A CV That Stands Out In 2022 — Full Guide
Unless you are the only person in the world with your skills then you are going to dive in a great competition when it comes to job hunting. The first step is to get interviewed, and unless you have strong connections, then you will need a CV to dive into that interview…
In this article I will clarify the following points:
- Recommended Sections / Layout / Formatting / Design
- Information that a recruiter needs to know V.S. Information nobody needs to know
- Tools to build a CV / Resume
- Common problems & General Tips
- Things to pay attention to when writing your CV
~ This information was collected from many resources online, articles, YouTube videos, LinkedIn posts, recruiters, and from my own experience.
Before starting, keep in mind the following:
~ CVs are given 5–15 seconds to make an impact on a recruiter
~ Your resume should be kept to 1 page or a MAXIMUM of 2 pages.
~ Include only your most recent and relevant experiences.
Recommended Sections To Include In Your CV / Resume:
- Resume header with contact info
- Professional summary
- Work experience, focused on career highlights
- Education and certifications
- Technical and soft skills
Information that a recruiter wants to know:
- Name, email, contact number
- Objective statement
- Education details: College, Major, GPA, Sample classes (optional, but if you list, make sure its classes that you scored well in and are relevant to your area of interest), academic awards.
- If you have studied abroad, you can list that too
- Projects that you have worked on
- Work experience/co-curricular activities
- Skills/other interests
- Street cred — GitHub/Stack Overflow/LinkedIn profile (highly recommended)
Information nobody needs to know:
- Your profile picture.
- Address, home phone number, gender, religion, race, marital status.
- Elementary, middle, high school
- Your low GPA
- Anything less recent than 3–4 years unless they are valid job experiences
- Anything about your parents/siblings, their names, occupation, etc
- Your life story
- Anything not relevant to the job you are applying for (e.g. that you have a driving license when you are applying to be a programmer)
Tools to build a CV / Resume
- Microsoft Word / Google Docs (Templates are available)
- Adobe Illustrator
- Online Builders (Zety Resume Builder / Resumonk / VisualCV / Enhancv)
Helping Tools
- Tools to make sure you don’t have any grammar mistakes or typos (e.g. Grammarly, Prowritingaid)
- Online ATS Scanners (e.g. Resume Worded)
Layout/Formatting/Design
- Be consistent about the way you format your resume.
Italics, underline, bold, and how they are used.
- Keep to a single standard font
Avoid fancy fonts like Comic Sans or whatever
And do not have too many varying styles/font sizes/color.
- Be consistent about the way you list your dates
e.g. May 2011 — Aug 2011
>> Avoid using numerals for both month and date due to the difference in style for MMDD and DDMM in different countries.
>> Dates like “Aug 2011 — June 12” show that you have zero attention to detail.
- Name your file firstname_lastname_resume.pdf instead of resume.pdf
- PDF preferred over Word doc (If the PDF file is large, use a online compressor)
- Be consistent about bullet points
PAY ATTENTION TO THESE:
- JOB TITLE MATCH + PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY
~ Most recruiters will match candidates with exact job titles to the open position.
~ Your professional summary should cover three things:
— A brief overview of your experience level, with how many years you’ve been a developer
— Highlight your biggest win as a developer, with quantitative data to back up your claims.
— Mention of a few technical skills or languages you’re proficient in. (Mention the ones listed in the job description)
- SKILLS AND KEYWORDS
~ Try to mention skills and keywords mentioned in there job description
~ Use varied vocabulary
— Rather than ‘managing’ everything, diversify your wording to ‘spearheading’, ‘leading’, ‘directing’ and ‘overseeing’.
— Rather than repeating ‘developing’, say ‘creating’ or ‘building’.~The right stack of technical skills to succeed
— Add only skills that are related to the position
— Customized for each job
- ADDING MEASURABLE RESULTS
~ Prove that you’re someone who can deliver results, rather than just execute tasks
~ Writing in the absent first person, which removes those pronouns completely, is the more common way to create a CV;
— for example: ‘Led a team and prepared reports’ , rather than ‘I led a team and I prepared reports.’~ Examples (Measurable Results):
— Supervised up to xx employees // Onboarded and trained new staff in groups of up to xx
— Improved user experience score by xx% after optimizing …
— Reduced labor costs by more than xx%
— Increased e-commerce sales by xx% in 1 year
— Ranked in top xx% of employee performance for 2 years running
- PRESENTATION AND LAYOUT:
~ SECTION HEADINGS (e.g. Work Experience, Education, Awards/Achievements, etc.)
~ Avoid trying to liven up your resume with non-standard section titles like, “My career in a nutshell.” “Work experience” already says everything it needs to.
~ Aim for a one-page resume if you have zero to 10 years of work experience.
~ If you have more than 10 years of work experience, you can use a two-page resume — but only if you have enough quality content to require two pages.
~If you pad your resume with fluff, a hiring manager might miss important information
Common Problems
- Resume length
- Style & Formatting
- Grammar mistakes (use grammarly to avoid typos and grammar mistakes)
- Proper resume sections
- Objectives and motivation
- Correct verbs and pronouns
- Your career summary is not as strong as it should be.
- Listing a bunch of technologies you claim you know without actually showing how you have worked with them is pointless.
- No projects, portfolio, or any indication of previous work.
- It’s a common mistake to simply describe your day-to-day responsibilities without showing the impact you’ve had on a business.
Tips
- The best place to put most of those keywords is in your skills section. This can be easily customized for each job you apply for and will only take a couple of minutes
- Recruiters really appreciate the richer online profiles that you include as an URL in the resume. (Portfolio, Github, Stackoverflow , LinkedIn)
- Focus on what you want from your next role
- Read company blogs, check out employee’s GitHub, scout current and ex-employees profiles to understand what toolset they are currently using in their projects. Whenever you find something relevant, make sure to prioritize these skills in your resume.
- Personal details are no longer required on your CV. This is partly due to the anti-discrimination laws and partly because they don’t offer any valuable information about your ability to do a job.
- Recruiters love when applicants mention personal projects in their resumes.
— Try to explain the problem you solved
— Aim to include more focus on your measurable results
— show the impact and results you have achieved
— If you are a freshman add your graduation project + any college projects
- Hobbies / Interests — unless your hobbies are directly related to your career objective, do not include them; they take up essential space on your CV which can be applied to more relevant detail
- Don’t use Photoshop/design software which converts your resume into an image.
- Generally, it’s better to submit your resume as a PDF, different versions of Word can change your layout, fonts, and formatting.
- where to include keywords?
— The best place to put most of those keywords is in your skills section
— Another great place for keywords is in your work experience section
— Demonstrate how you’ve used those skills in action
— You can also include keywords in your projects section, if you have one.
- The 10 seconds glance
— Have a look at what a recruiter says about the 10 seconds glance:
“ When I am looking at your resume, I am doing a keyword match against the skill set checklist. If I see a good amount of the right keywords in your resume, it is a pass. If I need to spend more than 10 seconds trying to figure out what you are writing about, it is a failure.”
- Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) now are so advanced that they can parse your resume automatically, search for specific keywords in your resume, and score your resume based on the weights pre-assigned to each keyword.
- Projects Projects Projects
— Ideally, 1–2 lines about the project, 2–3 lines about your role, what technologies you used, what you did, your learning, etc.
— These can be Final Year Projects, Research projects, projects for a particular class, freelance projects, or just personal projects (ie. GitHub stuff)
- Make sure you are contactable (Phone, Email, LinkedIn)
I am planning to write another article to discuss the interviewing process and how to succeed in any interview, so please stay tuned.
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