There are definitely many templates, designs, and rules to make your resume look amazing. I’m just sharing my personal opinion and expertise in writing a resume for software-related roles.
The main goal you want to achieve here is to make your resume as easily readable as possible.
Let’s start :)
1. Basic Resume Structure
This is the ideal order for your resume:
1/5–Skills
2/3 — Experience
2/3 — Projects
4 — Awards, Certificates, etc
1/5 — Education
1st/5th point — Skills at top and Education at bottom or Education at the top and Skills at the bottom are both good. Choosing which one out of these two is up to your preference.
2nd/3rd point — Normally, I suggest putting Experience as the second point and Projects as the third point. However, if you don’t have many software-related experiences, I suggest putting Projects before Experience. This is because you want the recruiters to see your resume in order of importance.
There’s no reason to put Experience first if they’re not too relevant in the job you’re applying for. On the other hand, if you have a lot of relevant experiences, there’s no reason to put a projects section if it seems irrelevant.
4th point — Write your Awards, Certificates, and any other relevant points that you want to put as the fourth point. If your award/certificate is related to your school (Ex. Entrance scholarships), I suggest putting it along with Education instead of here.
2. Resume Structure Points
2.1 Skills
I split this section into Languages and Technologies, one line each. Languages contain the programming languages that I use. Technologies will contain frameworks, libraries, and other technologies that are relevant to my software career.
I suggest putting the languages and technologies in order of proficiency or in the order that you want the company to see.
I recommend not putting the level of proficiency of the programming languages because it will only tell the recruiter which languages that you’re not so familiar with in comparison to the ones that you are familiar with. Also, it takes up a lot of unnecessary space.
Ex. Skills description with Languages and Technologies
2.2 Experience
2.2.1 There are four main important information you want to include in the header of each experience — position, company, date, location. I recommend using two lines for the headers as it is much easier to read the important points. Also, it makes the entire resume look less bombarded with just text.
2.2.2 As shown in the example below, my date format is
Starting month (first three letters) year — Ending month (first three letters) year
If you’re going to put the periods for shortening, either put them on all of them or don’t at all. Be consistent with the formatting.
2.2.3 I recommend 3–4 points per experience. Write down the relevant points as needed. If your experience is not too relevant nor recent but you still want to keep it in your resume, use 1–2 points.
2.2.4 Start each point with an action verb in past tense. Try not to be too simple or too repetitive with the verbs that you use.
I recommend looking through this list of action verbs here: https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/opia/job-search-toolkit/action-verbs/
2.2.5 Experience section breakdown
First point — General description of what you did at this company with enough details. You want to clearly articulate what you did so that a person reading for the first time can understand your role.
Second/Third points — Further details about what you did with quantitative data (numbers) if possible. You want to describe in detail what you did and provide results. Quantitative data grabs people’s attention more smoothly and is understood by people more easily.
Fourth point — This can be any other detail you want to mention, both quantitative or qualitative.
For example, if you had a technical job but also wanted to emphasize the leadership role you took in the team, you can write it here. Furthermore, you can omit writing the fourth point if the first three suffice in explaining your experience.
2.3 Projects
The structure of the projects section is very similar to the structure of the experience, so you can review Section 2.2.
The only differences are:
- Location is not necessary
- Date can be just written with the year you made the project (starting date, ending date, and the months are optional)
- 1–3 points are adequate enough (you can add more if you want)
- Hyperlink the projects’ GitHub for the recruiter to look through
Quantitative data on these points are still very good.
If you’re using projects from hackathons and won awards, I suggest writing down a point on the hackathon (also hyperlink the Devpost link if possible).
2.4 Awards / Certificates
Awards / Certificates section is optional. You can list the different types of awards, scholarships, certificates under here.
- Include the year of when you got the awards
- If possible, hyperlink the awards and certificates to show the actual certificate
2.5 Education
Write down your university name, major name, starting year, and predicted ending year.
If you don’t have an awards section but have scholarships that you want to write down, you can write them under here.
Furthermore, optionally, you can also write down any relevant course works under here as well.
3. General resume tips
- Use a well-organized standard template without too many flashy/artistic points. The main goal you want to achieve here is to make your resume as easily readable as possible.
- Use a 1-column resume — The majority of companies (if not all) use resume parsing software that extracts the main points from your resume. If your resume is 2-columns or is structured badly, it won’t parse well and is difficult to read at most times.
- Use Letter size. Check your resume right now if it’s Letter size or A4. The international standard on paper size is A4, except in North America where we use Letter size.
For example, my Microsoft Word on my Korean laptop has A4 as its default paper size. Please double-check your resume size especially if you’re not from here. - Search up the successful resumes that got people into your dream company. You can do this by going on LinkedIn and searching for current/former employees with the roles that you want and looking for their resumes.
- Here’s a list of personal websites from HackathonHackers that you can look through. A lot of these websites contain their resumes.
- There are also Subreddit/Discord posts asking for critiques on their resumes. There’s a good amount of resumes there getting a lot of praise. You can also ask for a resume critique as well.
Resume sharing post — https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/e8narz/official_excellent_and_exemplary_resume_sharing/
CS Careers Dev — https://cscareers.dev/
CS Majors — https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/
CS Careers Hub — https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/
- @jerryhjlee on Instagram and Tiktok
Jerry has one of the best and realistic pieces of advice in writing resumes and career tips. I suggest going through all of his videos as they are very entertaining and useful!
Overall, I recommend finding a design template from these piles of resumes that you really like and alter it in your own style to make it yours.
4. Resume document software — Word or LaTeX
I recommend using either Microsoft Word or LaTeX. Both of these tools are pretty good for resume building. Some people might say “LaTeX > Word” but I find both of these tools to be equally good in building resumes as both are very good document software programs. There’s a bit of a learning curve for LaTeX, but it might be useful to learn it now if you’re going into academia in the future as LaTeX is often used to write academic papers.
Overall, you should really observe how your resume looks in a PDF format.
