Structuring your Developer CV for impact, and other happenings in Tech
Why are you not getting invited for interviews after applying for roles? Did you tailor the CV to the role?
Welcome to another round up of happening in tech and what you need to know as a developer.
This week I will be focusing on crafting a CV that not only get you shortlisted but get you invited for interviews so that you can get your dream jobs. As a technical recruiter, I review hundreds of CVs daily and I wondered what the goal of the applicants were as the CV was exact opposite of the role applied for. So, what are your expectation? You don’t want to get the job? If you do why then didn’t you make the CV look like you want to get the job? So, let’s dive into this monster and slay it with our golden sword!
First off, make the CV relevant to the job, yes I know you are a Fullstack developer but this job is particularly for a frontend role. So, you are not expected to flaunt your Fullstack skills but your Frontend skills, remember, the company may already have a developer with skills in backend and they really may not need your backend skills. If you are stronger on the frontend but good on the backend, you want to highlight your strength more than what you are average on.
Personal Detail
Make your full name bold and visible, usually at the top of the page. Then your contact information. Your home address is irrelevant so don’t put it. Just state the city, state and country; i.e Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria. I see a lot of people putting their home address on their CV, this is not good because you really can't tell where your CV will land.
In summary, include your Fullname, email, Github URL and your personal website or portfolio. If you have a blog site, don’t forget to add it.
==========================
Latest Jobs
==========================
Structure your CV with relevant information first
A lot of developers write CVs with information about their school grades, and coding hackathons they did. Those are good and nice, if you are applying for internship but if you want serious roles you have to put in serious information. below are things you must do;
Real world experience should come first; the role, the company name and the start date. Add the highlights of your achievements at this job.
Contribution to real-world project; If you have been part of a project, either closed or open sourced, list the project and role you played.
Education: If you have a degree or masters list them next. If it’s relevant to the job, list your dissertation and projects in school.
Personal project; at your free time, what projects did you work on? List them, showcase the idea and the solution you built.
Tutorial and community: If you have given a talk or teach or have written a tutorial, list the stack and share the link if available.
Expertise Structure
After listing projects and your education the next is to list the programming languages and frameworks you are proficient in.
As a developer, you are not expected to know everything, however the ones you are very good at must be listed so that they can see how much of a match you are for the role. You don’t necessarily have to put the skill level, this will be discovered during the interview. But if you say you are an expert at a programming language or framework and you didn’t convince during the interview, then question could be asked about your honesty.
List technologies you used in your recent jobs; if you are applying for a role that requires a particular technology, put on your CV your experience using it and what you build with it. e.g “I optimize our e-commerce platform built in node microservice to reduce the load time by 70%, this made our checkout process faster and sales more than double in the month we deployed”.
===============================
Latest Jobs
===============================
Cover letters
Some people think this doesn’t matter but experience have showed that it matters. This is an opportunity to sell yourself in your own words. This is particularly important if you are applying for a senior roles, state your expectation in terms of culture you look forward to work and the impact you hope to make. State your recent achievement and things you are passionate about. You are not expected to put in everything on your CV in your cover letter but something that will make the recruiter find you remarkable!
Go ahead and redesign your CV with this tips and see how soon your dream job will land on you.
Latest News
Taptap Send, a free remittance transfer service targeting Africa, raises $13.4 million Series A
Trying clothes online, virtual store attendants, Facebook plans to over overhaul eCommerce
What you need to know as Malawi gets the world’s first 3D-printed school
MTN plans to invest $1.5 billion to boost broadband access in Nigeria
Jiji acquires Cars45 as it expands beyond its classifieds model
Mastering Software Engineering
How to design a system to scale to your first 100 million users
Laravel Examples; how to implement technical features in Laravel
File Upload With Progress Using Blazor WebAssembly And ASP.NET Core API
Has this been helpful? Let’s us know…
Have a blast this week!