Written, edited and reviewed by the people running the developer hiring process at tech companies
The contributing technical hiring managers and technical recruiters have collectively reviewed tens of thousands of resumes and hired over a thousand engineers, working at some of the top tech companies.
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Contributing authors
Technical reviewers
What Others are Saying
Being able to represent yourself well to hiring managers when applying for jobs is half of the battle. I've never read such an actionable guide to getting your resume in order, which can be the differentiator in a crowded job market.
Figuring out how to write a great dev resume is hard. When I started out, I had no idea how to write one for software engineering jobs. If you want to represent who you are on your resume and get a response, this is the book for you.
I’ve noticed a huge increase of recruiter calls after sending my updated resume. I’ve now accepted a job as a senior developer at a local startup.
I've been a hiring manager for 25 years now and I can find little substantive to add to the excellent advice in the book. here seems to be an inverse relationship between the awesomeness of the best developers I've ever hired and the impact of their CVs. Hopefully, this helps the stars stand out more effectively!
This guide has served to me as a glue to all the advice I've received from others and my reading. Simply put: a resume's purpose makes more sense and I feel much more empowered in my career.
The companies that you want to work for are often the hardest to get into. They have plenty of applications, they have plenty of choice. So why should they choose you? Gergely has done a tremendous service here by taking his significant experience and insight as a hiring manager in some of the most sought-after technical firms and condensed it into a readable, actionable guide with examples that make it far easier to see what makes a difference.
I redid my CV following the advice in the book. The response rate for my applications increased by a large margin. A few weeks later, I had multiple, good offers. I just started at my new job - thank you!
I learnt a lot reading the book and it gave me some great, actionable tips. It might be just luck, but I literally got a coding interview challenge after sending out my new, updated resume.
Table of contents
- Good Resumes, Great Resumes
- The COVID-19 Job Market
- Why LinkedIn is Not Enough
- A Resume Is (Still) Not Enough
- People in the Recruitment Process
- The COVID-19 Hiring Pipeline: What Hiring Managers Say
- Why Referrals are Important
- Referrals: what developers working at tech companies say
- The Priority of Your Resume
- Shorter Recruiting Pipleines
- The First Glance
- Ground Rules
- Simplicity and Consistency
- Avoiding Biases: Personal Details and Photos
- Recap: Actions to Improve Your Resume
- Structure for Interns, New Grads and Bootcamp Grads
- A Possible New Grad Resume Structure
- Structure with Work Experience
- Tell a Story with Your Resume
- Languages and Technologies
- The Summary Section
- Structure for Senior and Above People
- Recap: Actions to Improve Your Resume
- Results, Impact and Your Contribution
- Before and after: results and impact
- Don't be Humble
- Write a Resume for That Job
- Different Companies, Different Focus
- Tech companies hiring generalist software engineers
- Companies hiring for that specific technolog
- Keyword Stuffing
- Recap: Actions to Improve Your Resume
- Poor Format
- Forgetting About Your Audience
- Unnecessary Details
- Links
- Recap: Actions to Improve Your Resume
- ATS Check for That Job
- Write Two Different Resumes
- Find Out the Impact of Your Past Projects
- Do a Grammar Check, Not Just a Spellcheck
- Ask for Friends or Family to Proofread
- LinkedIn Profile
- How recruiters do boolean searches
- Optimizing LinkedIn when job searching
- Github and StackOverflow
- Technical Blogs
- Cover Letters
- How Recruiters and Hiring Managers Scan Resumes
- Good Resume Template Layout and Principles
- The Results of Using a Good Resume Template
- The Pragmatic Engineer’s Resume Template
- The Mono Engineer’s Resume Template
- CareerCup Resume Template
- CareerCup Resume Template
- VisualCV Standard Template
- Google Docs Swiss Resume Template
- Google Docs Serif Resume Template
- EnhanCV Software Engineer Resume
- EuroPass CV
About the author
Hi - I'm Gergely. I spent a decade working as a software developer, from small startups, through investment banking, then at tech companies like Skype, Microsoft, Skyscanner and Uber. I started as a junior developer, leveling up to senior and principal engineering positions. I later moved into engineering management. I've worked across the stack on web, native mobile, backend and distributed systems teams.
I've reviewed probably over a thousands developer resumes over the past few years and have given specific feedback to a few hundred of them in the last week of May 2020. I've always struggled to recommend a resource for developers on how to write good tech resumes. I'm writing this guide to even the field between those who have access to recruiters and hiring managers who give feedback on their resumes, and those who do not.
Follow me on Twitter at @GergelyOrosz, connect on Linkedin or read my blog on PragmaticEngineer.com.