a note here saying I can probably start phasing out some subjects from school if you needed to get real estate in. So, if they wanted to keep this to a single page resume, especially that they're now a mid-level engineer with a few years of work experience. To me, this part starts to become less relevant. I think especially early on, it can be really helpful. Right? You're graduating or internships even internships. This is great. New grad include it. But once you've been mid-level engineer for a little while with your years of experience, I think that if you need real estate back on your resume, then I would ditch this part just to get at least one line back. I had a small comment about the formatting of this resume aside from the redacted part cuz that was me doing this. Um, I think that the bolding was really good, but I can't put my finger on it. I think it's just like the the length of the lines or the formatting of the lines. For some reason, this is straining my eyes to read through. And it's kind of weird because I don't really think of myself as someone that really cares too much about this kind of thing. But this resume in particular, I don't know what it is, the lines feel like they're very long to me. Or maybe it's because the the spacing between the lines is really short. For some reason, reading this resume strains my eyes. It's unusual. I read code all day. I read emails all day. I read messages all day. Something about this is not really working for my eyes. Could just be me, but I figured I'd call it out just because. Maybe you want to get a couple of other people to check it out. Look at the formatting in terms of the line shape and stuff like that, but it seems like such a minor detail and it might be just me in this case, but I think the reason why I'm mentioning this is because you need information to stand out well to a reader. I think the bolding, like I said, is a really good job of doing that. But if it's going to mean maybe other people have the same opinion when they look at this, if it makes it hard for the other relevant information to stand out, then it's going to be missed. And the last note that I had here is really just for where they're going in the future. I don't really know where their interests are. I don't know what types of roles or domains they're applying for. They didn't even mention, they might have just wanted to have their resume reviewed to see if it's in good standing. um they didn't say like hey I'm trying to look for this type of role or I want to go into this company or this domain. So I don't really know but I would say that if they do have an interest in a particular domain then if they're able to because they have so many awesome things called out in their work experience I would say uh depending on the domain they may want to tailor some of this to make some of those things for that particular domain stand out more. What I mean by that is if they know they're going to be applying to a place that is like heavily using uh C andnet, right? If they have a lot of work experience that's calling out all of this impact that's quantitative, if there's other stuff that is .NET and C specific that is impactful, maybe replace some of the lines or make the the part that's quantitative stand out with the C andNET stuff. if they're going to a place it's I'm trying to look through um you know they you know they're they know that they're going to be using Rabbit MQ heavily at the place that they're applying to like finding ways to make that stuff really stand out I think would be beneficial. Um right now I think this is in really really good shape. This is sort of just an optimization on top of it. So, if they do want to customize it for places they're applying to, just try and see uh what the company that you're applying to is really focused on. If they know that they have a particular tech stack or domain, just try to tailor this because I think it's awesome. Tailor it to be a little bit more in tune with that. Otherwise, I think that this is really good as a general sort of resume that they could send out and I'm overall just super impressed by the bolding of the quantitative impact on many of the lines here. So, great job. I wish this person success. And of course, if you want your resume reviewed, remember that you can submit it to résumés atdevleer.ca. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.