5 Tips For Developers CV

at Mon Jun 4, 2018 in

articles tips

First, let’s make one thing clear I am no expert in HR, nor am I a recruitment guru but during the years I had to interview, test and select a bunch of technical people and I’ve seen the same mistakes over and over again.

The search for developers has never been higher, so a bunch of people get away with a terrible CV. But if you want to go the extra mile and be ahead of the game is nice to pay attention and give some love and care to your CV, some small tweaks here and there can do wonders.

These are my two cents about the subject, that’s only my personal opinion :)

1. Tailor Your CV For The Job

Even if you are very proud of your background as a graffiti artist, please skip this entirely if you are applying for a backend developer. Of course, you can mention your passion about street art briefly to tell a little about yourself as a final note, down there at the footer, use the main space to showcase what you are capable of.

Like if you as a full-stack engineer find a very interesting position as front-end, take some time to review and tone down the back-end side, leave it there as a note, but you need to showcase your front-end skills, in this case, the back-end is a plus, not a must.

2. Keep It Short, And I Mean Very Short

Ok, let’s talk about numbers if its more than 3 pages probably I won’t read it, and most of the recruiters from the places I’ve worked on agree with me on this: the bigger the CV less likely it will be read.

The goal here is the one page CV

Of course, there are exceptions if you’re someone who really achieved tons of accomplishments, well, then maybe you can go on and be a little more wordy about it.

If the recruiter needs more detail he will ask you.

3. Avoid The Buzzword Overload

The easier way to get people distracted while reading your CV is to drop the buzzword bomb. It might serve to impress someone who is not from tech business but usually tells that the guy is trying to stall or fill with every possible hot keyword of the moment increasing his chances to be indexed somehow.

It is not uncommon to see some guys dropping marketing jargons mixed with programming language names without any coherence or context.

This only shows how confusing and unorganized the person is.

4. Presentation Is Important

I know, that probably you are a numbers person and don’t want to know the best font combination or the best alignment for your CV. But it needs to be readable, and preferably not horrendous.

I will drop some hints here:

• 2 fonts max, one for a title and one for the body text. And no, Comic Sans is not allowed.
• Font size is important, make it readable.
• Black & dark gray are your friends.

But don’t overdo, avoid tables, pictures, and unnecessary stuff, less is more, emphasize the information.

5. Describe What YOU DID

You came until here, now your CV is 1 page long, beautiful with no excess of acronyms but… is not saying anything.

It is very important to showcase your code, especially back-end and devops guys can be almost impossible to showcase something without a Github profile.

About your professional experience be straightforward and describe what you did, not your team, not your company.

Company X Oct/2016 - Jan/2018
Responsible for the integration with partner X on Marketplace team. Achieved 70% better performance on batch products creation (reduced from 1s to 300ms) on the company’s product service by applying technic X using tool Y and language W.

Now we are talking! It says where you were, what you were responsible for and what you accomplished there!

This loosely follows the famous formula: accomplished X measured by Y by crafting Z.

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