Tips for Your Technical Resume
A technical resume can often be a jumble of acronyms and language unfamiliar to some recruiters or business execs. At any given time, a resume could use a little dose of fresh content and updating to reflect the latest and greatest projects you are working on. Check out these five tips that can help technology professionals improve their resumes and build a bridge to the next great career opportunity.
Working on Borrowed Time
When sending along your technical resume, you should assume that you are working on borrowed time. Despite the time and effort that goes into building a resume, many hiring managers and recruiters are trying to get through a significant stack of resumes to find the right candidates to meet with. If someone only has a few minutes to peruse your resume, find ways to grab their attention. Consider bumping up your key accomplishments to a prominent position or using the font and format to draw someone’s eyes to the best of your resume.
The Interactive Resume
Your resume is clearly the primary vehicle when applying for job opportunities but it can truly serve as an interactive map to your real world work examples. Use links from your resume to showcase your online assets. Do you have a personal website, open source code work, maybe even a patent? Though a technical recruiter may not always be able to understand the details of what you posted on a specific site, pointing to this content will help your resume stand out as it makes its way to your fellow techies.
What’s Your Number?
More technical recruiters are finding that candidates are open to being contacted via text on their mobile phone. If this is your preferred way of communicating then make sure you put this on your resume. This discreet communication channel can be a great way to quickly connect, ask a few questions and even set up an interview time.
Consistent Work History
Make sure that you are able to speak to the flow of your resume. If you made some jumps in your career or did a little independent consulting, there should be a story to tell so you can capture the interest of the recruiter or hiring manager. If you were at an organization for a while then show the progression through projects and responsibilities.
The most important factor is to be honest about where you have been, how long you were there and where you want to go.
Build out your years of experience across your career in a consistent readable way. You’d be surprised how often a technical resume appears to be disjointed and assembled over time.
Be Better on the Basics
It’s easy for people to tell you to use plenty of action verbs or put your education in a certain spot but you are better than that. You know these things by now so when I say be better on the basics, I mean being smart with your resume when sending to employers. Customize your technical resume to better connect you with the specific opportunity you are interested in obtaining. Don’t rewrite your resume for each job but keep a draft copy with a few highlighted sections that you know can be easily customized for each role.
Between LinkedIn and open source sites, technical job seekers are in a world less dependent of resumes but not totally rid of them. So make sure you put your best foot forward so can be in a position to get the job you want.
