title: Technical Resume Hints
category: blog tags: guide author: Emily Dunham dunhame@onid.oregonstate.edu date: 2014-01-25
The advice you'll get at a place like OSU Career Services is appropriate for generic resumes, but not all of it applies when tailoring your resume for a technical role. Technical resumes will typically be read by automated systems, HR people, and the professional engineers who conduct your interview.
Once you get your resume into the hands of an interviewer or hiring manager, it needs to accurately reflect who you are and what you can do. Don't lie, and don't bullshit. Sure, claiming to be proficient in technologies you aren't might get you an interview, but that interview will ask questions that you can't answer and generally waste everyone's time.
Conversely, don't underestimate your own abilities. If there's a project that you've done which you're reluctant to include on your resume because you think it's too trivial, ask in the IRC channel for feedback on whether it seems relevant to the position for which you're applying.
Engineers and technical recruiters like numbers and facts more than vague claims. For example, "Improved Android system throughput by 25% in some use cases" is much clearer and better quantified than "worked on Android devices".
If you're unlucky enough to be applying through automated systems rather than personal recommendations, it's especially important to list the names of all the technologies you're confident with. The automated systems for deciding whose resumes get seen by humans basically just search for buzzwords that match the job postings.
However, this is no excuse to include a wall of acronyms that people can't read. Put the names of the technologies you've worked with where it makes sense.
For most students in their first few years of open source involvement, one page is sufficient. A curriculum vitae includes publications and speaking experience, and is expected to exceed a single page if thoes sections have several items in each.
Although some recruiters believe that multiple-page resumes are acceptable, others will discard anything over a single page on the grounds that it shows you can't communicate concisely.
As a practical consideration, a single page is more convenient than multiple, because most of the resumes you print will be for career fairs on campus. If you're busy, you'll probably be updating and printing your resume in a hurry, and collating the pages and finding a stapler is inconvenient.
In short, resumes are best kept to a single page unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise.
- Contact information
Include your full name, email address, probably phone number, Github, and possibly IRC handle. Be cautious about including your phone number or home address if you plan to share your resume on Github or your personal web site.
- Mission Statement or Statement of Purpose
If you can sum up your goal in a single sentence, it doesn't hurt to include it. It might be especially helpful if you're trying to pivot your career and applying for jobs that don't precisely match your experience. However, if your experience and hobbies tell a cohesive story of what you enjoy doing, it doesn't appear to hurt to omit the mission statement entirely.
- Education
If you're applying through channels that recruit college students, they will expect you to have your education listed. This section should include school, years (hopefully year and month of anticipated graduation), major, and GPA.
Some positions require GPA to apply; others will assume the worst if you omit it, and others don't care. As a general rule, you should include your GPA unless it's worse than what the recruiter will assume if you leave it out. Alternatively, talk to the recruiters of each company you apply to, and customize your resume for their requirements.
- Skills
Most people use a centralized skills section to list all their buzzwords at once. If you have skills that you've picked up independently of any work or open source experience that you plan to list, you should include a skills section. However, if all of your major skills relevant to the job correlate to work or open source experience that appears elsewhere on your resume, include them in those sections and use the space that would have gone to skills for other things.
- Employment
List 3-5 recent, relevant jobs. List job title, employer, start month, and end month. Follow it with a couple of lines about what you did. Don't say "I"; they already know who you are. Use quantifiable metrics whenever possible. Brag. Name the technologies you learned at each job, preferably in a way that indicates your level of expertise with them.
- Projects/Contributions
Do you maintain an open source project? List it, with a few words about what it does and a link to its site. Did you write a cool thing that shows off your skills and open-source it? List it and link to it. Have you gotten code into somebody else's open-source project? Again, mention what the project does and where to see your contributions, unless it's extremely popular or used by the company where you're applying.
- References
Don't include them. It's debatable whether "references available upon request" is necessary at all -- typically, if a job requires references, it'll ask you for them directly.
It's especially important to avoid including your references' contact information if you post your resume online, on your personal site or in a Github repo. Web crawlers come through from time to time and scrape out everything formatted like a phone number or email address, and then spam them.
- Hobbies
If you have a hobby that relates directly to the position you're applying for or makes you stand out meaningfully, include it. For example, if you're a world champion at Tetris, or an avid golfer who's applying to write the website of a golf supplies company, include these facts about yourself. If the fact that you do a hobby carries useful information about why you'd be a better choice than other candidates for the job, include it. Otherwise, leave it out.
Make it pretty.
Imagine that you're a recruiter looking at your 50th resume of the day, and the thing you're currently working on is currently at the top of the stack. Is it enjoyable to look at?
As an applicant it's easy to feel like you're the center of the universe and your resume's primary purpose is to show off yourself, but it isn't. It actually exists to make the recruiter's day better, because they feel successful when they come across the resume of a well-qualified and promising candidate.
To show that you respect the recruiter's time and don't want to hurt their eyes, don't pack too much information onto the page. It's okay to tease them with high-level summaries of your accomplishments and leave them wanting more detail, because you can share those details in the interview.
- Whitespace
Don't leave big empty blocks of space on the page. Spread out your content, vertically and horizontally, and tweak bullet indentation until things look nice but lines don't wrap at awkward locations.
- Font size
Keep the default LaTeX font (more about that in a moment) for most of your resume, and never go smaller than 10pt.
- Paragraphs
No. Bulleted lists, or lists without bullets. Short, easy-to-read sentences about what you've done.
Use LaTeX to generate your resume. LaTeX is useful for all writeups, and will prove invaluable when you get to CS311. Most importantly, it more or less guarantees that your resume will end up looking pretty.
LaTeX is easy to keep under version control when you add and remove sections, as well.
Companies should allow you to submit your resume in .pdf format, which you should because it displays pretty consistently across all systems and is harder to inadvertently modify. If they demand a .doc, LaTeX can be rendered to .rtf, which can then be renamed to .doc, and then allegedly it works fine in Word. Test this, though, as your mileage may vary.
Upload your .tex, your Makefile, and probably a .pdf to Github. It's not usually a good idea to upload pdfs to Github, but resumes are an exception because it's convenient to have a pdf file available online whenever you need to link to it.
Keep a single master resume with all of the sections and content you might want. Trim it down to the most applicable page of content for a given position, then render a nice pdf or rtf, give it a useful name, and submit.
Emily Dunham * LaTeX resume, an older version helped get an Intel internship Spencer Krum * A different LaTeX template; got fulltime DevOps position at UTI and here I need to get other peoples' permission to link their resumes as well