Curriculum Vitae

Notes

• The goal of the CV is to sell you enough to get a recruiter phone call and continue the process

• You should choose a CV format that helps highlight the key information the recruiter looks for in the first scan. A good CV template follows these principles:

  • Single column

  • Dates, position name, and company name are all separated

  • Your location and languages/technologies are easy to find

• When you have experience, here is what will be most relevant:

  • Work experience

  • Languages and technologies you're proficient with

  • Education details

  • Extracurricular things - patents, talks, open source contributions

  • Certifications

  • Personal projects

• To make it clear what languages and technologies you're proficient with:

  • have a separate section in the first page of the CV

  • call out languages and technologies used as part of work experience

• To stand out, be specific. To be specific, follow this approach:

  • Use numbers and quantify whenever you can - number of users, service load numbers, customer support tickets you proactively resolved

  • Use active language that shows what you have done and how you have been proactive

  • Mention specific languages and technologies where they make sense

• A few things that can greatly help your job search are:

  • employee referrals: the best way to increase your chances of hearing back from a company. Ask around in your network or public forums where tech professionals gather (Twitter/LinkedIn/Blind)

  • cover letters: a coin toss - larger companies usually don't ask for one or don't pay much attention to it; at smaller firms and startups, it's a better investment to spend time on

  • LinkedIn, GitHub, StackOverflow: having an up-to-date profile will greatly help your job search. Refresh the LinkedIn profile as you write your resume. On GitHub, create a README to present yourself and your key projects more effectively. On Stack Overflow, tailor your Developer Story to make it easy for recruiters to find you with relevant opportunities

The Tech Resume Inside-Out - Gergely Orosz

Chapter 2

• Usually when the HM (hiring manager) reviews resumes, it can land in one of three piles:

  1. Yes: what the role needs, need to contact them

  2. Maybe: hmm, unsure after the first glance

  3. No: not a good fit for the position

• The goal of your resume is to get a YES for that specific position

• You won't be a match for all positions!

Chapter 3: The Hiring Pipeline

• Usually resumes are first filtered by an inbound sourcer, and the resumes that make the cut are then passed onto recruiters

• The recruiter coordinator will be liasing with the candidate, the recruiter, and the interview panel to organise and make the interview happen

• The hiring manager is the one opening the position in the first place and creating a profile of who they are looking for

• The hiring manager is the ultimate decider for hire or no hire

• The usual pipeline in big tech is:

  • ATS

  • Resume screen

  • Recruiter screen

  • Technical screen

  • Onsite

  • Offer

• The usual pipeline for startups is:

  • ATS

  • Resume screen

  • Hiring Manager call

  • Technical screen

  • Onsite

  • Offer

• Referrals can greatly improve your chance of skpping a few intial steps of the pipeline

• Usually you can get a referral through your network, second-degree LinkedIn connections, and cold outreaches to HMs (hardest)

• Job boards is where companies post job opening directly (e.g., LinkedIn Jobs, AngelList)

• Job aggregators are crawlers that look for job adverts on the Internet (e.g., Indeed, Simply Hired, CareerJet, LinkUp)

• Remember who the "target" for your resume is

Chapter 3.5: ATS Systems

• ATS stands for Applcation Tracking Systems

• The claim that 75% of the resumes will never be seen by human eyes is FALSE

• An ATS is essentially a database to keep track of all candidates, in order to make the HM's life easier by tracking a candidate throughout the pipeline

• You might get an automated ATS rejection, but it's not based on the contents of your resume - it might be for legal reasons (e.g., do you have a work permit or a visa?)

• Some ATS try to parse resumes but not for the application process, only for freetext search (and usually for a later date)

• There is usually no point in trying to optimize your resume for an ATS

Chapter 5: Tech Resume Basics

• HMs at a first glance are usually looking at:

  1. "I have a position to fill - is this person a match?"

  2. Years of experience

  3. Technologies

  4. Work experience

  5. Location & work authorization

  6. Anything else

• Resume "ground rules"

  1. Don't have typos

  2. Have contact details (email address, maybe phone number)

  3. Dates in reverse chronological order

  4. Remove photos and non-required personal information (might introduce bias)

  5. 2 pages or less

• Use bullet points for readability

• Resume Structure:

  1. Work experience: on the first page

  2. Language and Technologies: have a separate section for those (or you can have them at the end of each work experience)

  3. Achievements and promotions if you have a long tenure at a workplace

  4. Less space for old positions that do not support the application

  5. Extracurricular & Certificates: only add valuable ones for the position

  6. Projects: they get less relevant over time

• Your resume should tell your story and progression

  1. Promotions should be visible

  2. Titles should reflect the work you did

• Usually HMs or recruiters skip the summary section on the first scan

Chapter 7: Standing Out

• Be specific: what did you accomplish, what was the impact, what did you do to achieve this?

• Don't be humble: use "I" over "we", side projects & open-source contributions, what did you learn?

• Tailor your resumes for each job opening

  1. analyze the job description

  2. highlight the key skills the HM might be looking for

  3. for small companies, look up devs on LinkedIn

• Use active language and numbers when talking about your work

Chapter 8: Common Mistakes

• Formatting

  1. Too much bolding

  2. Inconsistent Formatting

  3. Sloppy phrasing

• Unnecessary details

  1. Too many contact details

  2. References directly on the resume

  3. Languages section (maybe put them on the second page)

• Links: have them blend in the resume rather than stand out

• Template over contents: usually one or two colours is enough

Chapter 12: Good Resume Templates

• Top-Down Layout

  1. It's a natural way to read

  2. Similar to what LinkedIn does

  3. Doesn't take full advantage of free space on a page

• Two-Column Layout

  1. More information on one page

  2. Nicer design options

  3. Hard to "glance" what is where

  4. Need to read in two directions

Resources

Articles

• A Better Resume for Developers - Ben Northrop

• Guida Galattica per il CV (English version) - Guido Penta

• How to write an effective developer resume: Advice from an hiring manager - Gergely Orosz

• I Rewrote my CV in Typst and I'll Never Look Back - Mattia Righetti

• My Personal Formula for a Winning Resume - Laszlo Bock

• The Biggest Mistakes I See on Resumes, and How to Correct Them - Laszlo Bock

• The Biggest Mistakes I See on Resumes, Part 2: Your top 8 questions - Laszlo Bock

Books

• The tech resume inside out - Gergely Orosz

Hacker News threads

• How does a great resume look like? What are the best tools to make one?

• Resumes that look good but professional too

Templates

• Awesome CV

• Europass CV

• Modern CV

Tools

• RenderCV (GitHub)

• Typst

Websites

• Jobscan - Check CV against job description

• OpenResume

• Resgen - Custom resumes for every job