How To Build A Resume That Gets Interview Calls ?
The first step towards applying to any job position is to submit your resume. Your profile is shortlisted for interview calls based on how good your resume looks. There is no rocket science involved in resume building, still many candidates miss some subtle points which can help your resume stand out. In this post I will cover the important points that you should take care of while creating your resume.
Make it readable
It is very important that your resume fits into one page. A one page resume looks professional, and feels easy to read. To fit your resume into one page you should remove information which is not related to your job role. I often see a big section for “Objective” or “Profile” at the top. This is not needed at all. No company cares about what your objective is. They are interested to know what skills you have and if those skills fit the job role or not. They are more interested in knowing if you have any practical work experience related to the skills you have mentioned. Another irrelevant information is your class 10th and 12th marks. They were required only till your college admission. Unless some company has criteria regarding your school marks, which rarely happens, you do not need to put them in your resume.
Removing irrelevant information will save up lots of space which can be used better for your skills, projects or work experience. It also makes your resume less cluttered and easy to read.
Adding your work experience
The most important thing in your resume will be your practical work experience, if you have any. So keep that as the first section where you explain about the work you did in past companies. There is no need to go into the finer details of your work. You should name the technologies you have worked on, and explain your work in terms of the impact you have created. This impact could be business impact, user impact or leadership skills like providing mentorship and so on.
Project section
If you have done some projects, they will play a key role in showcasing a strong profile. It is good to have 2-3 strong projects on your resume. It is even better if your future employer has a way to actually see what you built. There are 2 very good ways to showcase your work. One is to host a demo of your projects on a cloud platform and put the demo link in your resume. Another good way is to have the entire code hosted on Github. The Github link should be added to your resume. This will give confidence to your employer that the projects you are claiming are in working condition and actually built by you.
Importance of online profile
Another important thing that recruiters have started looking for is your profile on competitive programming platforms like Codechef and on interview preparation platforms like Leetcode. So if you are starting your interview preparation, it will help you to build a good profile on any of these platforms and add a link to your profile in an “Achievements” section in your resume. This will clearly demonstrate that you have good problem solving skills, and you will have a higher chance of getting shortlisted for the interviews.
A good resume can make a decision between getting that interview call or not. So it would be wise to spend some time in building a strong resume not only skill set wise but also format wise.
You can search some standard resume formats on Google and try to build a resume similar to those. One of the resources that I have myself found useful in the past is the resume format available on the career cup website.
If you are confused about which programming language to learn, do read this next post below.
