resume triage w/alishah novin

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. So that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at t s and t d e s s e y n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. So I want to go and dive in because this is going to go by super fast, not super long intros. But Alicia and I, actually this was Alicia's idea. And because most, most good ideas are Alicia's.

And basically Alicia was like, hey, we should do a resume review session. And I was like, yeah, sure, let's do it. I've tried to stay away from resume reviews. The reason why I don't actively pro act or don't proactively talk about resume reviews, I don't want to be known as a resume guy, right? I think that there's a lot of people out there that do the resume thing really well. But after talking with Alicia, actually Alicia, I think when you brought this up, I was getting my hair bleached, but it's not a lot of time to think about it. But after thinking about it, I realized that people need to know that their resumes are incredibly important.

And so Alicia and I are going to dive into that. So real quick, my background for those of you who do not know me, I am Taylor Destin. I'm a recruiter in Nashville. I've been recruiting for 11 years. My focus is on the engineering side. So I lead a team of six other individuals where we recruit top engineering town across the country. And I use content to communicate to both hiring managers and job seekers instead of sliding into your DMs like most recruiters. Alicia, give a quick background about yourself, man. To set the stage. Yeah. So first of all, given the fact that your hair is bleached, like you are the black, we are the black and white of tech cup, like this is too funny.

And our loops go different directions. Yeah, so I've had a very long career in tech, both at very large companies currently at Microsoft, for example. But I've been at another Fortune 200 company. I also work in the startup space for many, many years. Love both. Think that there's value in both. I have hired too many people that I've lost count of. account of, I've interviewed well over that and managed teams of 30, 40 people plus. And so it's been a passion of mine to just, I am a resume guy. And I think that it's an important one. There's a lot of critique these days about whether or not there really is needed, but I think they're important.

So let's get started. So to set the stage, for those of you who sent your resumes to us, we have them, we are going to try to get through them as much as possible. But I want to keep this to an hour because your boy still got to get lunch. I have not eaten lunch yet. So we're going to keep it to an hour. So we're I'm going to share my screen. And the point of this is Alicia and I are going to give our first takes. So I'm going to give my first take as a recruiter. Alicia is going to give his first take as a hiring manager.

And then we're going to talk three to five minutes on each person's resume on what we were changing why. Alicia am I missing anything I guess? No let me just add one thing though which is I so when I post a new job whether it's a junior through to senior the the approach that I and my peers have kind of I've seen many many others take with approach is you just first get inundated with so many resumes I mean, you're a needle and a haystack. And so the challenge that the hiring manager, the person who's ultimately going to be your boss, they have to make quick decisions.

They want to make the best hire as fast as possible and not have to invest all their time in finding that gem if they can find it quickly. And so that's what that first impression is all about is, imagine you're in the seat of the hiring manager, you're going to see the stack and you're going to say, okay, I'm going to make three stacks. I definitely need to drop everything and call this person because I don't want to lose them as a candidate. I'll get to them when I get to them. Then I'll hold off on this person for now. They're probably not aligned to the exact goal I need.

Then every once in a while you have to red flags, which is this person might be good, but it's going to take a lot of time on my part to really see that. I want to make a fast and best decision as well. I want to make the best decision as fast as possible. 100% yeah, and I want to stress that I think resume writing is To basically get the first eight seconds of a manager so they can understand what you do immediately and then move you to the process quickly So Christina what's going on? It's good to see you just hung out with her in Vegas this week.

All right, so let's go Let's dive in first resume. We need to pull it up real quick. Hold on hold on While you're doing that so for folks who didn't send in a resume or no actually how do I comment I have to go to the event don't I think I'll be really bad yeah yeah I'm gonna be in rookie so I'll put because I have a resume template and I will put that in the comments for folks who just want to shortcut the whole process and just kind of have a good sense you don't have to use my template you don't have to use my font you know I don't you know I'm not that weighted to how it looks and everything but what it'll help you do is kind of get a sense of of what kind of things help a hiring manager would make sure I don't also start playing the event while I'm talking.

But yeah, so I will put that in the comments right here. Okay, awesome. All right, I need to zoom in on this. How do I zoom in here? Command, for some reason it's not. Hit the bottom right, or if you, ah, yeah. This is why you're a hiring manager. All right, so, all right. So first one, anonymous, thank you for sending this in. So I'll go first. So first off, if I'm scrolling, so this is literally, I'm gonna go through literally how my mind works when I look at the resume. So first off, I see education, and then I see software knowledge base, right? So I see BS administration, so you guys can be reporting.

All right, so my eyes immediately go to Dynamics 365. So I'm like, all right, this person's in the ERP space, Scroll down, I see senior business analyst PM. So now my mind is senior business analyst, ERP focus experience, scroll through, I see Microsoft apps, I see lead sprint meetings with multiple teams. You know, again, BA, I look at titles, I think titles are important. EDI, this first got EDI experience and used to be in the finance side. So basically, so for me, whether this is wrong or right as a recruiter. I've already put this person in a bucket as a mid-business analyst who has a pretty good background with ERP experience in EDI, which are specific things that we get called about for business analysts.

And they have a finance background, which to me probably means they're very technically savvy, can probably do excel really well, which is sometimes important as a business analyst. So if I'm recruiting on a business analyst role, I'm gonna call this person. So that's my thoughts. Alicia, go. So, okay, so strictly looking at the resume and it's worth noting that I've not looked, I don't know about you Taylor, but I've not seen any one of these residents. We have not seen any one of these. We have not opened every resume we will open today is completely first impression. So it's literally like Alicia and I are hiring like we typically do.

Yeah. So first off, like the bucket I'd put this person in is probably in the middle category. The I will maybe call this person. And the reason why is because there's nothing that immediately just jumps out to me that says this is what that person's looking to do. I'm not a fan of having the education at the top because at the end of the day, the thing that I mostly want to go off of is experience and what you've done in terms of accomplishments. It doesn't mean that there can't be a summary at the top. And what I mean is, a summary, I don't mean a career objective or a long paragraph, but just kind of what is listed in the software knowledge base.

I think that's helpful. That's useful. But just visually, there's a lot of space taken up by that heading that is not there. I think that that's probably the person's name. But then the rest of it is kind of just, there's so much space lost to the certs and the education and all that, which is valuable, but not the most immediate I want to see. If you can scroll down just a bit more into the experience. Yeah, absolutely. Hold on. I got to find my cursor where my cursor is. All right. Yeah. So, so in here, like, but I think, I mean, honestly, again, visually, the fact that the experience is broken across two pages is kind of a bummer because that's the thing that immediately I want to see.

I'm not going to, you know, not hire someone because they span two pages or something like that, but for sure. It's more just what pulls away from my attention when I'm trying to go through things very quickly. I do see lead the lead sprint meetings with multiple teams, 5 or 7 employees, but it's a bummer that especially for a business analyst, especially for someone who's focused on making a machine work, that a statement that is quantified is almost one of the last bullets, whereas the first bullet built an application through Microsoft apps to automate the collection of information for an internal department, that's so much reading.

I mean like I, as someone who like to talk, as someone who is very wordy, that's like I struggle when I read lots and see lots and so a little more brevity I think would be important there. Yeah and I agree. I think it's just a lot of words right. I mean I think it's just you know, so for example evaluate existing implementations for technical issues or project risk, right? So I would ask, expand on that. What type of existing implementations have been done with an organization? Have you gone from Oracle to NetSuite? Have you gone from whatever, right? And what type of project risk did you find?

Right? Did you find that your NetSuite implementation was only 30% successful? I'm gonna make stuff up here. Only 30% successful. when the organization thought it was 95% successful. Right. The impact is like you have to have a quantified impact. That's going to be your bread and butter. And like we're stuck on the first one and maybe we'll but I mean I think it's worth stating that your resume and why I think resumes matter. Let me just make my case for why resumes matter. It helps the hiring manager understand who you are and get a sense of what you're trying to do. But it also helps you when you're in the interview because now you've got this neat packaged kind of pamphlet Consider it Yeah, just but it's it's it's like you are selling yourself, right?

Whether you're in tech or not in tech whether you're a code or not You know the idea of having to sell yourself was kind of a weird one But the idea is that you want to it's like your linkedin tagline, right? It's the tell me who you are in 140 characters kind of thing. Correct. And this This, I'm having to infer a lot, which is not what I want to do as a hiring manager. I want it to be slapped on the face. Cool, all right, I'm gonna stop screen sharing. All right, so thank you to who sent that in, we appreciate it. And then, at least I just say, we'll just go through mine and then we'll just go through yours.

So, all right, let me share this one. Share, share screen, window, no Chrome tab. All right, Alicia, you first, we will alternate. Okay. Okay, all right, see, let's just scroll down. Okay, so right there, I'm gonna say the same thing I said last time, right? Look at, like the professional experience starts way at the bottom. And it's, again, it's not the most immediate thing, but it's the next thing that I'm gonna look at. All that stuff that's on the top, certifications, technical expertise, summary of qualification, education. Probably the one thing I want to see in front of the experience is that technical expertise. The summary of qualifications, I would probably try to squish that into the technical expertise.

Maybe there's some stuff that is valuable. So in list that as another way in which you are an expert at something. Don't take up all that space, all that valuable space with all that, right? Smosh it into the technical expertise and then get the education, put it lower down, certifications, merge that with the education. So then professional experience, I like this. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, no, no, that's awesome. Yes, I love it when I see exactly what technologies were used for a given role, because that lets me, if we're interviewing, ask some very specific questions, which I like. Full stack, yeah. Clients. Okay, so that's good.

I'd work a little bit on the formatting because some of it's getting a little tough to sort of see and stand out. It kind of looks a little disorganized in some areas. And then it doesn't follow a similar pattern, right? So like I Heart Media has become very paragraph-driven whereas the ones above it have become kind of more bullet-based. So I put this in, like I'm seeing a lot of skill here, which is promising, but it's, I just think the formatting will help it go from a, that middle bucket to the upper bucket where I would definitely call. So I would just really walk off.

So you would put this, you put this as a middle bucket. So basically, you know, for again, for those of you who are tuning in, what Alicia and I are doing, we are categorizing, we're kind of categorizing three areas. One, I would say, I would say all things go top bucket, we're going to call you immediately. Then there's bucket two, which is what the last two resumes have been in. Not bad, not great. And then there's the third bucket, which was basically we're not gonna call you, but we love you. And so this is the second bucket. For me, real quick, again, I don't wanna belabor points here because we got so much to go over.

I would say here, again, the key thing I wanna get across here with Kevin, Kevin, as a recruiter, I'm gonna open up your resume like I did. And this, so this is what my computer shows right here. Right? I don't see anything technical really, right here. So then I have to do one scroll, right? So let's do one scroll. So one scroll is going to get me here, right? Which is better. I can tell you I can get an idea of what you're doing. But again, it's like Alicia said, you essentially have to scroll twice to get to your professional experience. So what I would do is I get rid of summary of qualifications and I would do this summary.

And Alicia, I think you and I are on the same page with this, but please let me know if we're not. I think your summer year qualifications need to be. So I could that 10 plus years of overall software development experience, seven years of job development experience, three years of Angular, two years of PHP and a BS degree in computer science. Yeah. And that's what the summary should be. And that's really the very top of the page. So when I open up your resume, I see all of your lists of experiences and your technical expertise, which really your technical expertise should be at the bottom because really the summary should be the main technical expertise.

The really your technical expertise side on your resume is just so it can get caught up in the searches. Right? But your summary portion needs to be to the point, if you have a really good summary portion, I don't even look at your resume. I call you. Yeah. And I would say that's the big thing. And then going off of what Alicia just said with professional experiences, I would agree with that. Some of it's kind of like bullet pointed and then other like right here. So this makes my eyes hurt. A talicized, bolding a talicized, and normal font. Like, that's a lot. So clean this up.

And then again, then right here, it gets a little wordy, right? So that's what I would do. Like, for example, this is just fluff, improving technical documentation. How? How did you improve technical documentation? Did you implement a technical documentation tool that the organization didn't have before. Those are the things that you have to think about. Go ahead, Alicia. No, I completely agree. And so I know Kevin, and we can't have chatted a fair bit. Oh, that's funny. And I just gotta say, I mean, I know Kevin is an awesome person. I know he's wicked skilled at what he can do. And this is an example of someone who is almost selling their skill level short because it gets lost.

There's just, it puts more work on me to have to figure it out as opposed to just laying it out for me and saying, this is why you're awesome. And I'm watching the comments, I think it was a couple that we probably want to do. So like Randall, just above that one, spent trying to jam things to a single page. And it doesn't have to be a single page. Single page is awesome. But the first page should be the best page. Yeah. The first page is the best page. Yeah. Yeah. And I told Alicia this after before we went live, I said, the first page of your resume needs to captivate my attention, right?

10 plus years of overall development, six years of.net, three years of Angular, two years of PHP, one year of Svelte, BS degree in computer science, going immediately into your technical experience. Then you're, then I look to your second and third page for a continuity of roles in seniority. And if you've not, if you're not coding or you're not coding anymore, You know managed teams of exercise for X number one. Yeah, quantitative. Yeah, Quantitative and you know save my company two million on budget because we were able to do X and Start to belabor the one but the reason why that matters is because Otherwise for me to figure out how many years you have have an experience I have to go and like scroll all the way to the bottom See how they started where they dev where they have this where they have that okay So now it's 2022 and I start having to do math and at that time.

We win our time people. Annie would you recommend only adding bullet points that are relevant to the job and expounding on those in the experience section? You want to take that? I guess she means in the summary. Yeah, right here. Would you recommend in the summary statement with a summary of qualifications? Which is kind of what I said I think, right? Summ. Yeah, yeah I agree. I think when you get into the experience though specifically, I wouldn't necessarily state anything that's obvious. So when you talk about relevant to the job, I'd rephrase that and say relevant to your impact, relevant to what you've done. And that's a hard thing because if you're a junior coder, for example, or you're a mid-level and you're still trying to figure your way around, it's hard to be like, well, what impact have I had?

But if you look a little deeper, you'll see that, hey, I did this with the team. I had an opinion here and it was actually appreciated. And so that's something that you drove. That's going to stand out to me more than I took bugs off the backlog and I coded them. I mean, I'm going to expect that you did that, right? Yeah. I know you too. I think a summary is if you're okay, so I'm glad Randall asked this. If you're a junior in your career, I would do an about me like hey former sous chef former Backstreet boy back of the house audio engineer turned software because here's why if I'm talking to somebody earlier in their career I want something that I can bond with them on and that's cool right like maybe maybe You know, maybe the hiring manager is a huge like foodie, right?

And you're like hey listen like you know I was with you know a chef with two Michelin star restaurants You know, I went to software school, wanted to get out of the restaurant industry because of the hours. Now I'm focused on Python and JavaScript. That tells me a story, right? So then I'm like, oh wow, this person will first off, what does that tell me? It tells you you're working in highly stressful situations because you worked at Michelin Star restaurants. I'm gonna bond with you because if I'm a foodie, I'm probably gonna know the restaurant or know of it. And then I see this specific thing.

So I think it makes sense to be about me if you're junior. If you're senior or mid in your career, just give me a summary. three years of JavaScript, two years of React, two years of AWS, BS degree in computer science, because I want to know what you what your experience level is immediately. Alicia, thoughts on that? No, I completely agree. And that kind of goes to a comment that Rochelle had just posted about a stamp of quantifying value as a junior, which is a tough one, or especially if you're an entry level or coming out of college, which is a comment just further down.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be the value like I saved the company millions of dollars, right? Something that still stands out to me is I worked on a 10 person team on a project that had X number of users. I mean those types of things give me a rough scale of what kind of work you've done. Verges is for example I worked on a product that no one's ever seen. It's never gone published and I mean that's kind of a poor experience if you've ever kind of found yourself on that type of thing. So you'll want to find other things that you can quantify.

Yeah. And like even if it was so, so if you think it's positive, I had like it. So if you're in boot camp and you create a capstone project and you have. 10 users on it. Tell me, hey, I developed an app that keeps track of stray cats in my neighborhood. And actually I have 10 houses that are actually using my app. I mean, that's pretty impressive. Like if you're a junior dev and you got a push to production, you have like 10 households using your app. That's impressive to me. I'd call you, Lisa. Well, you probably called him too. Yeah. Yeah. And the reason why is it's not necessarily the number.

Sure. I almost don't care about the number. It's more about the fact that you're thinking about the number. You're thinking about how you're communicating something. And that's the key, right? It's you're coming there and you're saying, I'm not just thinking about the work that I'm doing, but I'm thinking about the impact in a quantifiable meaningful sense. And that's going to be a skill that as you grow into an intermediate senior, et cetera, going to be more and more important. So thinking in terms of the impact, the timelines, the cost, those types of things are really, really important. Yeah, absolutely. And then quick kind of go through here, whether resume template would be the same format for new college grad.

I think really similar. I think there are some tweaks. You know, if you've just done capstone projects or college projects, maybe it's not professional experience, but I just edited a a guy's resume yesterday who had college experience and he put it as notable projects, but I think it's a very similar format and even more than the format, it's the same thing in regards to getting quantitative, right? Developed a point of proof of concept using these technologies that are doing this, right? It's like Annie said here, I like using this formula found online, accomplished X by doing Y, which resulted in Z. That's perfect, perfect. When you say quantify, how would you do that if you're just starting out?

Again, going back to this, again, get as quantitative as you can based off your project because I don't know what your project is. Don't make something up, right? And that'll be all makes something up. So if you don't, I'm going to know that, okay, this person is an entry level position. So they probably didn't save the company millions. And so I'm not going to look for that kind of thing. But if you, you know, like, let's say, let's, let's go the most basics. You came in and all you were ever given were just bugs on the backlog. You know, say I completed an average of seven bugs a week.

That is, that's enough, right? It's not the greatest thing. It's not like earth shattering in terms of the value, but it tells me something about how you think about stuff. And that's, that's just the key point that why I say quantify things. Absolutely. Great questions coming on new this, what happened. What, what, what about if you've had years of experience in tech when I was a developer or, and are not trying to transition. And are trying to transition to more of a formal dev coding position or not? I do not try to transition into more of a formal dev coding focus position. Kelly, Kelly, you qualify.

There's like one word in there that we need to know, are you trying to get into dev or are you not trying to get into dev? Cause if you're not trying to get a dev, don't put dev jargon in there. But if you're trying to get into dev, I think that's where we go to volunteer projects, doing something on your own. At least I know maybe that's on that note. I said now. Okay. And now trying to transition. Okay. So I mean, I mean, that's what I would say like listen, go to your local church, non-profit, something, ask for work to be done. I mean, even I'll give a shout out to Jordan Ryerson.

He tuned in earlier. I want to give him a shout out. So Jordan slid into my DMs. It was like, hey, man, like do you have anything that you need help with? And I was like, actually my other podcast because a man can have too many podcasts needs a rewrite on our website. And guess what he did? He rewrote it and actually got experience doing it. And now he is, he has it on his portfolio. Yeah. Everybody needs help. And I think again, like the hiring manager is going to be aware of some of those things too. It's not, you don't have to reach too far, but I think if you've transitioned roles, if you can quantify things from your previous roles, that helps.

Again, it's just about showing the way that you think about stuff. But then in terms of the formal dev encoding, that's going to get to projects and things that you might not have gotten paid for, but still have value in them. So share that. And there's always things that you can quantify there. I mean, at the very least, let's go for a complete stretch. I've no experience. I've been a banker for 50 years, and now I want to go and write code. And the only thing I have is the one project I did at a boot camp. But that one project has seven different classes, database structure with 18 tables, 100 lines of code, which is impressive, given the other numbers I just gave.

So let's say 1,000 lines ago, 10,000 lines of code. But those are numbers, right? Again, it's not that, I'm not gonna go, Oh, he doesn't have or she doesn't have 15,000 lines of code. Therefore, I'm not going to judge you based on that number. It's more about reflecting how you think because it helps me measure things better. Absolutely. I love that. All right. Let's let's get to another resume. Yeah. And again, thank you all for tuning in. We appreciate it and also just asking really good questions. And any of the comments is also doing a great job of like giving it a lot of really useful feedback.

So I would be. Yes, 100%. All right. Do I need to. I open this in my email. All right, there we go. All right, so me first. So first off, what I like right here without Berto, he immediately said what he is. Yes. I like that junior Android developer. Then he went into currently targeting junior Android role utilizing Kotlin. I like that. I would like to know what he has done. So what I would have liked is that currently targeting junior Android developer, I like that, but then tell me what you've done, not the skills that you want to do. I love Project's Quick. Alicia and I can click on his GitHub quickly.

I can see the text he has used, and then he dives into obviously non-technical experience. So, you know, if I'm looking at this customer service, so here's the deal. There's, I want, I would not call you Alberto, and here's why, because you don't have any technical experience on your resume. I want whatever whatever you did in here, I need that listed out like right here. I think you may be concerned with just getting just one page. Listen, if you can give me if half of your resume, the first page is just technical stuff from a side project perspective. I love that. And if your non technical stuff is on page two, that's totally I've come across junior developers that their entire first page is side projects and to make it look like they've actually been doing it for a long time and I and and and I call them.

So, I would put this in the do not call. Alicia, what are your thoughts? I'm a little different on this. I'd probably go in the medium again. But I'll tell you why. I think there's a lot that's being done correctly in terms of that first, I mean, at first heading super strong. I think there's some things that I would, like you mentioned, Taylor, like, tighten up. The project section that MTG deckmaker, MTG card rulings, I think those are projects, but it doesn't tell me what the projects are actually doing. It does say what the tech stack is, which is good. I think there's a little like there's just not enough meat on the bone there, but the thing about Let's go ahead.

Okay, and then the thing on the professional experience There's stuff that's valuable there. It's just that it's not Valuable to me, but there is stuff that could be valuable to me Right like ranked in the top 10 performing representatives eight different months. That's awesome But then senior technical support representative, I mean, that means that you've worked with probably either hardware or like, I've done some kind of software stuff, which that's going to be valuable for any coder to have that experience. So talk to me about why your time at Spectrum was so valuable at what makes it valuable as a coder now. And if you start reframing that experience that you've had, the previous career doesn't become throw away.

your previous experience doesn't throw away. You're actually showing the value that it has there. So I think there's a lot that can be done that's positive with this. And I think the first half is really, really tight, really strong. It needs some improvements in some areas. But otherwise, depending on the caliber of other candidates I have, I probably have you in the middle market. Okay, love that. So also to right here, it will be on YouTube, I guess. And then Annie, yes, this will be saved on my LinkedIn. And but yeah, you can definitely find it on on on my YouTube. All right, let's go to the next one.

That's good. I like it. Also, also, I love that we don't quite see eye to eye, which is fantastic. It's important. He needs me to disagree with you. Say well, as that pains me to disagree with you. No, honestly, more people need to disagree better. So, Andrew Peters, you first. Okay, let's scroll down real quick. Okay, I'm going to go with my, I, uh, it's spelled right back up to the top. I, yeah, sorry. I'm not making my thoughts. Go ahead. Sorry. No, no, I, I would be a little, I don't know, lower end of my middle bucket. I think there's really, yeah, I, I, and I'll tell you why, because there's, there's some good stuff there, but again, it's getting lost for me.

And that that's the structure. Like that's the struggle I have, right? I want it. I want to quickly be able to see it. I think there's again, what, let me, let me say it in this way. the content in there is really great. And so that's why I'd be more favorable towards this. It's the structure of it that makes me struggle. Like the projects all look the same. I mean, that could be one project, right? And this is bold headings and things like that will help it put it over the edge. The table above it with the weird kind of like. Yeah, this doesn't look good.

Right. And you know what makes it a challenge for me the fact that languages on the far left, technologies in the middle, frameworks on the right, and it's like visually it's hard to kind of sort that in my mind. Right? And now if I spent more than 30 seconds on this, I'd start to see the content, I'd start to see the value. But we don't have we don't have 30 seconds. I think that's what we're trying to get across. Right. Right. But like, I'll tell you, I'll tell you what is such a bummer. Bachelor degree in computer science, that's phenomenal. That's amazing. But it's almost lost in the fact that there's not a very like the formatting, the structure.

I mean, I would, you know, you can even consider putting Andrew Peters, I got the name right, Peter, comma BSC, computer science. That's that'd be phenomenal, right? Like there's ways to highlight and amplify that value, but it's the way that it's just laid out, that's what kind of I think would burn you. So it's funny because for me this is an immediate call, which is awesome. This is why I love doing this. So a few reasons. So first off, left a line, everything. I hate middle line, right? That's just a preference. Push this over, push this over. Also, So Andrew Peters, listen, you got a 4.0 from a bachelor's degree in computer science.

Like that shit needs to be like, I need to see that. So I would probably put the education above the summary. And I would also try. So these are the small things that clutter everything up. I don't need to know your location. It just doesn't matter. Like we're in a remote world. So D-Link these, or at least D-Link or unlink whatever it's called, your email, because that, like, that distracts me just like, ooh. Where'd we go? Oh, wait a minute. Nope, that's not it. Well, seeing your email's sailor. No, seriously. There's literally nothing exciting. Where's that? Andrew Peters. Yeah. Plus, up again. So, like, and then also too, like this is hard to read.

I would probably just like, you know, languages and I would just type them out and then, you know, tab down technologies, type them out. But the reason why I like this is because the summary, I know exactly what he does. Full stack developer, spring boot, Java react and Redux. I need that personal projects. I'm with Alicia, but I can tell at least where your focus is. Like, like, so my eyes, spring boot, Java react. Okay. I'm going to see what else I can see. Okay. This is literally how I think spring boot. Okay. Got it more spring boot. This guy obviously does Java. There it is Java right there.

Okay, Florida blue, up spring API is great Java. Open shift got some and then okay so so then in my mind I'm like, all right, this person has been developing now for two almost going on two and a half years of experience. and then it has probably, you know, the last year of Java. Like I can glean that off your resume pretty quickly. So I would call Andrews Peter. So let's quickly with the layout on that because I think this is an important distinction worth sharing. Depending on the company that I'm with at the time, when I'm hiring, I can either be hyper-selective or I have to be very like, put a lot of scrutiny on each resume.

Sure. So there are there are times when I can afford to make a mistake and there are times when I can't sure and the resume that it's what structure the way it is it would Not do well in places where I can afford to make a mistake The long as Taylor was talking I was starting to see more and more stuff going. Oh gosh like I wish that was like Amplified highlighted like made bigger and just jumped out at me because it's getting lost and that's that's the key for me is that put yourself in my shoes and I get this resume and let's just, I don't know Andrew's well to say whether or not he's like amazing or not but let's assume yes right.

So now imagine I get the exact same caliber candidate but the resume tells me all of those things. The one added bonus that comes with that resume is the fact that that person is communicating in a way which if I have a concern about how well are they gonna document their code how well are they going to communicate with the rest of the team, how well are they going to present information to a leadership team, et cetera, that's going to help that one candidate edge out over this one. And that's the key is it's about how are you presenting information. And so skills wise and worth sharing that I don't think we're judging anyone on their skills here.

Let's call that out. We're not saying that you're not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're not judging any because we don't know. Right. It's just purely how you're presenting yourself. And that's what's getting lost is I'm not, nothing is immediately jumping out to me to say exactly what you are and the more they dig, I go, gosh, like, you know, there's a lot here that can actually work with. Yeah. All right. So I'm going to stop sharing real quick. I'm going to answer Annie's question real quick because it's very pertinent. How would you, how would you frame a description for the projects? What should be added and not added for me?

Annie, I think it's exactly what you said earlier, right? So my kind of four, my four bullet points that should be pretty standard is first bullet point is describing your project like you describe it to somebody in your family, right? Because we all talk to people in our family differently than our industry, right? It's like, Mom, no, I don't code. I find people who code, right? My mom's told things I can fix computers, right? Which is not coding, let's be honest. The second thing is, so the second third bullet point is what Annie, you said, right? So I developed an app that leveraged. We needed a really light, fast front end, so we leveraged React and we brought, we changed it over from Angular 2 and the response time was 15 milliseconds faster.

And then we really needed to solve a cloud issue, so we leveraged AWS Lambda because of this. Right? Very specific. And then the last bullet point should be all the technologies and tooling you've touched, because there are times that you have touched, I say this example all the time, as a recruiter, we searched very specific first. So let's say if Alicia called me and goes, Taylor, I need a .NET developer with some React experience, and it would be a plus if they have Figma because this .NET developer is gonna have to be working in the front end a little bit more, working with design team.

So they at least have to know how to mess around with Figma. If you're a .NET developer with heavy React experience and you've touched Figma, and you don't include it in your entire technologies using you follow this framework, that's not gonna be in your resume. And so I'm gonna miss calling you because of it. Now, if I pull up your resume and it says Figma the technology is used, but it doesn't show it in your main bullet points, I'm gonna ask you about it. Hey, Annie, I saw we have Figma, I'm looking for a .NET React developer has Figma, how did you use it? Annie's probably gonna go, well, I actually worked on a project for three months with it, but that's about it.

But to me, that's enough. To the hiring manager, that's enough. Yeah. One thing I'll add to that, and you kind of touched on that. But so I personally, I put the technologies first right under the project name, just because I didn't help see that. Okay. Yeah. No, I mean, that you could go either way, really doesn't matter. But the thing that I would say, and this is, it's kind of an expectation that's evolved over time. 10 years ago, I don't think this was as big of an expectation. But I think as people have gotten more and more interested in questions around software delivery and building the right product and questions around product management.

The key thing for me is stating what the solution or excuse me, stating what the problem is that you're trying to solve. So for example, I have a project that I worked on and the key that or the thing that I was doing was I just felt developers were not getting an opportunity to write and code for games. And coding in a game gives you a different way of thinking and lets you exercise code in a totally different way. Then you would when you're always building business applications and mobile applications. And so that was a project I was trying to solve is how can I help coders actually get an opportunity to get exposed to coding for games?

And that is nothing technical in it, right? It's just a very clear problem and I would put that as, you know, I'd state languages first, but then next I would say here's the problem I was trying to solve and then here's how I went about solving it, quantify where you can, but that allows again, as the hiring manager, let's me go, okay, this person is trying to not just understand the technical part, but they're also trying to understand the purpose because then they can come back to me and they say, hey, we're being told to build it this way but if we consider the problem in this way we might actually have a better solution and that's better overall.

Yeah, makes total sense. All right, so we're going to move on to the next one. Let's mode here and go rapid fire lightning round. Yeah, I don't worry definitely not going to get to everybody today. All right, so I'm going to share my screen again. All right, so me first. So first off, I just hate this format. So this is, I think this is a Microsoft Word format. I just think there's, so I think this information needs to be up here, right? Because you're wasting a fourth of your page with a box that has no pertinent information in it. So I, and also I hate the, so when I talk about dual columns, you're like, what's dual columns?

What does a dual column resume look like? This is it, right? So there's data going down the right hand side and there's data going down the left hand side and it's very, very confusing. Now that being said, the way my brain would work is I would say five years of front end engineering, which is good. I see React and Angular. I would go down to like, okay, this is an intern. So it's a newer developer. So three projects on time, that's good, accessibility standards, okay, I don't know what tech you used, right? I see GitHub and Jira, but was this like, if this is a front end developer project that NetCo, what tech are you using?

You didn't even list it, right? Same here, front end, I see HTML, see that's better, right? Not bad, but again, doesn't tell me about the project. All that being said, I'm probably gonna put this in the past bucket, bucket three, because I'm having to infer way too much and I don't have time to go through everything. Yeah, I agree. I think digging into it, I'm seeing a lot of really solid stuff, but first blush impressions, I would probably have passed a lot faster. One of the things that I, so I'll share something that was not my own style. Like I typos and things don't really bother me too much.

I'm really near it. but when I surveyed a bunch of hiring managers, some people will outright just toss it in the trash that they see a typo. I didn't spot any typos, but what I'm seeing a lot of is inconsistent formatting and capitalization of languages. Like if you just look, web development, capital D, there's things like that that I think are worth paying attention to because other people actually put a lot of priority and urgency on those. But I think, I mean, again, It's like the skills are there. It's just not being highlighted in the right kind of way. And that's the bummer. That's the shame.

I think that if the more I spend looking at this, the more positives I see, there are quantified statements. But this is what, like a third of the way down at that point. And then it's- We were on one, two pages. And you got a bunch of skills over here. I don't know. It's just a lot. move the education at the top. I mean, you know, having graduated yet, but if you're gonna get your bachelor's degree in a technical field like physics, like hiring me to wanna know that, that's gotta go to the top. So again, formatting. I mean, most of the issue with resumes these days isn't necessarily the content in it, it's the formatting.

Yeah. And it's part of that formatting though, it's like, it's also how you format your contact. For example, my favorite programming language is JavaScript. That's cool, that's great. I wouldn't put it on a resume. That's almost more of a cover letter kind of thing. If you want to have a cover letter, you don't need to have a cover letter. That's a whole other series, Taylor. Oh, my God. Jesus. But I don't, you don't need to write that in the resume. And you save so much room by not having statements like that. Yeah, Jarr comes in and God admit, I changed from a two column to one after Taylor's last resume chat and got nothing but positive feedback.

Again, I've talked to so many hiring managers on my podcast about this. They've all, it's not just me blabbering. Like I've had other hiring managers, CIOs, VPs of engineering directors, like Alicia, it just takes away from everything. Randall, should you try to include your skills in your experience rather than list them? Well, this is where if you're more senior in your career, I want us in your summary go, you know, 15 years of .NET, 10 years of Angular, three years of React. But if you're younger in your career, I just need you to talk about what you've done and who you are. But if you're going to list skills, I think the key, especially if you're starting off, the key is less about things like, for example, the customer service thing, that's not, it's not that that's not a skill or a valued skill, but it's for a developer role.

It doesn't mean anything. Right. And it's hard to measure someone on that. But knowing that you know, react, awesome. Right. all your languages list all your methodologies, that you know list all that stuff, the frameworks everything, but you don't need to get into the more soft skilled kind of things, especially if you're early in your career. If you're late in your career, then you'll probably want to amplify those by again quantifying those statements. 10 plus two. Yeah, instead of good communicator, it's led three teams. Exactly. Five different time zones. Exactly. The presentation. Yeah, all that stuff. Kelly comes in here. all thoughts on about functional resins.

You're okay in a place, you're traditional. I mean, you're functional resume. So I wrote my dad's resume in the restaurant industry. I wrote, I just tell Nalisha off air. I wrote my wife's resume. She's a photographer. It's all the same format. Like the formatting needs to be the same. It's just the content in it. But you need to be able to communicate what you do and your accomplishments immediately. I wish I had my dad's resume, I can pull up. But my dad was at the same restaurant for 25 years. So like at the very top, we didn't do a summary. We did an accomplishments. And like we put some big numbers that he accomplished because you open up your resume, you're gonna know he's in the restaurant industry.

So what do people really wanna know? People wanna know my dad's like biggest success stories. And so that's what we put at the top of the resume. Yeah. I'd say that, you know, leap, like, I'm a millennial, but I'm pretty old school in terms of my views. Are you like the eldest of millennials? I'm like, yeah. You're like the elder, elder millennial. You're like the final boss millennial. The senior in high school is like, let me tell you guys how it's gonna be. No, but like, I like resumes that are very traditional because I think they do a really good job at expressing a certain level of professional self, right?

Which is important. And it's weird for me to say that because I'm also very casual in terms of how I dress and how I talk and the relationships I have. But at the same time, I think it's kind of like, there's two different modes. There's your personal life and then there's your professional life. And I wanna make sure that someone who needs to be professional can be when they need to be. But otherwise, like there's so many ways where you can express your personality. Like your portfolio can be your fun loving self, but have your resume be as tight and like just white background, black text, a serif font is nice.

My wife, photographer, she's been responsible for all my branding, all my colors, everything. Her resume was black and white and the creative recruiter that called her goes, this is a fantastic resume. And get this, I didn't realize this. So the shoot was for Apple. She didn't get it, they filled it internally. And I was like, we get that all the time. But you know what the recruiter said. The recruiter said this, and I thought it was, I thought it was so smart. And it was just a different way of thinking. She says, for the people who include all the colors and the fonts, what happens is, is your resume starts to become a portfolio and then creative starts to pick apart.

Why did they use this font versus the other font or this color versus the other color? or why did they put a dot in their signature here and not over here, then it just goes completely haywire on the creative side. So that's why again, keep it just so stupid simple. Yeah. Patrick Bateman style. Like let me see Paul Allen's resume. I don't know what it is, but that's the only thing. What? You do, you do not know. Real quick, satin comes in here. If you're gonna get a chance to review someone's resume. I think Alicia and I are going to try to do this once a month.

So we will do a call for resumes again. So you can continue to email that to us. All right, let's try to hit two more before we wrap up. Let's try to, let's try five. Let's really pick up the price. Five? Yeah. All right. We'll have mercy. All right, I'm going to share this. Mr. Overachiever over there. How do you not know the Patrick Bateman business card, I just don't, I just don't, I'm sorry. All right, I think it's my turn first. Maybe. Nah, I think it's mine actually. All right, go ahead, go. This looks very familiar though, I'll say. It looks a lot like someone has seen the template that I share, so I'm gonna spend, why don't you go first because then I'll let me kind of dig a little deeper into this one.

I would call this person immediately. Because they use my template. No. Because literally I can tell, yeah, yeah, because I can literally tell what this entire person does in the career summary, this person's got four years of hands-on experience with a MERN stack, one year of managing tech and non-tech customers, gather requirements, and then I can see front-end developer type scripts. So literally for me, I know this person's got four years of experience, I know that their last job, look at this, I love this, worked on a product I mean, I would say if I'm going to pick, because this is, I mean, I want to be biased towards my own template, but what I will take part is that box that has the phone number and everything like that.

I remove that border because that shouldn't be there. Yeah. You know, the willing to relocate part. I'd probably remove that. I don't. I think that that's not necessarily going to help you and anyone who sees it will probably ask but I don't know I'm not an expert on that So so go we I would say keep it in because we need to know as a recruiter if a person can't be mobile But that's good then then listen to what Taylor just said there, but yeah, otherwise Just going off content alone without any bias that like this is hitting on all things Maybe bold the left column with the experience main tech tech stack tools because that'll help me visually kind of sort the two But otherwise, this is, yeah, there's a reason why I structured my template in that way.

Cool, awesome. Alright, next one. And to answer your question real quick, Aaron, basically what we're going to do is I'm going from the first people who sent stuff to me to the latest people who sent stuff to me, so we'll just continue that route. So the earlier you can get your resume to us the better. Alright, I'm going to do another one. Also I'm shocked. A lot of y'all are totally fine getting your resumes roasted online, which is pretty awesome, to be honest, which is great. I love the vulnerability. All right. All right. Your turn. Okay. Scroll down. Okay. So I'm seeing a lot of good stuff.

I'd probably put it in the probably the call or otherwise the higher end of the medium bucket, but probably the only thing I'd say is just not a big fan. This doesn't look like it has a structure to it. It just looks a little bit kind of like, you know how, what is it, indeed, or like, can they generate a resume? It looks a little bit much like that, which I'm not a fan of. I think there's ways that like, for example, the spacing between bank app and breweries react app, the tech stack part gets lost in there. And it just, again, it makes me, the cognitive load is higher on the resume like this, but I think it's really good in terms of what it's listing.

I think there's some things that can be improved still like a little more quantified statements about how you're proficient. Do not say I'm a five star C sharp developer because five star doesn't mean anything to me. But saying you're two year or three year or five year that is very meaningful. Just don't self rate on your language experience. Yeah, don't don't self rate. I would probably call as well. I think this could be a lot better. I think you can give me more experience three years of C sharp two years of Python, whatever. I like it. I would call. Yeah. All right. So let's just go next.

All right. Is it my turn? It's my turn. I'm gonna be honest. This is very hard for me to read. Yeah. This is I'm gonna be honest with you. I would I would pass immediately immediately. Just immediately a lot going on here. I hate these bullet points. These are like a Microsoft Word bullet point. I also hate the three column bullet point. It just the three columns very distracting and your whole resume is crammed on the one page. Let your resume breathe people. It's okay to go two pages. Formatting is inconsistent. Just look sloppy, bolding all over the place. Yeah, just would pass. Yeah. I agree.

There's I'm looking what's bold and there's a lot of really good stuff there. It's just getting lost and that's that's the problem. So I mean, you have a lot of really, really valuable stuff to work with. And so that's great. Just realize that as you try to cram it all into one page, as you have like a bullet point that is longer than 10 words, let's say, is no longer a bullet point. I have really long two line bullet points that's not doing you any favors. So just work on summarizing work on structuring, work on editing out. And I think you'll have a much stronger resume.

I mean, there's some stuff I love this research created at the made a revenue $60,000 a quarter. Like why that buried like it gets lost so easily. Yeah, it's lost so easily. So yeah, it's again, it's it's having to make that quick decision. If we spend any longer on it, we'd probably move that person into a higher bucket. But. All right, my turn. I don't know. I lost track. All right. But this is, I think we're, we're going to start seeing the patterns here. So two columns, doesn't have much or any real summary at the top. So no, no summary. Yeah. So now I'm having a cognitive look.

I don't like personally, do not like hyperlink texts. Like don't, I'm going to print out a resume. That's my honest truth. I like to print them out because it lets me mark up what I want to see, what I don't want to see and like what I want to ask more about. And if I then have to try and go and pull up the resume just to get to the person's LinkedIn, that's going to frustrate me. Same. I would probably pass the eye. There's no, I can't really tell what what your strengths are. You know, what or what you want to do or anything like that.

So. I pass. Alright, last one. Because my because the plumbers coming, we have a leaky faucet. Alright. Let's let's fix that too. Let's do it together. Yeah, it's live stream it. Yeah, you do not want me to live stream. So I probably pass. Yeah, I think there's a lot of intentional approach to this, which is good. Yeah. I think it's just like the skills aren't listing skills. And there's a lot of projects in there it looks like. So I wouldn't put that there. I just structure. Bullets are good, but I think I don't see anything. Can you scroll up real quick? Sorry to the experience.

Yeah, it's a little bit focused on just the roles and responsibilities less about the impact. So I'd say probably make that change too. Yeah, just very, yeah, like data integration specialist, like it looks like that's your first tech role and your resume and there's no tech jargon in there. So cool. Alrighty, man. That was good. We'll pass on that resume, unfortunately. So let's just say that. All right. Thank you all for hanging out with us. We appreciate that was good. We got one more question one more question. This last question Kelly. What did you go? How would you guys suggest listening language experience when it was just more so reading over code and specs.

Before I took a class, I have people that say like in production. Tinkered side projects and like just study. And I've seen resumes like that and I like that. So I'm fine with you putting self-study in the technical skills and listing all of the self-study skills. So that way Alicia has a hiring manager, me as a recruiter can look at it like, all right, this person doesn't have any C-sharp and production itself studied. That helps us kind of recalibrate your resume. And I also just say, like instead of putting in the effort to say that you self-learned or just studied it, just put it into practice, dude, do something small.

And that's more meaningful. You can say, listen, I didn't have an opportunity to put this in a working environment or on a real project, but I gave myself a small thing. The last quick note I'll say is you're more than welcome to hit me up on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message and more questions. I will say this, though, as well. Go and look at the resume template, not because I'm trying to promote it or anything, but because I took a lot of time to try and summarize all of these things in the section. So when you see the experience section, The bullets are here's what you should write and why you should write it, how you can do it with some examples.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom, there is my fake persona, Dave Elliper, developer, no one's ever caught that it seems, but it's a great pun I think. I laugh every time I see it, but there's an example that I've built off of that. So hopefully that'll give you enough context so that when you do ask me another question, try to root it in that so that I can help out be more specific than just being more broad in terms of candy, help me with my resume. like to want I want to give very specific feedback. But you want to have to start all the way from beginning.

And then also listen, I mean, I always say this now, if if you were impacted by this live show, share it. I would share it. You know, I think other people need to know how to write a resume because a lot of bad resumes. So share it. If this has any impact with you. But again, thank you so much. We appreciate y'all a ton and Alicia, let's just let's just play on do this in October. All right. You can go walk American side because you can get the Patrick bait reference. Okay, so I'm good. All right. See y'all. Bye. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful because you know why?

There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finished an entire episode. So I appreciate you so so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others, and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. Please, like, right now. Unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, tailor at vaco.com or at Tdeston on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.