In my 7 years in recruitment I can only wonder at how many CV's I must have reviewed, I'd say it's into the 10's of thousands by now and the best one's always follow a very similar practice and format. It's easily overlooked how important a good looking resume is, you may feel, 'I've got all the right experience, I'm a Go ninja, I've worked in containerised, micro-serviced CI/CD environments. Who else can Kubernetes like me with some monitoring using a bit of Prometheus and Grafana'. Well these skills, albeit fantastic and invaluable will get lost in a sea of confusion if not properly showcased in a well structured CV.
'But I'm just a humble coder, what can I possibly do to make sure my CV is the one chosen one?' - Well fear not, I am here to give you the key pointers on what's important to mention and the pitfalls to avoid.
Right..so, obviously after the all important personal details listed at the top *name, address, shoe size.. the first key area to focus on is an short introduction into you, this shouldn't be longer than 5 lines but contain your details on your commercial background, the values you hold dear to yourself within your chosen field and how you can add value to the people and companies you're going to work with. As a Software Engineer it should contain information on, the recent technologies, methodologies and personal skills you have. You may think this is all just whishy-washy generic nonsense but the amount of hiring managers I have known to make up their minds based on the effort put into this introduction is far more than you'd think!
Now comes the main meal, and any Michelin star chef will tell you that presentation is king!
Senior Golang Engineer *BOLD
May 2017 - Present *BOLD
Company *BOLD
'I joined Nasa as a Junior Go engineer as part of the web team working on the exploration of the Milky Way product. The product was initially built in PHP but through a major migration we've now moved everything into Go and are now...you get it right - the devil is in the detail and this is what managers want to know..what. did. you. actually. work on, what were the methodologies / environments - if you worked on anything interesting with pioneering technologies then shout about it because not everyone does and you'll separate your resume from the rest if you can really show the value you can add to a team/project.
Think about the contributions you made during the position; what problems did you solve? What impact did that have on the company? Maybe the infra automation tool you implemented increased deployments by X and saved from resource draining manual tasks. Be as specific as possible!
Finish the paragraph with, Tech used: Go, NodeJS, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana Docker....*BOLD
Repeat, repeat, repeat
Formatting is so important so remember to use the same font and space your text well to give it a clear and coherent feel - remember this CV is an extension of you and will demonstrate to hiring managers how you present yourself and the importance you put into your work.
If you can don't exceed 2 pages, nobody wants to read a 5 page manual on your paper run from way back when. Finish off the resume with a paragraph on your hobbies and educational background any supporting Github or similar code sample links. SAVE IT AS A PDF -> PDF's look so much better and are are properly formatted when submitted through portals so you have less chance of it coming out with all those hieroglyphic symbols
Finally - when you get the job just drop me a thank you, an emails fine.