Resume pitfalls every programmer should avoid
As a manager responsible for new hires in our department, I have had the opportunity to review several resumes. I am often distracted by poorly written resumes that make it difficult to quickly discern whether or not a candidate is qualified. Based upon my experiences, the following are a few resume writing tips that will help you to avoid common pitfalls and improve your chances of landing an interview.
You will find a distinctive difference between the advice offered here and the advice often offered by technical recruiters. Unfortunately, the majority (although not all) of head hunters peg you as a sale, and as such, any sale is a good sale. This can lead to misrepresentation, and regardless of how tantalizing your resume appears to be, promising what you fail to deliver will destroy your reputation.
Avoid buzzword overload
When I read through a resume that contains an exhaustive list of buzzwords under a skills heading, I am struck with an overwhelming sense of mediocrity and suspicion. Unless you have intermediate to advanced hands-on experience, or a well-recognized certification for a specific skill, then leave it off your resume. Any individual within your field of expertise can peruse a magazine or browse the Internet in order to discover the soup de jour. I could care less that you know of AJAX, Flex or Ruby on Rails, unless you can do the day-to-day work. Besides, any interviewer in an initial phone screen will inquire about the necessary skills to do the job. If a specific skill is required, it can be discerned quickly that you are telling half-truths or tossing out buzzwords in an act of desperation. Nothing angers a hiring manager more than finding out you have padded your resume in a bait-and-switch attempt.
If you are a recent graduate, what will sell your skills and knowledge most on your resume is your coursework GPA and viewable prototypes. Even without real world experience it demonstrates a desire to learn and dedication.
Avoid an objectives heading
Unless you are applying for a management position, and tasked with the responsibility of setting the direction for a department or company, avoid an objectives heading on your resume. Although some recruiters still believe this is proper form, in reality it is a wasted opportunity to grab the attention of the reader. Even more unpleasant is receiving a resume with an objective that reads identical to the original job posting. If you are working with a recruiter, instruct them to leave this off your resume when forwarding it to a company advertising an open position. As an alternative, a brief (3-5 sentences) and intriguing cover letter is a more appropriate lead-in to your resume.
Avoid job responsibilities in favor of obstacles overcome
The top tier programmers will be able to list specific problems and the creative solutions they engineered in order to solve them. This is how you should list relevant work experience, especially if you feel your skill set is lacking. I have spoken with several managers who are more interested in problem solvers than code junkies. A monkey punching away at a keyboard is not an asset to an organization, so stating how you did it is just as important as what you did. Consider the following two examples:
Dull:
Programmed 1,200 lines of code for the online version of a popular tax software bundle, and worked successfully with a system architect and project manager throughout the duration of the project.
Engaging:
Utilized Java EE to program TurboTax Internet Edition ahead of the schedule stipulated by the project manager and to the specifications provided by the system architect.
The engaging example above illustrates that you know Java EE, you have coded for a nationally recognized brand, you were ahead of schedule, and therefore budget, and that you can read a specification accurately. The description is detailed, poignant and grabs the attention of the reader immediately.
Avoid more than one page with less than five years experience
There are very few instances when a candidate’s resume deserves two pages, especially if they have less than five years of work experience. As a contractor you can easily find your resume pushing close to two pages, but if you have been employed full-time, then a two page resume is a red flag (due to the number of previous positions held). The sneaking suspicion is that you are easily dissatisfied, or that employers are easily dissatisfied with you.
Recent accomplishments are the most important aspect of a resume, and the further in the past a position was held, the less detailed you should be in describing it. Only pinpoint one or two major accomplishments that summarize your capabilities in these instances. You will find it easier to trim your resume down to one or one-and-a-half pages.
Avoid creative document formatting
Even though this is a mistake made most by recent college graduates, seasoned professionals can fall into the trap as well. Regardless of what you have been told about standing out amongst a sea of resumes, creative document formatting is not recommended. Stick to the following guidelines:
- Page margins should be equal, and should be between one-half and one inch.
- You should use one font family throughout the document.
- The font family should be Arial, Tahoma, or Verdana for a sans-serif font, or Courier, Palatino Linotype, or Times New Roman for a serif font.
- For anything other than your name and section headings, the font size should not be less than ten, and not greater than twelve. It should also be consistent.
- Career history and experience should come first, then skill set, and finally your education and certifications.
- Do not use underline, however, bold and italic are acceptable to offset headings.
Avoid improper grammar
Spelling mistakes are less common due to automated spell check, but grammatical error is rampant in resumes. You can quickly improve your chances of an interview when your resume is devoid of sentence fragments, punctuation misuses and inconsistencies. Although word processing programs do contain automated grammar check, they are never one hundred percent accurate. You should always have one or two others in your field review your resume, and these should be individuals who have been complimented for their excellent communication skills.
Other helpful tips
- Career history should be in chronological order, from the most recent to the least recent.
- Use bullets when describing your career accomplishments.
- Placing “REFERENCES UPON REQUEST” at the bottom of your resume is no longer necessary. However, you should have three references available at the time of a phone screen or before an interview. This includes a full name, professional relationship, phone number, e-mail address, and acceptable contact hours.
- Do not provide salary information within your resume. Although employers are entitled to ask for a detailed salary history, you should politely decline. Instead, you need to be prepared to discuss the acceptable salary range for the open position.
- Always have a plain text resume handy, and formatting for this resume should only contain spaces and line breaks.
Posted by Brian
September 4th, 2006
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32 Comments
#01, Sep 04 2006
Sylvain
About buzzword overload: excellent point, however, unless a candidate loads his/her resume with said buzzwords, the hiring manager will never see the resume which will be filtered out by either dumb recruiters and/or dumb resume mining software. Ideally, one should submit two versions of the resume, one to get a foot in the door, and one used for the actual interview, but I don’t see how that could work :-)
#02, Sep 05 2006
taterhead
>Courier, Palatino Linotype, or Times New Roman for a serif font.
Hmmm, Courier as serif, new one on me.
#03, Sep 05 2006
Brian Reindel
Hi Sylvain, thanks for your feedback. The buzzword overload is definitely an area of contention amongst recruiters, managers and potential hires. From a time perspective I can understand why recruiters use filtering software to weed out resumes by keywords or buzzwords, but in the end, the employee and manager are the individuals who have little to gain from the practice. A bit of advice I have read in the past and will pass along is the concept of a skills matrix. It is more effort, but it can pay off in the short term trying to get your foot in the door. Instead of listing your skills out separated simply by a comma, provide a separate sheet that lists each skill on a row, with three columns to be checked — either “Beginner”, “Intermediate” or “Advanced”. This will give some more weight to your resume while providing a quick and honest assessment for managers. It bends the two page rule a little, but the common consensus is that that rule can be bent anyhow. Hope this was helpful.
#04, Sep 05 2006
Brian
taterhead, thanks for pointing that out :)
Courier is actually a monospace font.
#05, Sep 05 2006
Reg Braithwaite
Great post!
As a hiring manager, I hate to see keywords sprinkled onto a resume like confetti, especially when I know that most of them are useless. My compromise the last time I sent my resume out was to put all the keywords at the bottom where a machine would find them and to put the most relevant buzzwords in the body of the resume as you suggest.
p.s. My understanding is that Courier is a serif typeface (serifs are the little decorations on the end of lines). It is almost always set in a monospaced fashion (computers tie the letter spacing to the typeface automatically). Serifs and spacing are orthogonal: Optima does not have serifs and is proportiononally spaced; Garamond does have serifs and is proportionally set; Monaco is a sans-serif typeface that is monospaced.
#06, Sep 05 2006
keylime
“Serif” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif) refers to whether the typeface includes decorations. Courier is a “slab serif” typeface (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_serif).
Whether a typeface is proportional or monospaced has nothing to do with whether it is serif or sans-serif (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif).
#07, Sep 05 2006
Sailman
Courier is an monospaced font, but it also falls under the classification of Serif due to the fact that courier has serifs on several letters.
#08, Sep 05 2006
masterson
Sorry, but this is bad advice. Recruiters have little judgement or knowledge of IT and use dumb word matching to filter resumes. So you’ve tossed many people with ABILITY out the window because they didn’t have the right KEYWORDS.
You should be equally suspicious of everybody. Of couse resumes can be complete fabrications. Bottom line, if they can’t speak lucidly, then can’t code lucidly. The stereotype of the poorly communicative nerd but genius programmer is BS. I talk to them and do code review of some projects they’ve done themselves (not just as a team member). Also, I want to see if they can touch type, since a 60wpm programmer is 3 times faster than a 20wpm coder. Yeah, it happens.
#09, Sep 05 2006
Brian
Thanks everyone for the info about Courier! Another interesting point to make would be that in CSS, the value of Courier falls under monospace, so if you specify serif as a default, Courier will not be one of the choices.
Reg, thanks for your comments - much appreciated.
#10, Sep 05 2006
Brian
masterson, thanks for the good feedback. I’m sorry if I come across as completely Utopian, but the issue continues to be recruiters and the process by which they recruit, and they should therefore modify their process. Managers and candidates should not be suffering for this laziness. Also, if a potential candidate does have the ability, it will show on a well written resume, because work experience will include projects with current technologies, and thus buzzwords. I can’t say it enough — if you place a skill or set of skills on your resume that you do not really know, your reputation is at stake and your marketability as a candidate will eventually suffer.
#11, Sep 05 2006
Jeff Read
I would recommend also not using “utilized” when you mean “used”. I know this sounds like a bike shed issue in light of the great tips above but every time I read someone say they “utilized” or “leveraged” something instead of using it, it makes me want to smash things. I’m not a recruiter or hiring manager but as long as we’re declaring war on buzzwords, why not go all the way, eh?
#12, Sep 05 2006
Brian W.
Great article! This has answered a lot of questions I have had recently about getting my article ready for future employers. Thank you very much!
#13, Sep 05 2006
dali
“Utilized Java EE to program TurboTax Internet Edition ahead of the schedule stipulated by the project manager…”
But I thought lying in a job interview is a bad idea.
#14, Sep 05 2006
Chris Wilson
There’s one thing I strongly disagree with about this article: The use of Italic for section headings. I had a college career conselor flame me out for doing this, because a lot of large companies will actually pull your resume off sites like monster.com or dice.com. And get this, instead of pulling it down in word format and putting it into a database, its typical for an intern to just print your resume from the website, OCR it and enter it into the database without correcting it whatsoever.
I laughed at her and thought, “Nobody could be that stupid.”, but now that I’m out in the corporate world, and I’ve seen how HR operates at two different companies, I fully realize that she gave sound advice.
So let me repeat it: Skip the italic. It has more of a possibility of messing up during OCR. Use bold or a larger font (or both), otherwise, underline or make it ALL CAPS. Just not italic.
(Good article otherwise)
#15, Sep 05 2006
Greg
Masterson - he didn’t say _no_ keywords, he said avoid overload. To put this into perspective, I have seen resumes that have a complete gibberish of random acronyms for the first two paragraphs. The good news is these are usually preceded by a poor cover letter so reading the resume is unnecessary ;-)
Remember this is not interviewing tips. The objective of the resume is not to convince someone how good you are, it is to get an interview.
Excellent article.
#16, Sep 05 2006
Brian
dali, I had a good laugh… I know, I know, when does a project ever finish ahead of schedule and below budget.
#17, Sep 05 2006
juliuss
Buzzword overload may suck when you’re a hiring manager, but the reason you came across the resume in the first place is probably due to buzzword overload. It’s a catch 22. The only way we can get out of this buzzword cycle is to stop using head-hunters.
#18, Sep 05 2006
Gustave Moiré
Résumé pitfalls EVERYONE should avoid would also include properly spelling the word itself.
#19, Sep 05 2006
David
I liked the article and it’s very usefull and I fully agree with not including skills and promises you can’t live up to.
However, in the UK at least, I have found that most of the initial filtering is done either by the agency or a recruiter with very little IT knowledge and thus agree with masterson.
I understand your point that recruiters should change their practices but when I submit a CV I have no way to discern or control how the selection or filtering will be performed.
The way I get around this is to keep my skills seperate, concise and without buzzwords but make sure any relevent popular terms are included in my work experience notes where appropriate.
#20, Sep 06 2006
Brian
Hi Gustave, for some time now resume has been a much accepted variant spelling without the acute accents.
#21, Sep 06 2006
Alex Rudloff
Great post, though I’d be hesitant to toss out keywords for the sole sake of avoidance.
I’ve had a lot of resumes thrown my way. Once they make it to me, I assume that people have used the resume to screen folks out. The resume then, is no longer needed, and I can interview the candidate with little regard to what is truly a silly piece of paper.
It’s purpose is to help hr folks filter out noise though and as more and more job hunting takes place online, without those keywords, you’ll never turn up in search results.
Just some thoughts :)
Best,
Alex Rudloff
Emurse.com
#22, Sep 06 2006
Dominic Cronin
If a recruiter needs to see buzzwords before they’ll promote your CV, they are most likely just sitting on top of a database of CVs instead of doing their job. If that’s the case, they’ll probably misrepresent you, and almost certainly don’t deserve your sanction for sending out your details to putative employers.
#23, Sep 06 2006
mark
[quote]Also, I want to see if they can touch type, since a 60wpm programmer is 3 times faster than a 20wpm coder. Yeah, it happens.[/quote]
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Anyone who believes that way is only qualifed to hire at a mcdonalds.
#24, Sep 07 2006
Gary
“Résumé” vs. “resume” notwithstanding, I remember reading somewhere that a résumé should never include the word, i.e. “Résumé of Bob Smith” is bad form or at least indicates Bob is a newby.
One thing that turns me off when I’m reviewing someone’s resume is excessive use of unfamiliar acronyms. Naturally, industry-standard acronyms may need no explanation, but internal company acronyms should be avoided; instead, describe the concept in language a person with reasonable technical knowledge can understand. I ask acronym-wielding candidates to explain each one; it’s a good test of their communications skills and BS quotient, which most fail.
#25, Sep 07 2006
Jared Nuzzolillo
I doubt that one of the most significant impacts on time to delivery for software projects is typing speed (except in extreme circumstances). Surely this could is a factor, but I can’t imagine disqualifying an otherwise decent prospect based on his lacking the ability to touch type.
On the other hand, watching a programmer interact with his preferred text editor may give you an indication of how long they have been programming and how resourceful they are. Whenever I see a programmer holding down the right arrow key instead of pressing or +, I want to slit my own throat in protest, screaming “Whyyyyyyyyyyy” as I collapse onto their desk…
#26, Sep 08 2006
Judy
I disagree with the education being at the end of the resume. My preference is professional summary, education, skill set, then professional experience.
#27, Sep 08 2006
Eric Derby
I will start by saying that I am a Technical Recruiter, and more specifically I work for an agency. I think the comments about recruiters were mostly targeted at those that work in agencies, not internal positions. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Objective: I disagree with the point here. A good objective will get the attention of the reader, and keep the resume in the ‘continue reviewing’ pile. In my opinion an objective needs to be one sentence, and needs to say two things. First it needs to say the type of position the candidate is looking for i.e. ‘Software Engineer’ or ‘Business Analyst’ so that the reviewer, who is most often looking for people for multiple positions, can put the resume into a catagory. Second the objective needs to say what is special about the candidate over and above all other candidates. When done properly an objective can be very effective, and keep the reader looking for more.
Buzzwords: I agree with the original article that buzzwords should not be put into a resume unless the person has actual experience with it. However, even light experience or personal experience can be helpful. AJAX for example, is not a very common skill. I happen to know a local company looking for a Java developer with AJAX. Candidates without AJAX will not be considered. I know one software developer who has systems at home, and has built some applications using AJAX. As far as the employer is concerned this would be enough experience.
I agree that many resumes have way too many buzzwords. But I think this is caused by search and scanning programs, by both job board and internal resume systems. Many qualified people are often overlooked for the lack of certain buzzwords on their resume. In one specific example I know a candidate that was rejected by a company for not having MFC, when Microsoft Foundation Class was clearly written on the resume. When recruiters, both internal and external, have a good knowlege of what they are looking for, the need for excessive buzzwords is reduced.
I will also note that I do not modify the data in resumes. The candidate is responsible for writing their own resume. I will often give advice, but generally not make any changes to the text. I often will change the format, primarily font and font size, so that our clients will see consistency from us.
I will close with the note that I have a BS CS, and was a software developer for 7 years, and a network manager for 2 years. This combined with 10 years of combined sales and recruiting has given me a reasonable understanding of what works.
#28, Sep 08 2006
Brian
Eric, thank you for the comments - it is great to hear from a technical recruiter on the subject.
I think we’ll have to disagree on the objective portion :)
By the time a resume reaches my desk, I already know the position for which the applicant is applying, so stating it in the resume is usually repetitive. It has been filtered through an e-mail, HR, or our Web site, and we already know by that point.
Let me say, though, it is not necessarily a bad thing to provide an objective, but if you do decide to take that route, it should be short, well-communicated and interesting.
#29, Sep 22 2006
Resume Pitfalls every Programmer should avoid « W H I H A T H A C
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#30, Oct 02 2006
Idea Senator
Is it resume or CV? Which one do you use and how do they differ?
#31, Oct 03 2006
Brian
Idea Senator,
That depends on the country and sometimes the position. More often than not, if you are applying for a position in the US, it will be a resume. However, in the EU or UK, it will more than likely be called a CV. Hope that is helpful.
Brian
#32, Feb 07 2008
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