Resume Audit: What's Holding You Back From Jobs?

In this résé review, we're going to be looking at a mid-level web developer resume. And if you're new to this series where we review résumés together, this is going to be not a roast. It's not making fun of anyone. It's really just going through a resume and seeing what things stand out that this person's done really well in my opinion and any constructive criticism that I can give back to them to try and help improve their resume. So, if you're interested having your resume be reviewed, you can submit it to résumés.devleer.ca. Let's jump over to this resume and check it out. Okay. I like going through the structure to begin with and we can see we have a brief education section right at the top. Um, then we have experience and from my perspective I think having experience kind of take up the core part of the resume. I'll zoom out a little bit so you can see it more clearly. Just like loading the resume with actual work experience in my opinion is the number one thing to focus on. So I like that we get right into it. And then internship on the next page and then we have some projects. So, in my opinion from kind of laying this out, I really like this approach because we get into the work experience right away. And again, it's pretty common, but not everyone does this. But I do like seeing the experience in the reverse chronological order. It's pretty common, but like I said, not everyone does it. But in my opinion, it tells a really nice story for how someone's career is progressing and the different things that they're getting to focus on, especially as that correlates to the work that they're doing professionally. So, let's scroll back in a little bit here. And so, to kick things off, we can see that if we just glance across uh these two main positions that they've had most recently, we have a lot of web development. So, we can see like uh let me switch over to some highlighting tools here. We can see that we have like uh Angular, TypeScript, HTML, we have Node, JS, Bootstrap. So, okay. So, some web tech, we see Angular again, Java, Spring Framework, HTML, CSS, TypeScript, right? So, bunch of web development. That's going to be a pretty common theme here. And I think one of my main takeaways as we go through this resume because I do think that it's done well is that if this individual is looking for this type of work, I think they've done a good job kind of calling that out according to their experience throughout the resume. However, if they are looking for specific roles where they're looking at different types of technology, things maybe that they don't have experience on directly, I think that if you're not able to get that on the job currently, then we'll go look at that in their project listing towards the end. So, that's going to be one of my takeaways for this because like I said, I do think they've done a really good job on this one. One thing that stands out to me and again not everyone does this but when we have the work experience called out right so full stack software engineer companies redacted we see the time the next thing that they do is that they call out some of the technologies right at the top here I like this I think that you can get away with a like sort of skills and tech section but personally seeing it corresponding to the work that you're doing is great so they have you know this called out for some keywords but then we also see the keywords kind across the different projects and stuff that they're working on. Right? So, uh, Angular for I'm just kind of going through and highlighting a handful of different things here, right? AWS, Angular, RxJS, NGRX. So, we have that kind of called out corresponding with the work experience. Again, I like this because the more disjoint that things are on your resume, the more that someone who's reading it has to try and draw conclusions, which may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you're someone who has to sit and read through a lot of résumés, the more work that you have to do when reading a resume, the less likely it is that things are going to be very clear. So, try to make it as easy to understand for the résé reader as possible. As we go through this, I'm not going to read it all line by line, but um some things that I like here aside from just the technology called out. We can see uh some information around scale, right? So used by 10,000 plus agents. User base isn't necessarily a, you know, direct thing that's going to indicate scale, but it can help, right? If we know the number of concurrent users and we can uh understand sort of the scale of system, it does help in terms of complexity or different things that you might have to consider when building applications. Right? Right? If I built a web application and it's published online, that's great if you're going through the deployment and all of these things, but if you have like one user using it or no one uses it compared to trying to support systems at scale that are, you know, thousands, tens of thousands or millions of users, there's different considerations that go into systems of those scales. So, I think that if you have information about that, it's helpful to kind of share in your work experience. It might not be a deal breaker, but that might be something that shines if someone's like, "Okay, this person has seen some of these systems at scale." Migrated backend Java Spring Boot Services right here. Reducing latency and load times up to 70%. In other videos where I'm reviewing RS, one of the things I like calling out is that being able to quantify impact is very helpful. It's not trivial. It's sometimes really difficult to go, okay, I know that I worked on this project. They know that it was important for work, but I didn't get like, you know, an exact number like increased revenue by 17% or decreased overhead by 36.27%. You might not have some of these things. If you do have it, I think that it's very helpful to share because people can really start to understand some of the actual impact that was had by the work that you've done. We can see unit testing, code coverage. Okay, so these are helpful things. some of these things, the more experience you get, the less like relevant it will be to include because if you're, you know, much more senior, there's going to be some things that are almost like you're just expected to do and calling them out isn't really that helpful. But I think at this uh point in this person's career, I think this is helpful information to include. We'll keep going down a little bit more. I think this kind of thing collaborated extensively with product owners to gather requirements, t-shirt size, contributed road map, ensuring timely long-term deliverables. I think being able to call out different collaboration opportunities cross functional, right? If you work with product owners, you work with designers, you work with a testing team, you work with trainers, if you have these opportunities to call out different collaborations, I think that that can be really helpful. And that's especially the case because when you're a lot more junior, sometimes you don't get these opportunities because the work that you're doing is a lot more constrained, a lot more confined, a lot less ambiguous. It's a lot more bite-size. it's well understood. But as you're getting more experience, there's going to be these bigger opportunities where there's things that are a little bit more unknown and you start interacting with other roles, maybe other teams. So showing that in your work experience can be really helpful to say, hey, look, like I'm starting to tackle bigger types of challenges. So I think this is good to call out. We'll move on to the next role. Again, same idea where we have technology called it, but we can see translate UIUX designs into functional experiences for over 1 million monthly users. Now, what we don't know here is like when we're talking about just the UI design or doing some of the front-end pieces, the scale maybe isn't so important, right? But if we're talking about some of the backend pieces, building out the system, that might be a lot more relevant. So, it's still helpful to include if you have it, but you know, just something to think about. Optimize algorithms using robust data structure. Okay, so optimize algorithms and then again reducing site load time in several cases by over 40%. So we can start to understand some of the impact with this kind of stuff. I should touch on this because it might not be obvious, but sometimes when people are talking uh either in interviews or on resumes, sometimes people like to get into the details that are hyper specific to a different product or service that they've worked on and it's almost kind of proprietary. So without really understanding and being part of the team building it, the person who's hearing about this might not get the technical jargon if you're referring to different internal things. So again when you can start saying look like I reduce site load time in several cases by over 40%. I don't have to know all of the you know historic or technical jargon that might go into a product or service you have that's something that I can understand very simply let junior developers so let's highlight that by conducting code reviews to ensure they develop best practices growth mindset agile environment healthy and open team environment these are types of things that again I think if you have some experience like this call it out if people are looking for people that aren't necessarily just junior there's roles like this that exist of But when you're trying to get a little bit more experience and you want someone who's a little bit more senior and they can help juniors out, this is great to be able to say, I have experience coaching other people, guiding them, thinking about how you can influence the team in positive ways, right? It doesn't have to be a formal like tech lead or team lead kind of role. Being able to demonstrate informal leadership is great. So call it out if you have it. Automation, right? Automated deployment processes. So some CI/CD background helpful. something to keep in mind that like when you're trying to call out all the awesome things for the specific role you're trying to do kind of mentioned earlier this person's trying to go for a role that's using particular technologies and stuff like that calling out that experience is great but calling out like things that are you know adjacent to it so being able to have CI/CD experience talking about deployment even if you're not necessarily actively working in a deployment space could still be helpful to say like I have knowledge for how these things work I have some experience there. So again, call it out if you have it. Server side rendering, metadata and advertisements, improving SEO and driving a notable 23% increase in traffic. Okay, so there's again quantifiable impact. Develop 22 plus dynamic and responsive angular components. Okay, so we have some idea for sort of amount of different coverage that this person's done. And then we can see revamp some page achieving a 75% reduction in load time. Right? So optimizing multiple asynchronous backend API calls I think this is a great example of saying like I did this thing here's a quantifiable impact again I don't need to know all the technical details for what happened here because by reading this I can understand at a high level what was being done and some of the experience right so if we have the technology kind of included throughout the work experience and the impact it starts to paint a more clear picture let's scroll down a little lower this is their internship But even in their internship, right, resulting in a, uh, 10% more efficient content updates, created over 50 comprehensive Confluence documents, uh, documentations or documents, I guess, validated your story. So, some of these things like, you know, as you're becoming more senior might seem like less relevant, but this is someone's internship, being able to talk about how you're building out documentation, especially if that's going to help the team or other roles and stuff like that, that could be something very helpful as an intern. So again, if you have the experience, call it out. As this person becomes more and more experienced, like maybe some of this internship stuff might fall off, right? Because if they're going for a senior role or something, you know, more advanced in the future, this kind of thing might not be very relevant at that point in time. But again, for where they're at, I think no harm in calling that out. Just going to briefly talk about the projects. We don't have to go through them in detail, but they have four projects listed here. One of the great things when you have projects is that you can start talking about the different technology that you're using. Right? So firebait I'm just going to kind of go through and highlight some of these things because again if this person did not have some of these things directly in their work experience or had little use of it fire store tailwind I'm just again kind of going through and highlighting AI chatbot next.js Tailwind Gemini serverside rendering. Okay, I'm just going to stop there. But if they didn't have the opportunity to call these different technology use cases out in their actual work experience, then this is a great opportunity where they can say, "Look, I'm building stuff on the side where I'm getting to explore this." When I talk to people about their side projects and like what they should do or whatever else. Personally, when I'm looking at this kind of stuff, I don't need to see that someone has a side project that has tons of users or anything like that. Like, if you do, that's cool. But really, I like seeing that people are trying to explore side projects to go learn and try things out. That's worked really well for me. I think that when I've done interviews and been able to talk about that kind of stuff, the people that are interested in the side projects are interested in what I'm learning about, and I've just found that that translates really well. So that's how I focus on this kind of stuff. From my experience, it, like I said, I think it does translate well. So my takeaway for this person, I think they've done a great job across their resume calling out impact. And I would just say to them, I don't know exactly what role they're looking for, but if they're looking at their tech choices that they've been exploring in their projects compared to what they have across the rest of their resume, if there are gaps, then I would say, "Hey, look, like you've got some awesome projects. Is there another way that you can call out some of these technologies that you don't really have experience yet with? So, I think overall awesome job and just a friendly reminder that if you want your resume reviewed in a similar way, submit it to résuméser.ca. Thank you so much and I'll see you in the next one.