resume review

[short]

Hey guys,
I'm about to graduate with my BS in CS this term, after 5 long years.... and I'm hoping to get criticism from some fellow developers

I remember seeing Falco's resume, and thought I would ask you guys for criticism? I'll be applying for an internship at Intel (hopefully followed up by a job)

Thanks to all!!

[dandymcgee]

One thing I would consider doing is summarizing your programming experience to a MUCH shorter section. If you feel the specifics are necessary, either add them at the end or even put them on a second page. The sections feels very overwhelming and wall-of-texty right, and may cause the person reviewing it to just toss it aside out of laziness. The best resumes show your qualification for the job in the least words possible, blunt and straightforward.

Work experience is a plus, don't shame it so far toward the bottom like you've done. If you shorten the programming experience section it will pretty much fix this problem, the alternative being moving it up above programming experience. Also you don't have to say "employed from x to y", you can just write "July 2008 - Jun 2009". It's easier to read quickly that way and you lose no information.

Your objective is focused and well written. I wouldn't change a thing.

I've attached my resume. It's in a somewhat non-standard format to suit the particular position I was applying for. The employer's listing focused heavily on education, hence the abnormal length of that section. The key is to craft a resume specifically for each potential employer so as to spark their interests. Obviously I don't think my resume (or any for that matter) is perfect, but the more examples you see perhaps the better you can make your own.

[EdBoon]

Woo congrats on the upcoming graduation.

I agree with Daniel L. Bechard on his comments about shortening up some of the content. its a lot of text for the eye and doesn't split up very well. Maybe take the top 3 or 4 experiences and sum them up a bit more. or could also split the section into 2 sections: skills, and experience. it just looks a bit much, the reader will tend to skim a larger portion of the material if the section is big. remember, a potential employer may be looking through hundreds of these. Short and to the point, don't even give them a chance to skim through anything.


The actual content is great, not the problem, but it might be overwhelming to the reader.

im going to throw my resume from when i graduated, examples never hurt.

Jacob_Jameson_Resume.doc

(45.5 KiB) Downloaded 355 times

also graduating in 5 years is legit, stay for even longer if u can

Best of luck!

[JamesParkes]

@short - I would definitely agree with the two other replies. Short and sweet, but you still want to keep all that great work you have done. Maybe a could thing to do would be eliminating all those words like "experimenting" or "working." I would consolidate it instead by just saying I have experience in C/C++, C#, etc.

Then, with the things you have a lot of experience with, you can keep that a little more written out.

[mattheweston]

I'll add that the Objective should probably be changed to Professional Summary. This needs to be your 60 sec sales pitch. Imagine you are in an elevator with the person who will determine if you get hired. You have till they get off the elevator to sell yourself. Give it your best try.

[teamtwentythree]

I might come off a bit harsh, but just trying to give real advice...

Make sure you tailor your resume to the position/employer, no one size fits all here. Obviously they will be similar but you may need to reorder skills to bring the most relevant to the forefront. It also shows you are looking at this position and aren't just spamming every internship opening out there.

Remove "etc..." from the first line in experience. It makes it sound like you're listing stuff that the recruiter wants to hear, not your actual skills (I've read a lot of resumes and I'm a bit jaded by people overstating their skills or outright lying).

And just so we're clear, its 100x worse to list something on your resume that you aren't familiar with and not be able to answer a question on it than it is to not have it. You've got a lot of stuff there, unless you can answer a non-trivial question about them I would pull them off. I've done probably 50 interviews of CS grads and its not hard to find out when they pad their resume with things they only did/used once or twice.

I'm not sure I understand what you were doing at Northern Arizona. Did you start CS there and then transfer to OSU?

I would probably swap education below experience, only beacuse I think your GPA will be a bit low and better for that to be the part they overlook. Its all about getting into that interview here.

In your experience section I would move away from some of the specific tech you used to more of what you were doing. For example, "RhinoMocks and Moq testing frameworks" means very little to me. Were you doing unit tests, UI automation, stress testing? Big companies generally have their own tech, they want to know you have the fundamentals.

Work experience needs a bit more detail. What did you do? IT Help Desk can probably be inferred, the others need explanation.

I would probably yank the hobbies bit, you're already talking about most of it in your experience section.

Beyond that I would get info from Intel themselves:
http://blogs.intel.com/jobs/2009/08/13/ ... cv_part_1/

I would also make sure not to limit yourself to one company. I know MS has a pretty cushy internship setup and Amazon probably does as well.

[short]

Hey guys, triple midterms have kept me busy since I originally posted, but I wanted to let you guys know I got the job/internship!! Pays out the ass, and I get to program C/C++ on embedded systems to boot! I attached the updated resume, thanks to all of your advice!

I took the time to separate out related skills from actual programming experience, remove things that I may have used for a 10 week class but mostly forgotten, and overall make it more concise. I also moved my work experience above the programming experience, it seemed a little weird to me but apparently it paid off.

I attached the updated resume I used, it's definitely an improvement!

[dandymcgee]

Hey guys, triple midterms have kept me busy since I originally posted, but I wanted to let you guys know I got the job/internship!! Pays out the ass, and I get to program C/C++ on embedded systems to boot! I attached the updated resume, thanks to all of your advice!

Wow, that looks much better than it did before. Congratulations on getting the position! Keep us updated on how it's going and all the cool shit you get to play with.

[TheBuzzSaw]

I'm not targeting anything specific on your resume; I just want to make a comment from the perspective of someone who actively participates in the hiring process.

Make sure you can defend everything on your resume.

There is nothing more obnoxious that dealing with applicants who put C++ on their resumes only to reveal in the interview: "Oh, I did a little C++ for a week last summer." If you feel inadequate in a particular area, omit it (or make it blatantly obvious that you only dabbled in the technology). Along those same lines, make sure you don't saturate your resume with every technology you've ever touched. As teamtwentythree stated, adjust the resume for the position.

We had another applicant who submitted a horrible code sample. If we stumble upon code ourselves, we're likely to be kinder (since the code might be old, not representative of their current skill, etc.). However, once the sample is referenced on the resume, we become much more critical.

With all that said, the resume looks good. Kudos for keeping it to one page. You have a lot of excellent experience in a variety of places. I'm working to qualify myself to have Qt Creator experience. XD

[short]

I'm not targeting anything specific on your resume; I just want to make a comment from the perspective of someone who actively participates in the hiring process.

Make sure you can defend everything on your resume.

There is nothing more obnoxious that dealing with applicants who put C++ on their resumes only to reveal in the interview: "Oh, I did a little C++ for a week last summer." If you feel inadequate in a particular area, omit it (or make it blatantly obvious that you only dabbled in the technology). Along those same lines, make sure you don't saturate your resume with every technology you've ever touched. As teamtwentythree stated, adjust the resume for the position.

We had another applicant who submitted a horrible code sample. If we stumble upon code ourselves, we're likely to be kinder (since the code might be old, not representative of their current skill, etc.). However, once the sample is referenced on the resume, we become much more critical.

With all that said, the resume looks good. Kudos for keeping it to one page. You have a lot of excellent experience in a variety of places. I'm working to qualify myself to have Qt Creator experience. XD

Thanks for the compliment! I'm excited to get started. I took twentythree's advice and took off everything I didn't have a solid background in, I am actually looking forward to the opportunity to demonstrate my ability. I really hope I can make an impression. Thank you for the feedback!

Do you look at resume's professionally?? I'd love some advice if you have any.

[TheBuzzSaw]

I represent a later step in the hiring pipeline. (I'm the hiring fragment shader. Wakka wakka.) By the time engineers reach me, they've already been cleared for an interview. However, I launch my attack with the applicant's resume as my platform.

Everyone else has given good advice already. My typical advice is "keep it to one page" and "get your darn high school graduation off there". You've already adhered to that. Some more detail in your work experience would be nice. You don't need a ton. (Most people go overboard here.) Just summarize what you did technically at each job.

Yeah, we had one applicant who listed everything in existence. I swear, he had experience in C, C++, C#, Java, ASP.NET, MFC, WPF, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Flash, AdobeFX, Silverlight, Visual BASIC 6, Visual BASIC .NET, PHP, Ruby, Lua, Perl, etc. etc. etc. The interview exposed that he had virtually no experience in C++, and he failed to know many of the C# basics (despite listing C# in ~6 locations). He really had no business listing either on his resume (much less the 500 other areas of tech). I guess I just keep bringing him up because I'm still traumatized from how silly that interview was. Just look over your stuff and imagine the interviewer targeting it and being an expert himself/herself. Are you OK having someone ask how to best tweak a RhinoMocks/Moq unit test? Would you be OK having a 5 minute discussion what the Qt framework and how much you like/dislike signals & slots? That kind of stuff. Just make sure your answer will never be, "Oh, I touched that for an hour one weekend."

[teamtwentythree]

Grats on the position!