How good is your CV/Resumé?

If you are like me, your CV comes out only when changing jobs. We might spend a few minutes tidying it up and then we consider it ready to apply for jobs.

Now imagine that you are an employer looking to recruit for that job. You don’t know any of the candidates personally, you have 50 applications from the completely unqualified desperados through to over-qualified and somewhat suspicious applications (if they are so qualified, why are they applying for this job?). This employer usually has only two things to make a judgment about whether to invest time on an interview process. Your CV and your covering letter. The covering letter is fairly self-explanatory: you should write it specifically to each company you are applying to and sell yourself as to why you are the best choice for the role they are filling. However, the covering letter is an indicator of writing quality and can be full of overstatements and puffery, although if you don’t bother, it also shows a lack of awareness or laziness!

You might also have a Recruiter but honestly, they are salespeople first and foremost so despite them assuring me they have no reason to suggest an unsuitable candidate, of course they do. Recruiters can make enormous amounts of commission so I don’t trust most of them to either tell the truth or even to be able to determine a good candidate from a bad one.

So the CV?

Now you have hopefully thought about the predicament of the recruiter, what does that mean for your CV?

I will describe how I interpret a CV. You will hopefully notice that the logic is not solid but that’s the point. “A poorly written CV = unmotivated or unpassionate or lazy applicant” is clearly not always true but when it is most of the information I have about you, I will assume the worst, especially if there are lots of issues rather than just one.

The CV is more based in fact than in the subjective content of a covering letter and it suggests a lot about you without you probably thinking about it. By the way, don’t like on your CV, if you do then you will probably be dismissed regardless of whether you can do the job - who wants to employ someone who is not trustworthy?

Length of the CV

Lots of people talk about this. No more than 1/2/3 pages etc. What is more important is that on the first page, I can quickly see your relevance to the role I am recruiting for. If it is 3 pages, I might skim to the end, if it is 4 or more then I am going to assume you are not good at distilling important facts down into a small package and that is not good for a Software Developer.

Design of the CV

Some CVs I have seen haven’t used barely more design than Word with 2 levels of headings. “Facts are more important than design”. They might be to you but that says something to the employer. If you don’t care about design, are you going to build things that customers enjoy using?

Header information

Having a photo is nice but if you are worried that you will be judged for how you look, then it is fine not to include a photo. However, at some point they will see you!

I am not a fan of the “I am a dedicated and hard-working engineer…” stuff because you would never write the opposite. If it doesn’t take up too much space, I won’t discard the CV but try and think about things that make you diferent or special. Everyone would claim to be a hard worker I would expect but instead, if you are “an engineer who tries to work smarter rather than harder” it speaks more about you than a generic phrase like “committed”. If not, stick to a normal summary e.g. “A .Net Developer with 20 years of experience across fintech and SaaS with some experience of Front-end Development”.

I don’t need your life story in the header and I don’t need your address in the CV. A location is fine like “Kyiv, Ukraine” but otherwise your contact information should be on the covering letter. You should include links to a blog or github profile etc. if they show a good level of activity. They are also a good way to determine the type of code you write. I have seen experienced developers write poor code on Github, which suggests they haven’t invested in learning what good code looks like (or they know but they didn’t bother!).

Skillset list

This should mostly not be needed but it must definitely not be 10 lines long in 2 columns and include everything you worked on in the past. Honestly, I do not care that you worked on VBa in 2005, why would I? If you are e.g. a .Net Developer, I would expect expertise in .Net, html/css and some SQL Server knowledge. I will test what I need you to know. The only exception is if you have rare niche skills, but again, I don’t want a massive list, I will look for experience fit much more than something listed on a skillset.

Work experience

I am mostly going to care about your last 2-5 years although if you are a Senior/Lead, I will also want to see at the last a VERY basic entry for previous jobs so I can see how you got there.

The single thing that most people get wrong is they describe a job in terms of the job and not in terms of your contribution. Take the following example:

Senior Developer: Worked on an application used in car garages. Involved in estimation, Scrum meetings, implementation and testing of functionality as well as working with stakeholders. Skills: C#, SQL Server, Vue JS

Honestly, 90% of CVs read like that. What does that example tell me about whether I want to employ this person in the role I am advertising? Nothing. It basically says, “I was doing a software development role”, which is not at all surprising because you are a software developer.

I have also had the other extreme, which I get a lot from corporate candidates and AI users.

Senior Developer: Collaborated closely with stakeholders to ensure functionality was delivered to time and budget and ensuring customer engagement through iterative workflows combined with agile working

What does that say? That you are obnoxious and think I care about your business speak? It says no more than the first example and is equally offputting.

What should this read like then? Ask yourself what you did generally and what you contributed specifically.

Senior Developer: Using Scrum, I delivered a wide range of different features for our car garage SaaS platform that were mainly C#/Razor with some small pieces of work in Vue JS. I was also in charge of 3 major projects including migrating from Azure to AWS, a performance improvement piece on SQL Server and acting as Scrum Master to help get the most out of our agile process. I managed the improvement plans for all of our junior developers using a system I developed in-house to try and ensure knowledge sharing was done effectively and Developers were gaining a wide range of skills.

If there are specific numbers to quantify things, add them but don’t overdo it. Picking your 3 headlines is better than trying to list everything. If you list everything, that just shouts either insecurity or ego to me. This is the main reason you should dig out your CV at least once per year and add-in/prune anything that seems no longer relevant. Maybe you have done a major project recently that would be more interesting on a CV than the thing you did 3 years ago. I find that if people ask me what I have achieved in my current role of 7 years, I too would struggle, not because I haven’t done much but because I have done a lot.

Older work entries

If you want to stick to the “no more than 2 sides” rule, which you should. Then after 5 years, just flatten the experience to 1 line e.g. “Senior Developer. John Lewis UK. Application Development with C#, SQL Server and Azure” if I am really interested, I can pick it up in an interview but your length of service is important although I also want you to have up-to-date skills which I will get from the past 5 years.

University information

Again, brief and to-the-point is fine. I don’t want a massive description of your final year project, just mention it and it can be looked into later “BEng (Hons) 2:1 Software Engineering with final year project: AI to schedule transport. University of Warwick”

Gaps and Length of Employment

Ideally, there should not be gaps in your employment record. If you were on sabbatical travelling round the world, mention it. If it was a job that is not relevant, mention it. These things are all important. I saw one CV with so many different jobs it read like the candidate didn’t know what he wanted to do. I didn’t take it to interview for that reason so you consider that when moving around a lot.

It is quite a common strategy that people move jobs every 2 years in order to get a higher salary but this does create a problem for applications. Not everyone will agree with this but this is how I read this on a CV. 1) This person is more interested in enriching themselves than finding a job they are passionate about 2) There is no reason to think they will stay longer than 2 years 3) I am always going to be worried about their salary and feel pressured to give them rises because I know they will leave if I don’t. 4) There is a good chance they have not experienced a proper lifecycle for a large project and the experience that only comes when you are still maintaining something 5 years after you deployed it.

Obviously, you cannot change your employment history if you have been job hopping but you need to be aware of the effect and if you are given a chance, you need a good explanation for why someone should invest a significant amount of money into your recruitment and training if you are not likely to hang around very long.

So what?

Get your CV out today and have a look. Can you make it more succinct? More about your contributions than about the companies you worked for? Can you make it look like it has had some design consideration and that you appreciate that people enjoy looking at nice documents? Do you think it would stand out against 50 other generic CVs or not? If not, what can you do about it? Can you do additional professional training? Stcik in your current job to make sure you get some good CV material from the experience?

Hopefully this is enough to think about!