The job-hopping season is coming to an end. As an interviewer of the department, I have acquired many resumes during this period. Unfortunately, the number of resumes received is too high, but it is less than desirable. Some candidates fail to make it to the interview process, not because of their lack of ability, but because the resume itself does not show their ability well, so they miss the opportunity to interview.
In order to avoid the recurrence of similar “tragedy”, I plan to take advantage of this activity, stand in the interviewer’s point of view, share some of my experience and advice on resume making, hoping to help readers in need in the next job hunting more smoothly.
In the following paragraphs, I will describe the three parts of my resume that I value most, in the hope of enlightening your readers. They are:
- Technical ability;
- Project experience;
- Overall impression;
In my experience, there’s no reason why you can’t get an interview with a resume that follows these three principles, so without more words, let’s get started 🙌.
1. Technical ability
Usually, the “Technical skills” section will be placed in the core of your resume, right after your bio. This makes sense because it helps employers determine more quickly whether your skills are a match for their needs.
So when creating this section, you should consider the following two things:
(1) What to write?
Candidates often make two mistakes in describing their technical abilities: either they include too many useless things, or they include too few useful things. The more and less here are relative to the “hiring needs of employers”.
I recommend that every candidate carefully design the skills they need to showcase during this part of the resume writing process, highlighting the skills they already have that overlap with the employer’s needs, and proudly displaying them afterward if there’s any left over.
However, it would be inappropriate to show the following here:
- It doesn’t make sense that the employer doesn’t need a skill that they know about.
- Non-complex, common-sense skills, such as demonstrating that you know how to use Git or use specific business libraries when interviewing for senior development positions;
The more you make sure the skills you’re presenting are an exact match to the employer’s needs, the more you’ll catch the employer’s eye and give it the confidence and courage to continue reading your resume.
(2) How to write?
When we know what to write skills, we also need to know how to properly describe those skills, we will usually: “understanding, familiar with, master, master” this a few adjectives to describe skills proficiency, let me from the perspective of the interviewer to share with you once I think that the meaning behind the words:
- Understand: Indicates that you have heard of the concept and even understand its rationale;
- Familiarity: Indicates that you have practiced a technology as a Demo or have worked on a project or two related to the technology, but lack of precipitation.
- Proficiency: Indicates that you have mastered the core principles of a certain technology in an industrial environment through the practice of several projects, and can flexibly apply them in the development;
- Proficient: it means that you have mastered the principle and application of a certain technology to an almost perfect degree through many times of project practice and painstaking research;
You should be aware that you need to be objective and honest about your skill level, neither exaggerating nor underestimating yourself. In writing this section, I recommend that you rank your skills from highest to lowest in terms of proficiency, while giving higher priority to skills that employers have explicitly said they want.
2. Project Experience
Having covered technical skills, I will now share with you the most important part of your resume – “project experience”. If a resume is rated out of 100, project experience should be rated at least 50 points. So please pay special attention.
(1) Why must you use the STAR principle?
Have you ever heard of the “STAR” principle of writing project histories? I ask because I’ve read popular articles about this principle on various forums in recent years, but I’ve surprisingly rarely seen it put into action on a resume, which is surprising given the cost/output ratio of applying it.
The truth is, if you insist on not using the STAR principle to describe your project experience, chances are I won’t be able to get anything worthwhile from your resume.
Let me describe a type of description THAT I often see:
In this project, I completed the requirements of XXX and YYY and applied a, B and C technologies.
I still don’t understand why this meaningless description is so persistent on all kinds of resumes, and why so many job seekers are so enthusiastic about using this template.
The problem with this description is that it tells me nothing more than that the candidate is actually working.
Let’s take a look at what is revealed in the description of a project’s experience that follows the STAR rule: (Incidentally, the STAR rule refers to the principle of describing a Situation, Task, Action, and Result information in the description.)
The XXX problem occurred in XXX project, and I, as XXX, was responsible for the XXX part. I successfully solved the problem through XXX method (or technical solution), making XXX improve XXX and XXX increase XXX.
Of course, this example full of XXX is just a starting point to show you how you can fully demonstrate to your employer the value of your output and achievements in project development by following the STAR principle. And learn about your multifaceted capabilities through your solutions.
Therefore, not surprisingly, I recommend that you immediately apply the STAR principle to describe your project experience.
If you have done so, please accept my respect.
(2) Quality is more important than weight
In addition to using STAR to describe your project experience, one thing to note is: Never stack your project experience!
A good resume should be short and to the point. Just as no one is interested in whether you were an HONOR student in elementary school, employers are usually not interested in what projects you worked on five years ago (unless it was really good!). .
Ideally, a resume should be no more than one page, and no more than two pages is a good measure. Given this space, your project experience should ideally include only projects you have worked on in the last year that you feel are representative.
It has been said that ten bland projects are not worth one exciting project, and this is exactly the case.
3. Resume impression section
With skills and project experience out of the way, let’s finally talk about some principles to follow when writing a resume. When a resume is sent to an employer, it’s common for employers to take a quick look at it and use their gut instinct to decide whether to read it or not, but I’d like to share with you what I think a good resume should have.
(1) Three principles of resume writing: clear, brief and necessary;
As the title suggests, a good resume should have the following three characteristics:
- Clear: This means that the content of your CV should be unambiguous, easy to understand and logical as a whole;
- Be brief: The ability to “get to the point” is a must in life and at work, and the best job candidates show this as much as possible on their resumes. Try to keep it tantalizing and no longer than one page.
- Necessary: Recruitment itself is a process of mutual matching. Presenting necessary information to each other can help each other save the most time and improve efficiency. It’s easy to make sure your resume contains what the employer wants to know.
We hope you can understand these three principles to review and optimize your resume, make sure everything is right, we can move on to the next important step: resume delivery. Yeah, I have something to say here, too.
(2) Why should you stop offshore investment?
My final piece of advice is: don’t throw anything at sea.
Of course I understand that the cost of overseas investment is extremely low in the face of pressure to find a job, but please note that the return from overseas investment is also relatively small (not to mention that failure is more likely to lead to frustration and a vicious cycle of negative emotions).
In fact, the gap between “sea investment” and “precision investment” is not particularly wide. Sometimes you only need a little extra effort to bring huge benefits.
I suggest that you put all your information in one document first, and then select 10 employers that you want to work for every day. Read their recruitment needs carefully, and then select the parts that match their recruitment needs in your document.
Then you can send it out. Guess what happens next? Because your skill description perfectly matches the employer’s needs, and because the description of project experience is based on STAR principle, the employer can better understand your abilities in all aspects.
Without a doubt, you will greatly improve your chances of making it to the interview stage!
This is the first step to success!
4. At the end
So far, the article finally came to an end. To sum up, we talked about the following three parts of the resume process and gave some suggestions:
- Technical ability: write the required ability of the post first, then write the ability to add points, do not write irrelevant ability;
- Project experience: only write STAR projects and describe them according to STAR rules;
- Resume impressions: Follow the three cardinal rules for your resume: be clear, brief, essential, and targeted.
I hope the experience I have shared can be helpful to you, and I hope you can finally enter the desired enterprise work. Thank you for reading this far, it’s not easy!
PS:
This article was invited to participate in the digging gold spring recruitment activities, naturally expect Lao to gain, can get a small gift from the official. But this requires the reader’s approval and help, so if you find this article helpful, please do:
1. Forwarding others and helping others write better resumes;
2. Give positive likes and comments to this article, and the author will get higher marks;
Thank you in advance for your support and assistance.
5. 🎁 Benefits at the end of the article
Thank you for reading this, and in return for your patience, I have prepared two special benefits for you:
(1) 🎁 is looking for more articles from me related to technical recruitment and Web development?
To tell you the truth, I just opened my personal wechat public account named “Front-end Disorderly Step”, which will be officially put into operation after May 1, 2020. At present, I plan to keep updating at the rate of 3 articles per month.
The public account content will involve “front-end development technology” and “technology industry recruitment” and other topics, if you like my writing style and look forward to seeing more content I share, please go to the wechat search and follow the “front-end disorderly step” wechat public account now.
Looking at the increasing number of followers, I will be more and more strict requirements for their output of better quality articles.
We look forward to your attention.
(2) 🎁 want to work together with me, enjoy the privilege of face to face?
B: That’s perfect. Our department is always looking for good partners to join us. You can learn about our recruitment requirements here, and contact me at any time by private letter for recruitment information.
Looking forward to your contact and joining us.