Why Nobody is Reading Your Software Engineering Resume
You are a likely a strong developer with a breadth of experience. Maybe you’re a core contributor to your team, maybe you’re one of the leaders of your team or your product. But.. your resume? Does it tell a stranger what you’re uniquely good at? Or does it only tell them what technologies you’ve used, just like every other java developer out there?
If it’s like the majority of developer resumes we’ve seen, it likely reads something like this:
- Developed backend GraphQL API utilizing Spring Boot, Hibernate, JPA and GraphQL SPQR
- Full-stack development of Enterprise Product Configurator software
- Created and implemented multiple spring boot microservices
What have I learned about any of these developers? They know java and spring boot. Maybe that’s helpful, but as a hiring manager my recruiter has already filtered down my stack of resumes — almost every developer on my list knows java & spring boot. Not to mention, we’ve all met developers who knew java & spring boot, but weren’t actually that good.
So, what should they say?
To demonstrate your value, you need to articulate your impact towards three crucial outcomes of your job: user impact, system fitness, and team flow.
The three outcomes of your impact
1. User & Business Impact
The technology you built impacted a user — somewhere, somehow. Tell us about that user! Who are they, how many were there and how did you change their lives? Why did the thing you built matter? Who was it valuable for?
Migrated a multi-page user experience into a single page app which improved customer engagement by 8%
Architected product tours in React for a new feature that improved customer adoption by 22% leading to $1.1M in incremental revenue
2. System Fitness
It’s simple to discuss the features you developed. But we frequently neglect to discuss the non-functional complexity we had to integrate into our projects. What was the most challenging aspect of your product? How did you approach it from an architecture standpoint? How did the system need to evolve and what role did you play in that?
Built RESTful APIs used throughout the company to serve data to the React front-end with over 250,000 concurrent users
Formulated and implemented improvements on cleanup processes and performance, minimizing downtime by 90%
3. Team Flow
If we only had to think about code when we’re at work — it would likely be pretty straightforward, right? A critical factor in the success of technology organizations is their teams, how they work together, and what the flow of ideas looks like through the delivery lifecycle. How you influence and impact that lifecycle and the team is critical! How have you eased a developer’s workflow? What problems did you solve for them? How did you improve your path to production? You can talk about how much time it saved!
Rearchitected our platform approach to feature toggles enabling teams to improve deployment frequency by 400%
Contributed to the in-house UI library to create reusable components, saving 200 hours of deployment time per month
Your resume is your first impression and the way to get your foot in the door. Well-written resumes lead to higher salaries, more senior roles, and a shorter job search. Make sure yours stands above the rest, by speaking to the tangible impact you have made to each of your projects.
Need more examples to get you going? Check out our 16 Free Engineering Bullet Points that will Get You Hired.
We’re TechResumes.io. We craft impact driven resumes for software engineers and technologists. We’ve been technical interviewers, engineering managers and engineering directors. We know what a good engineer looks like, and we use that knowledge to craft resumes that land you the interviews.
