NO Professional Experience: First Developer Job Resume Review

If you were trying to break into the software engineering industry, what should your resume look like? Hi, my name is Nick Cantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. In this video, we're going to be looking at a resume submitted by someone trying to break into the software engineering industry. And like all the other videos in this ré review series, I'm going to be trying to offer constructive criticism. That's going to mean I'm calling out things that I think are done well and opportunities for improvement. My disclaimer is that I'm not trying to pick on anyone. This is not going to be a resume roast. It's not meant to make fun of anyone. It's simply to try and help. Now, these people have submitted their resumes because they are looking for feedback. They do want to be better. And I think that's important that I do try and offer opportunities for improvement. If you're interested in having the opportunity for your resume to be reviewed, you can submit it to résuméser.ca and I'll try to consider getting a video made for it. With that said, let's jump over to this resume and check things out. As mentioned, this person is trying to break into the industry. They did mention, I'm just pulling up their email here, that they don't have any professional experience yet, which is as expected when they're trying to break in, but I guess that also suggests that they don't have um other experiences outside of software development. So in some cases people might be career switchers in which case I would say you might want to try and list some other work experience because even though it's not necessarily related to software development and building applications if you have other professional work experience in some other industry so you are switching over careers I think that is an interesting opportunity to include but in this person's case as far as I can tell they're just getting started in their career in general. The first thing that I'll note at the top, they have a little bit of a summary here. Um, I think that this can be a nice personal touch. Depending on what they have, uh, you know, if you had a loaded resume and then you were trying to add a little bit of a summary here, too. I think that that might be taking away from some of the real estate that you want to have some other things called out. This person's case, because there's not a lot of, you know, they don't have other work experience, it's just going to be projects. I think that this could be a nice little opportunity to be personal. um they can include some technical skills and things like that. So they do mention junior full stack developer experience in modern technologies. You'll note that uh a lot of the time if I'm criticizing or critiquing something when things start to sound very general to me that's kind of like fluffing things up and it sort of has at least for me like a bit of a it backfires a little bit because I'm going I don't know what that that means. I have to guess at what that means. So, two things that I want you to think about as we go through all of this are one, do I have to guess at what this means? Because it's a little bit ambiguous. That's something we want to try and avoid. And the other thing is that, and I'll say this in every ré review video I make, is why should I care? Which is not meant to sound harsh, but it's a tool for you to use when you're writing your resume. And if you're going line by line in your resume, you've included some piece of information. Why should I care as the ré reader? What is it that's important about that line? Because if you've written it and you're trying to think about the person reading it and they're going to say, "Why should I care?" If you can't answer it, it might be because it's one, not important, or two, it is really valuable, but you need to explain it in a different way. Maybe that's offering more detail, being more specific, or finding a way to elaborate on the benefit of that thing. Hands-on experience in modern technologies, I don't know what those are. On the front end, I use Nex.js. Okay, so they have included something at least to create responsive and efficient interfaces. While on the back end, I work with Nex.js to implement secure authentication using JWT and passport. So this in my opinion ended up being a you know a sentence that they have a couple of things listed for for tech skilled in Postgress for data management experience using Docker. Okay. So, in the end when I read this part, this ended up being like a sentencebased way to just highlight uh some technologies, and that's not terrible by any means, but I think they have, you know, at the bottom they have stack listed. So, everything that they just said, they basically have um some of them called out from their stack list. What I probably would have done is just move that stack list right up to the top, right? Otherwise, I would try to focus this summary on maybe something that's a little bit more interesting about them because this ends up being repeated information. If the goal was to call out technologies and things like that, uh I would say just bring it up to the top, get that out of the way. That could be uh potentially helpful when people are trying to go through large volumes of résumés. They might be looking for skills right at the beginning, especially for more junior roles. Uh sometimes that can be the case, right? they people might want to make sure that some junior uh that's trying to break into the industry or if it's an intern like what are we going to have to teach this person? Oh wait, they already know a little bit about React. They've used Nex.js. Cool. Okay, so they know some JavaScript. They know React. They work with JWTs for authentication. Okay, cool. Like they have a baseline. Like I will keep reading the rest of this resume. If someone were to have listed out skills that were completely different, that person might go, "Uh, I have, you know, 950 other resumes to go look through, so maybe already I can tell this person is likely statistically not going to be as good of a fit compared to some other people, I might just move on." So, I think if you have some good skill sets to call out, pulling that up to the top could be helpful. if they wanted to do it this way with the summary, then I would just say that having it at the bottom again, uh maybe isn't so helpful. So, just something to think about in terms of the real estate that's on your resume. So, overall though, not like this is bad. Um, but the way that I see this is just a a sentence or paragraph way of of listing technologies, which I saw the bulleted list at the bottom. So, I I don't see the the big differentiator there. Okay. Next up is experience. this person has listed what I would call projects as their experience. Like I think I understand why because this is truly like the experience that they've had. I would probably categorize this as projects because the way that I interpret this and I know that it's not the reality is like when I see experience listed like this, it makes me think that it's like work experience, but I know that it's not because of the context they provided me. It's not that this is wrong, but to me it almost feels like the the word that I would want here is projects because that's truly what it is. Maybe it's a little bit pedantic, but you know, if this person was building these things and they had turned it into a business and they were operating it as such, then maybe calling it work experience. I know they didn't say work experience. It's just general experience. But something to think about, I would personally just call these projects. But one thing that I want to call out kind of make a a little bit of a a point of again not pick on this person by any means. I know that they're trying to get into the industry. So if we look at the dates and I sometimes will redact these and I didn't in this case because I don't think there was enough information. These are just projects not companies they've worked at. If we look at the dates, so this is 11 2024 and 10 2024. Uh the date that I'm recording this is February 23rd, 2025. So uh essentially this person in terms of their experience, they have a couple of months. I want to mention this because I know that a lot of people are going through this. I think that this is going to feel extremely challenging to apply to jobs with this resume. And it's not because I think their projects suck or something like that. I don't think that's the case at all. We haven't even started talking about this yet. When I see this and I know that this person is trying to apply to jobs, in my head, I'm all that I'm thinking is this is probably going to feel very difficult for them because if they started submitting this to a whole bunch of places, the volume of applicants that are going to be there, the volume of applicants are going to have very similar experience like NestJS, Nex.js, JS like front-end tech like there's going to be an overwhelming number of people with a very very similar set of experiences that may have been doing it for more than a few months. I'm not saying that those individuals are necessarily better. This person might be an awesome developer even with only a few months of experience. But what I am saying is that it's probably going to be very difficult to convey that if that is a reality with very limited experience. Okay. So I'm trying to be transparent about this. One thing that I want to segue in before we read through these projects because that's the bulk of this resume is these these couple of projects. The feedback right there the the recommendation that I would have for this person is certainly not to give up by any means. I know there's a lot of stuff on the internet right now where it's like, oh, all the junior software developers are, what do people say? They're cooked, right? Cooked. Um, and you know, AI is taking over and the job market sucks and it's impossible to get a job. Nope, I don't think so. Uh, I, you know, even over the last year, I was interviewing junior level developers. So, the jobs are out there. I think that it is very competitive and I think that there are a lot of people in this position like this individual that have a little bit of experience from working on side projects. There are a lot of people in this exact same boat. One of the goals if we were to think about uh three stages I try to frame this in three stages. Three stages of getting your first job. It's going to be your resume and applications. That's the first stage. And that's a lot about getting noticed. The second stage is going to be about your interviewing. And when I talk about these stages, there's different sets of skills to focus on because the goals are actually different at each stage. And then the third stage is actually having the job and performing well at it. This person's in stage one. And the goal in stage one or phase one, however we want to call it, is going to be about standing out and getting noticed. This person has limited experience and the experience they do list is a very common set of frameworks and technologies. They're going to be disadvantaged purely based on statistics. That does not mean that there's no chance. So what do we do? I would highly recommend to this person to try and find some opportunities to differentiate. Right? will notice one of their projects that's listed a little bit below is blockchain. Interesting. That is not just the same as working with a JavaScript framework. That's one thing that's interesting. Again, we're going to revisit the projects at the end. What I would say and a way that they could try to add more to their experience aside from just projects are what other types of opportunities could this person be doing? It's great that they have some side projects. I absolutely encourage everyone to be trying to build things on the side. Does not mean that you have to try and create the next Facebook or monetize and get a million users or something like that, but building things on the side to learn for sure. But there's more that we could be doing, especially if our experience is limited. One thing that comes to mind is that you could be looking for open-source projects to contribute to. You could be looking for different companies or not for-p profofits that you could be volunteering for. This is again going to give you some actual real experience. It's not going to give you money if you're volunteering, but it will give you potential experience. And if someone is accepting volunteers, that means they might not be very picky. You might be able to get your foot in the door and now you have different sets of experience you could list. Like I worked on a team, right? That's completely different than anything listed here. that's going to be completely different than anyone else in your exact position who just has a couple of projects they've been building on the side. You've worked with other people, right? That's sounds small, but it's one big advantage because in software engineering, we're building software in teams. You had to onboard to someone else's codebase, right? That's a a whole set of skills that you have to go learn how to effectively navigate larger code bases that you didn't create from scratch. So, we have a couple of ideas there. I would also say that if you can go to meetups, you might be able to network with people. Maybe that's just virtual. If you could do it in person, that's great, too. There might be clubs. I know in this person's case, I don't think that they listed out any um any school. Uh I know, sorry, they do have their education listed at the bottom. Uh and it is ongoing. So, in this case, if they're if they're at university or college, I think this is such a good opportunity. go see what types of programs or clubs or whatever sort of networking for um developers exists at your that's being offered. Right? I know when I was going through school, I didn't take advantage of anything that was like, you know, robotics club or these different teams and stuff. If you're just trying to get experience, I highly recommend you go do this. This is such a good opportunity to go back up to this list up at the top. We have a couple of projects for a few months. How do you want to stand out from everyone else? that's in the exact same boat. I did the robotics club. We sent a robot to this competition and we got second place. Or, you know, there's so many interesting opportunities that you might be able to find at your college or university like this. I feel like when I reflect on my own experience in college or university, right, like I didn't take advantage of almost anything like that. So, would highly recommend that as a way to differentiate. But because this person's in that first phase, we need to look for those opportunities to differentiate. Otherwise, statistically, this person will likely be passed over a majority of the time. And the reason why is because based on what's listed, it's only going to take for someone looking at résumés at least, it's only going to take someone with a little bit more experience to automatically supersede this person, which is unfortunate because this person could be very great, but they're not standing out with what's written. Let's go over to their projects now and wrap this up. So, based on their projects here, they have one, they say full stack developer. We can see the different technologies. I think this is good. I do appreciate, I've said this in other videos, right? When people have their technologies listed out, that's helpful. And if you can sort of include the technologies in your experience or the projects you're working on, then I can actually, as the reviewer of the resume, see how you're using them. It's not, you know, you list in your 50 programming languages, you know, and you're saying, I know Visual Basics 6 and I know Rust, and then I look through your projects and work experience, and I'm like, I don't see that you've used that anywhere. It doesn't mean I don't believe you. It just means that, you know, if the other language you used was Python the entire time that you listed them out, then I might say, "Okay, well, you're probably quite strong in Python and maybe these other languages you don't know so well because I just don't see them being called out." I do like when people call out the tech stacks and languages and stuff throughout. I think it's uh very useful. If we're looking through what they've done, what I see across these, you know, it's kind of tricky when you're building side projects or if you haven't worked somewhere professionally cuz usually what I would say is they want to talk about impact. Why did what you're building here have some impact? Why is it significant? It's not wrong that they don't have that or it might be difficult to call out. I think that can be one of the challenges with side projects. I'm just going to sort of mention as someone reading this like what do I like what do I see? What stands out to me? I see the tech stacks which is like I said helpful and I see that they have tech stacks and stuff they're calling out that sort of get us end to end right containerized architecture I see they're using docker I see they have some automated workflows GitHub actions I'm assuming so they have their tests I'm assuming like some type of automated build deployment thing going on here front end back end so I'm getting a very highlevel idea that this person has worked end to end, but it's only like if you remember what I said at the beginning of this video, I have to guess at everything else or if I'm reading this like why do I care? The answer that I'm getting for why do I care about reading these is that someone's trying to indicate to me that I've spanned the full stack of development. That's sort of all that I get from reading this. My feedback to the person that wrote this would be if there's more that you're trying to get me to understand from this, I would say like maybe find different ways to try and articulate this. So, it's not that this is bad, but I'm just trying to indicate this is really all that I'm extracting. They have spanned the full stack of things and I don't really know much else about what's going on, right? And that might just be because this project's pretty new. Sort of the reality of working on a relatively new project. Let's go down to this last project they have, which is blockchain. I would say if this person is applying to other blockchain roles, like if that's where they'd like to go, this is great. I think that this is something that can help help them stand out. There might be plenty of other people that are doing blockchain stuff, but the reality is like if you think about applying to somewhere where having a special set of skills is helpful, then include that if you have it, right? I think maybe that's very obvious. I'm just saying it out loud. So, if that's their interest, that's great. This can be a little bit I mean they don't have many projects or experiences listed out in the first place. So it's fine totally fine to include this. If you were in a situation where you're like kind of fighting for real estate on your resume cuz you had like 10 projects. I would say blockchain is going to be pretty specific. So if you're applying to a job that has nothing to do with crypto or blockchain, probably don't include it. If you have some other experience is going to be beneficial. It's going to be pretty specific, right? Someone at a different company, even a recruiter that's reading through a resume, they might have a really hard time trying to understand why anything to do with blockchain might be beneficial to what they're building. Perhaps it's because there is no benefit. But the reality is having it as a specialized set of skills and applying to a job in that field can be very helpful. So overall, um, you know, I think the biggest piece of feedback I have here is that it's going to be really difficult to apply for jobs and get and have success in standing out without more experience. If we go down a little lower, they've called out languages. Um, yeah, this person is from a different country. So, right now, like I'm Canadian, I live in the US, and I think that depending on where they're applying to and stuff like that, um, maybe this can be very beneficial. what I don't have experience in and I'm just trying to be very transparent. So, I'm trying to, you know, put my hat on as someone who lives in a different country that um so if this person I think they said they're in Brazil. So, if they're in Brazil and they were applying to uh work at a Brazilian software company, I might imagine that they would have client potentially have clients or other uh stakeholders they're interacting with that speak English. It's relatively common that happens at companies, especially if they're international. And that might be a very beneficial thing for them to call out and say, "By the way, like yes, I speak Portuguese. That's my native language, but I also do speak English, right? And that might be something where it's like, hey, that's actually very helpful because we actually have a requirement that people working here have to speak English to some degree, right?" So, I think that that could be a helpful thing to call out, which I've done. I'm trying to call this out as a bias I have because I speak English as my my first language and it's not something that I've really had to think about. So just making a note that that could be a helpful thing. My biggest recommendation for this individual is like let's try to find some other experiences that you can layer on here that are going to help you stand out. And because you're still in college, I would say one of your best bets is to be networking there and see what types of opportunities you can find there. So, I honestly do wish this person success. They are still very early in their uh in their sort of uh career adventure and I'm excited to see what types of other experiences they can pick up and how they're going to try and differentiate themselves in terms of that experience that they're building up and standing out. So, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time.