Interviewing - Have An Awesome Resume Available

Going to an interview soon? The first thing you need to do is to create or update your resume. Below is an excerpt from my eBook titled “Rock Your Technical Interview”. I plan to write more articles on interviewing, so check back often.

It is very important to keep your resume up to date. I update my resume at least every quarter. I also update it when I am done with a project worthy of putting what I did on my resume. Remember to also update your LinkedIn profile whenever you update your resume.

Use recruiters to edit your resume. All recruiters want your resume as a Word document so they can put their logo on it and make you look good. Ask for the document back after you go to the interview. Keep doing this until you get an awesome looking resume. Engineers are not very good writers… recruiters should be! If you do not have a recruiter, have someone who is very good at English to look over and edit it for you. Make sure you use spell-check!

Keep the size of your resume to two or three pages. Interviewers are really only interested in the last few jobs you have done (all the technical info). The rest should be one-line work histories that contain position, company, and dates (see below).

Also, make sure to not submit your default resume to a position. You or your recruiter should customize your resume based on the job description that you are applying. Highlight the technologies they are looking for. Possibly remove the technologies that they are not looking for. Put your entire job history on LinkedIn and put a link to your profile on the top of your resume. If a potential employer wants to see your entire job history, they can go to LinkedIn.

Do not put technologies on your resume you do not want to do (like VB6 or ASP). You could be asked about this during the technical interview. If you have not coded in VB6 in 15 years (like myself), you most likely will not answer the questions correctly and fail the interview.

Resume Format

I will share with you the format/ layout of my own resume.

Header

One the left side of my resume, I list my name, phone number (I use a Google number, not my actual phone number), email address, and the link to my LinkedIn profile. On the right side, I put the Microsoft MVP logo. If you have a logo for a certification you have etc., then place it here. DO NOT put your picture. Here is what mine looks like:

In this section list things like,

• Your goals and objectives for your new job.
• 1-2 sentences that quickly list your experience.
• Other items that you can list
  • I put that I’m a Microsoft MVP
  • My most recent books
  • I add a single sentence that describes my speaking experience
  • I list my teaching experience
  • I mention dotNetTips.com blog
  • I mention the user group that I founded and ran for 20 years
  • I mention my patient
  • I list my awards (geek related of course)

Computer Skills

In this section, I list the languages that I know. Remember not to put languages that you don’t want to do anymore. Then I list the software that I know how to use. Everything from SQL Server, IIS, SharePoint and Windows OS’s. Here is what mine looks like:

Experience

In the experience section, list the company, time frame that you worked there and a list of your major responsibilities and successes. Make sure to be direct and to the point, highlighting and technologies that you used. This helps the interviewers to know if you have recent work experience in the technologies that the company is looking for. Make sure you are ready to discuss, in detail, anything written in this section. Below how I listed two of my recent jobs.

If your resume starts to grow over three pages, then start removing what you did at older positions. This is how mine looks: