Many years ago, I wrote a tips on job applications post, because I had been seeing a lot of poorly formatted and written applications. While good formatting and tailoring to job postings are important, the content is obviously important as well. Again, there is so much literature out there, but what I’ve seen recently has spurred me to write this post to discuss what I find most important and the tips I give others.
Resume sections
The order of these sections may differ slightly depending on where you are in your career. For example, recent graduates may want to put education before work experience if the education is more relevant than the work experience for the particular application.
- Personal info (recommend putting into header to save space and repeat on cover letter)
- Highlights
- Relevant work experience
- Education: may include certification
- Skills and areas of knowledge
- Other: examples “Relevant projects outside of work”, “Current affiliations”, “Volunteer work”, “Community involvement”, “Accomplishments”, “Publications/Presentations”
Remember to make good use of white space, and format everything for easy scanning/skimming.
Highlights
This may seem like a “waste” of space, since you’re obviously going to cover everything you can from the job posting and highlight your fit in the cover letter. However, the most important things they’re looking for are worth repeating. Some people reviewing your application may not have time to read over the whole thing.
It’s also a good way for both sides to review alignment. Do you recognize what they’re looking for the most? Do you match those things?
Work experience
Aside from your current position, pick and choose what to include or expand on. You may want to list all significant work experience from the last 2-5 years to show there’s no gap in employment. If you’ve had only 1-2 jobs in that time, you may want to go as far back as 10 years.
You don’t necessarily want to describe them all in detail. Aside from having limited space, you want to focus on the things you’ve done that are relevant to the job you’re applied for. Meaning, for some jobs, you may only have 1 bullet point.
Bullet points are the standard for describing work experience. However, instead of just copying the job description, consider results-oriented points of the work you accomplished. It is much more impressive to say that you “created dashboards to visualize work results, such as time from application to offer for job candidates” instead of “created and maintained data visualization dashboards”.
If you want to include a job description, you can link to them. If they’re not available online, you also have the option of posting them online somewhere, then linking to them.
Education
Even with education, how much to include depends on relevance. You’ll want to list any multi-year program degrees, and any relevant certification.
You may want to list relevant courses, projects, or achievements as well.
Skills and areas of knowledge
This is definitely the area where I’ve seen the most issues.
When applying to a job, consider who will see your application. In small organizations or departments, the hiring team likely include people who are not experts in your field.
Think about how to categorize your skills and knowledge areas for someone unfamiliar with the terms and jargon of the area. In particular, avoid acronyms unless the acronym is more common than the spelled out term (such as HTML).
For example, I’ve seen a software developer’s resume have something similar to:
Python, GitHub, Git, CI/CD, DAST, SAST
I may know what all those are, but do you expect someone who doesn’t work in software development to know?
If you’re joining a small team, you’re often going to encounter more than just the hiring manager. In some cases, the manager may not be super technical, but have a broad level of understanding in the field. I have worked in numerous jobs where my manager may understand technology at a high level, but wasn’t familiar with code, nor coding practices, let alone the tools used in software development.
Listing specifics is often necessary and great if they match what the organization already uses. How you list them though is important. Add categories and level of expertise where it’s important.
Using the previous example, it might look like this:
Programming languages: Python (expert)
Source Control Management: GitHub
Version Control System: Git
Continuous Integration and Deployment
Security scanning: DAST, SAST
Yes, it takes more room, but it’s also much more understandable to someone not familiar with the jargon and tools of software development. Note that I used “Programming languages” because “languages” means written/spoken languages.
Other sections
I listed some possibilities at the top, but here they are again:
- Relevant projects (outside of work)
- Current affiliations
- Volunteer work
- Community involvement
- Accomplishments
- Publications/Presentations
Typically, you’ll have 1 or 2 of these. Which ones to include depend on a mix of you and the job you’re applying for. First, think about relevance or what’s expected for the role/industry. For example, in academia, publications and conference presentations are expected, especially any peer-reviewed publications.
Sometimes, even if it’s not directly relevant to the job, it may be relevant for the organization. For example, if the organization encourages volunteer or community work, or even has a formal program for such work, you want to include any of your recent volunteer/community work.
Take away
If you only take one thing away from this article, it’s that your resume should be easy to read and understand, while also telling the reader why they want you for the job.
Good luck!
