If you’re a tech professional, you might have potential employers lining up to court you.
But if you don’t have tech companies inviting you for interviews, something might be wrong with your resume.
In this video, I’ll be sharing with you the most common mistakes I see tech professionals making on their resumes, mistakes that you’ll want to avoid if you want to get hired by the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, and other Big Tech.
As with most resume mistakes, the problems that tech professionals run into is that they might forget to or have difficulty making their work make sense to the reader.
It’s important to be mindful that the front-line resume reviewer needs to be able to read how your skills will serve the hiring managers’ business needs.
If this is unclear on your resume, they can’t confidently put you in front of the hiring manager.
Your job is to make this an easy decision.
By avoiding the mistakes in this video, you’ll get that much closer to an interview.
Mistake #1: Resume Is Full Of Jargon and Acronyms
One of the most common mistakes I see across tech resumes is heavy use of jargon and acronyms.
For efficiency, many companies come up with their own, languages?
These languages often don’t translate.
But sometimes entire professions or industries can have languages that only the insiders understand.
The second a recruiter goes “huh?” or has to go to Google to unpack an acronym, you’ve probably lost them.
So on our resumes, we need to avoid putting them in that situation.
What To Do Instead
Have someone who isn’t a technical professional proofread your resume and ask them to point out anything they don’t understand.
Rephrase whatever they point out and use simplified language.
For acronyms, you don’t need to cut them completely from your resume, but you need to establish their first use in your resume by spelling out the term in full, and then adding the acronym in brackets immediately after.
That way if the reader needs to translate the acronym later on while reading, all they need to do is go back in your resume and the acronym is there.
It’s all about minimizing the work for the reader so that you’re minimizing anything that would get in between you and an interview.
Mistake #2: Tech Barfed All Over Your Resume
We get it, you’re a techie, but you don’t need to share every single tech that you ever used in your entire life on your resume.
I often see tech professionals including a full data dump of all the tech proficiency they have had, ever, on their resumes and this does not serve you.
It requires the reader to wade through an ocean of tech to confirm that you are skilled in the tech they need you to be skilled in.
What To Do Instead
Instead, make sure you’re highlighting select tech, specifically the tech that you know you need to show you’re proficient in for your target job at the target company.
Usually, this tech will be noted in the job posting. If it’s not, you might have to anticipate what they might need. But again, don’t give them every tech you’ve ever used ever, only the tech you know they’ll need you to work with.
Mistake #3: Relying On A Former Intern’s Resume Template
Every week there’s a new former Google, Amazon, or Apple intern or employee is trying to hawk their resume for you to use as a template to get your foot in the door with these Big Tech companies.
I’ve seen and read several of these resumes, and they are almost always a great example of what, not to do.
Resumes are only one part of the equation when it comes to job searching. We don’t know whether or not they had a cousin refer them internally. We don’t know if they impressed the heck out of a recruiter at a career fair.
Templates are not a magic bullet. In fact, they give you a false sense of security.
I detail many reasons why templates don’t help in my video exposing resume templates.
What To Do Instead
Worry less about how you’re displaying content in your resume, and invest your energy into actually writing it well.
A number of my videos contain a peek into a super simplified approach to building the scaffolding and structure of your resume. You can follow that. It’s not a template, it’s a structure that helps keep order.
What you write in your resume is what matters the most.
Mistake #4: Not Showing How You Use Your Skills To Create Solutions
This brings us to the final mistake I want to mention, which has the greatest impact on your job search, and reinforces why the content on your resume is everything.
Where you don’t tell the reader how you demonstrated your skills to create real world solutions.
What To Do Instead
When you’re writing about your responsibilities or the projects that you’ve worked on, you need to bring the whole idea full circle with a description of what the positive outcome was. And in doing so, you need to show the reader that you understand and will be able to fill the business needs for the job for which you’re applying.
So you developed web-based applications – what did that enable for your users or what business result did that create for your organization?
You contributed to a big ecommerce project – what did that enable for the business that they weren’t able to do before?
You QA tested integration of cloud solutions – what risk did you mitigate, what issues did you uncover and fix or prevent?
These are just a few examples of how you need to take details about your work experience, over the finish line when writing them, and make sure that you’re properly explaining the impact of your work so that the reader can picture you creating real-world solutions. Particularly, real-world solutions they need you to create at THEIR company.
At the end of the day, the single best way to make sure you avoid these resume mistakes is to always write your resume with the reader in mind, and make sure that you’re showing you’re qualified for the role based on what you read in the job posting.
Have you made any of these resume mistakes? As a tech professional, what challenges you the most in resume writing? Tell me in the comments below.
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