5 Tips to Get Your Resume Selected

When I first arrived in Australia, getting a new job was one of the biggest challenges I had faced. Later, when my wife came in, the story repeated itself. We both had worked in enterprise organizations for 5+ years and yet our CVs would not get selected.

I had to use trial and error to tweak my CV. On some occasions, I would get help from a friendly recruiter to improve my CV if they see I could be a suitable candidate for the role.

My previous consultancy ran a session that talked about tips to improve CV as the start of the pandemic suspended many projects. So here are 5 tips gleaned from both that session and my experience to help you get your CV selected.

Remember, a polished resume is also an advertisement of your own attention to detail. This post covers:

Tip 1: Keep the audience in mind

Your audiences fall into two distinct tribes. One is the recruiter, and the other is the hiring manager.

Recruiters

Recruiters’ job is to filter a handful of resumes to find the best fit within a brief time. They are also competing against other firms to find candidates from the same pool. It is not a simple job.

Your resume should make the recruiter’s job easier. It should have a list of technologies that you have experience with, as well as descriptions that highlight the type of experience you have.

Hiring Manager

The hiring manager will be the person with whom you will end up working with. She will need to know as many details as possible about your experiences. She will want to see whether you have the required level of experience in the roles she needs.

So your resume should cater to both audiences. Keep both audiences in mind when you review your resume.

Tip 2: Be Brief

Both recruiters and hiring managers want to find if you have relevant experience fast. For recruiters, they may have 20–30 resumes. Hiring managers get less than that, but they have other pressing concerns in their daily work. So, it pays to be brief.

Bullet points and short sentences go a long way to get your point across. You want your resume to be read at a glance.

Tip 3: Tell a story

Everybody loves a story. Your resume should tell a story of your experiences. Use the STAR technique to tell a story. I picked out some of my outstanding work in the past and added them in a section called “Key Highlights”. Then I would use 2–3 sentences using the STAR technique to write the story.

You need to be brief here and only need to cover the outline. It does two things. It showcases the experience as well as leaves a bit of intrigue for the reader to know more. This has helped me showcase my best work during interviews.

Tip 4: It is not about you

Talk about what you bring to the table. This was a mistake I did a lot. I had my goals in my resume. But hiring manager was looking for things that I could do to help improve the team’s productivity. It is about the value you can bring to the team.

Statement 1: My goal is to work on the latest technologies and solve challenging problems.
Statement 2: My goal is to solve business problems within the estimated timeline with zero defects.

Statement 2 is about the value you intend to deliver. Statement 1 is about the latest technologies. Some organizations might not have the latest technology stack. It also hints that you might jump ship if you find the latest technology elsewhere, as technology always changing. Statement 2 talks about zero defects, which are specific. It shows an obvious goal. Being specific is the next tip.

Tip 5: Be specific. Quantify where possible.

A job in technology requires us to be specific. Our resume should reflect that.

Statement 1: By implementing the change I was able to reduce the response times.
Statement 2: Identified and optimized a SQL to achieve response time reduction by 20%.

The second option provides the detail that you did as well as the result you have achieved. It also leaves room for further questions. You will impress your recruiter or hiring manager with your achievement and you might get a question — how did you achieve that? Now you have the floor to talk about your achievement.

Bonus Tip: Do the basic sanity

I have kept this tip as last as once. This should be part of the review process of the resume. Ensure the following things:

If you have read so far, read further as it discusses some don’ts to supercharge your resume.

Dont’s

Do not repeat yourself

You work on quite a few projects where you had performed the same role. So it is common to see copy-pasting the responsibilities across your projects. Readers will skip them anyway, so there is no point in adding them. Telling a story about each of your projects makes the reader interested to know more.

Do not use — etc

“etc” is vague. Your resume should be specific. It shows either you do not have the relevant detail or you are lazy. Both of which are detrimental to your CV to get selected.

Do not use words ending with -ing for actions taken

Words ending with -ing show work in progress. Your resume is about your experience. So avoid it as you have done the work.

BAD: In this role, I was responsible for leading a team of 7 developers who were asked to integrate a new system into an existing one. (25 words)
GOOD: Establish a team of 7 developers to integrate a new SAP based solution into an existing cloud environment. (17 words)

Do not mislead

Avoid adding technologies for the sake of beefing up the resume. It might get you an interview or even a job. But you will soon regret it. It leads to a terrible experience for everyone involved.

Summary

So there it is. I have covered the 5 key tips for your resume.

I have also provided mistakes to avoid.

Most of us in technology dislike writing documentation and writing a resume is documentation. But you should think about your why. Your resume is the gateway to interesting roles, projects, and higher pay packages. It pays to be diligent with your resume.

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