Resume critique?

Hey everyone (especially hiring managers), can you take a look at my resume? I am looking for ways to improve it for a job search. The things blacked out are just my personal info.

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Three fairly small things that might have an outside impact:

  • Replace the “Hosted on Digital Ocean” line with link to the project (both to live and to the codebase). Make sure they are polished, both UI-wise and codebase-wise. Re code, make sure everything is very readable (personally in particular I’d want a well-written README file, tests, clean commented code, etc).
  • If you’ve been doing a diploma I assume you had a final project? If so, that’s the biggest single thing you’ve done for the past three years, so ideally mention it.
  • Tailor the education part particularly to the job spec, ie if it asks for a tech/approach/language etc you’ve encountered (or one that is directly comparable), add that tech to the relevant section, make it obvious. Not a cheat-ey thing here – it will make you more attractive and give you more of a chance of getting to interview. Then the interviewer will query you on it, which is what you should want: you should be able to have a conversation with them about it.

Otherwise looks fine (there’s not a lot else can add), what you have looks interesting and really useful. Just to emphasise, re the third point, do tailor it carefully for each application, doing that can pay huge dividends.

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Thanks! I will definitely add links and readme files. My final project was not impressive at all, so thats why I didn’t include it. What about the skills section on the bottom? Should it be more higher up?

I think it’s a good idea to separate the What and the How in your job and projects.

You put the How (the technologies) into the free text of the What (business problems solved). I think it’s way easier for a recruiter to digest this stuff with a better separation, especially because you already have a Technologies Used for the jobs. I even think this is redundant. If you want to highlight the tech, I would separate it more visibly.

Example:
Old: Designed RESTful backend server using Node.js, enabling shoes to be stored persistently in a cloud based databases.

I think this is hard to digest.

New: Designed backend server with persistant cloud storage (Node.js, MySQL, AWS).

This is a clearer separation between What (free text) and How (in the brackets).

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This makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

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