The resume is the interviewer’s first impression of the candidate. How well you write your resume will have a direct impact on whether you pass the resume screening process. It is no exaggeration to say that the quality of the resume plays a 50% decisive role in the final Offer. Even, many interviewers have formed their subconscious mind whether to hire or not after reading the candidate’s resume, and the subsequent interview is just to find evidence to confirm their subconscious mind.

I have worked for more than 10 years at both large and small companies and startups. I have been a technical interviewer since I started at Google. I have interviewed hundreds of people, read thousands of resumes, and met all kinds of candidates. Since resume is so important, so in this article, I will combine my own experience, talk about how to write a beautiful resume?

01 Compact format and clear structure

While a resume doesn’t need to be flashy or cover and photos, it should be well-structured. It’s best to write something like an eight-part essay so that the interviewer can see at a glance what the main sections of your resume are and where each section starts and ends.

Generally speaking, the resume will include contact information, technical skills summary, work experience, project experience, educational background, other achievements (such as contests, papers, awards, open source projects and technology sharing), self-evaluation, etc. Of course, some are optional, such as other grades.

Self-evaluation is optional, and if you must, it should be no more than one line. Too subjective self-evaluation, the general interviewer will pass, too much writing is a distraction. For example, the following personal evaluation is a negative textbook, it is better to write: “self-study ability, obedient, honest, hard-working,” a line can be done.

Keep your resume compact, don’t waste white space, and have enough information in each line. For example, the following description is not compact enough to take up 10 or so lines of information.” “Company name”, “working time”, “position”, “department” and so on can be put on one line, “project name”, “project time” can also be directly put on one line, in addition, “company name”, “position”, “project experience”, “project description” and other subheadings can not be put.

On the contrary, the following resume is particularly compact, with clear starting and ending blocks.

02 focus, avoid by all means

This one is for candidates who have been working for a long time. I’ve seen candidates whose resumes span more than 10 pages, with dozens of projects, and their personal evaluations take up more than half a page of prose. HR people read a lot of resumes every day, and technical interviewers are busy. If a resume looks like a running list, it’s hard to expect HR and interviewers to read every line.

In short, a resume should not be too long. For fresh graduates, one page should be enough, no more than two pages. For social recruitment candidates with rich project experience, a resume of four pages is the upper limit, and try to keep it within two or three pages. After all, the main purpose of a resume isn’t to find out anything about a candidate, it’s just to ask the candidate to provide evidence of their ability to match the position.

If there are many projects, we can choose the ones with technical content and technical ability to write in detail, and the others can be abbreviated or not written, just a sentence. On the other hand, listing too many unskilled projects can backfire, as the candidate may seem to have worked long hours on unskilled projects, and five years of experience may be worth two years of work. So, this also echoes the saying: less is more!

In addition, it’s important to highlight the highlights of your resume, the most compelling evidence of your skills (competitions, papers, patents, open source projects, etc.) in your resume (e.g. in a separate module) rather than drowning in plain project descriptions. Don’t expect the interviewer to look for your highlights on your resume. Instead, make them visible and memorable.

03 Highlights are the value of a resume

Now the competition is more and more fierce, a position often have a lot of people to send resume, especially the big factory, is a thousand pick one, ten thousand pick one. How to stand out from the crowd of candidates and be immediately picked by HR or interviewers? This requires that our resume not be too bland, to have some highlights that are different from most people.

I’m going to focus on what the highlights are, and you can dig them up in terms of your own experience.

First of all, for candidates, large factories, well-known enterprises work experience is very important ability endorsement, commonly known as hard currency, stepping stone. Therefore, if you want to have a better career development, a well-known company work experience, even if it is just to make money, is also very necessary, the starting point of employment will be much higher.

Secondly, a good educational background is also a highlight of a resume, such as a graduate from North China University of Foreign Exchange, which is extremely important for fresh graduates. After all, before going out into the world, most people are blank SLATE, and educational background is very few to distinguish candidates. Although it is said that a technical degree is not important, generally speaking, students from good schools have a better grasp of basic computer knowledge, general knowledge, learning ability, self-discipline and hard work. They tend to be better at execution and fast delivery and perform better at work. If you don’t have a good education background, don’t be discouraged. Try to accumulate other highlights that the interviewer can overlook.

Thirdly, more technical project experience is also a highlight. The so-called technology of high gold content, is to do something complex, the use of advanced technology, to solve the problem is relatively difficult. For example, the candidate’s resume says “responsible for the design and implementation of an e-commerce transaction system for millions of users.” We can read a lot into this sentence alone.

First, “responsible” two words, indicating that the candidate has the ability to take charge of one’s own side, recruit in can directly use, do not have to teach by hand.

Second, the words “millions of users” indicate that the candidate is working on a system that has performance pressure, performance-driven technology.

Third, the word “e-commerce trading system” indicates that the system the candidate has built is relatively complex. After all, the e-commerce system itself is a relatively complex system, and the trading system is the most core of it.

Fourth, the word “design and implementation” indicates that the candidate has some architectural ability, rather than just following the design of others to implement the code.

If the project has no technical merit, that’s fine. Because sometimes, the company does what project, also is not our technical people can decide. If you don’t have a solid project or work experience with a reputable company, interviewers are looking for other things that can demonstrate good skills. For example, “won a prize in XXX competition”, “published a paper patent”, “read XXX source code”, “maintain many open source projects in STAR”, “submitted code to XXX famous open source project”, “have high-quality technical blog” and so on. These can all be resume highlights.

Polish your resume like a product

I think that’s important. No matter product, technology or code, it is an iterative process of optimization. Writing a resume is no exception. The first time written, may not be very good, this time, do not immediately take it to post, but need to polish several times.

People are very subjective. After writing your resume, you will feel good. In fact, after a few days, when you look at it again, you will find that there are a lot of areas that can be further improved without considering all aspects. So I usually start preparing my resume a month or even a few months before I apply for a job. Write a first draft and then, every once in a while, reread it. You’ll find a lot to improve on. Sometimes a technical point pops into my head and I add it to my resume. Or when I see others have a more professional description of a technical point, I will use it to modify my own resume.

Give yourself plenty of time to iterate and polish your resume, rather than finishing it. After you’ve revised your resume a few times, the difference between your first draft and your final draft can be huge. This is a real experience of mine. You can practice it and see if it works.

In addition, the resume should be appropriately packaged, of course, this is not to teach you to lie, but to describe the project, describe the technology in a more professional way. From my personal experience of reading resumes as an interviewer, even for the same project, everyone’s resumes are quite different. Some people are good at discovering and summarizing, digging out the difficulties of the project and summarizing the technical points used in the project. And some people, clearly the project is very difficult, but write flat, difficult points, technical points are not summarized in place, which is a bit of a loss.

Take a look at your resume to see how the project was described in more technical terms, or ask someone in your life to help you polish it. Some “plain” resumes can turn into “awesome” resumes.

05 Finally, conclusion

Recruitment is like a blind date convention, while a resume is like a person’s appearance, although content is important, appearance plays a very important role in standing out after a brief contact and gaining the qualification for further contacts. In fact, most interviews, especially for college admissions, will be conducted by the interviewer with the resume in hand, so a well-written resume will also help the interview.

Zheng Wang, a former Google engineer, is the author of “The Beauty of Data Structures and Algorithms” and “The Beauty of Design Patterns”. Wechat official account: Xiao Zhengge, follow wechat official account reply PDF, get 100+ pages of Google engineers’ algorithm learning and interview experience sharing.