Hi! Please review my cover letter. Help me to improve my chance to get into the WebTech world.
Resume:
Looks all right, but no one reads cover letters any more. How’s the resumé itself look?
It’s tricky to make a resumé without any industry experience. I’d suggest putting more focus on the projects section and leave out the online courses. People are more interested in what you know than how you came to know it. Basically you’re looking to create a text version of your portfolio, so each project description should grab enough attention to get someone to click through and take a longer look.
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If you’re going to take the time & effort to write a cover letter, it needs to stand out. And you need to say at least 2 unique things: (1) what YOU bring to the table, and (2) why you’re applying to THIS company. The one you posted above does neither, and could just as easily be written by someone else, and it’s not unique to any one company. Cover letters should be customized to each company that you’re applying for, otherwise you’re wasting your time writing them. Companies get anywhere from 100s to 1000s of applications for just one position, so don’t write a forgettable useless cover letter. And do your research on a company before writing a cover letter. If you don’t put in the time to do that, it’s virtually guaranteed the company will throw out your letter/application.
As for your resume:
- I highly recommend not doing a split-column layout, especially if you’re applying online to lots of positions. They don’t scan well by ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems).
- All of your contact info should be in one place at the top of the page.
- I don’t know what “Contact Keeper” and “Burger Builder” are, but YelpCamp and Warbler need to be deleted. There are probably more than 10K student implementations of both of those by now, and “projects” that you do by following along to during an online course are NOT projects that you should be putting on your resume. Your projects should be original and done by either you alone or a team of other developers. If “Contact Keeper” and “Burger Builder” don’t fall under that description either, then you need to delete them too. Only list projects that you’ve built from the ground up by yourself or with other people. If you haven’t done that, then you need to get coding before applying to any further jobs.
- Online courses aren’t legitimate education, and you need to delete those too. You should only list degrees received from accredited colleges & universities as education. You can put those on your LinkedIn profile if you want, but they don’t belong on a resume.
- Your college experience was 7 years ago. What have you been doing since then? That length of time which has not been accounted for on your resume will raise any hiring person’s red flag. If you worked in a job (any job), put it on your resume even if it wasn’t in tech.
- Don’t write a lot of technical jargon on your resume to describe projects or experience. No one cares about that except other developers, and most of the time, it’s not a developer who’ll be reading your resume. You need to make the resume readable and understandable to an average person who is not a dev.
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Hey @YagneshP!
When I commented on your last post about your portfolio I brought up the same issue. Some people looking at your resume might not notice that they are udemy projects but others might and dismiss you.
Getting a job is tough enough as is. You don’t want someone to ask “didn’t I just see this project 5 minutes ago?” Instead you want them to say “Hey, this is cool. Let me check it out.”
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Thank you for reviewing my resume and cover letter.
I found a few an article from FCC news that I think would help you write stronger cover letters.
Perhaps when you’re applying for a more experienced role.
But for an entry level I’d argue that you’re better off submitting as many applications as possible than slowing down to tailor to each job.