12 Tips to Write an Effective Web Developer Resume

A resume is the first thing that gets looked at when applying for a job.

A good resume should grab the attention of employers and recruiters. It should show your strongest skills and accomplishments. It should show how you're a match for a position.

Since the resume is so crucial for landing an interview, here are 12 tips for crafting a good resume.

1. One Page Resume

Recruiters do a 15 - 30 second skim of your resume.

They do not read your resume entirely. That means having lengthy resumes will not make you more impressive. If you think you can't get your resume to just one page, trust me, you can!

Just think about what is really important for a recruiter to see.

2. Name, Contact Information, and Links

Place your name and contact information at the top.

Highlight your name by using a large and bold font. Feel free to include a GitHub and/or LinkedIn link at the top, near your contact information for easy access.

3. No Objectives

Objectives state your desired job position in a lengthy manner.

The company already knows that because you applied for a particular position. It'll just waste space.

4. Place Education Section After Work/Project Section

What you know is important, but what you’ve done with what you know matters so much more. So, you want to get to your experience as quickly as possible.

If you are a self-taught developer, you can even omit this section.

5. Short Bullets

Anything that feels like a paragraph won't get read.

Recruiters only spend 15 - 30 seconds on your resume. Keep your bullet points short from one to two lines.

6. Use X-Y-Z format

Tasks make you an expense. Outcomes make you an asset that adds value to the organization.

You want to show why the things you’ve done matter by talking about the value you created. Your bullets should focus on your accomplishments. Articulate your experience in this very specific way.

"Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z]."

For Example: “Improved the performance of Charity Organization’s website by ~30%, resulting in a 75% increase in online donations.”

7. Use a Simple Resume Template

The goal of your resume is that the recruiter is able to skim through it and easily pull out the important stuff without reading it in detail. So avoid any fancy resume templates. Try to keep it simple.

8. Projects

Projects need not be completed or launched.

As long as you've done a good amount of work on them, that's good enough! You should pick their top 3 - 5 projects to list on their resume. These can be academically required projects or independent projects.

Make sure you write a good description of what is it that you worked on or created, what you did specifically/what you contributed technically, and the languages used to create the program/app/software.

9. Additional Experience

You can put in additional experience, like leadership activities. Be careful that the experience is relevant to the position you are applying for.

10. Languages and Technologies

List the languages/tools/software you're comfortable with. Don't lie and put things on there that you aren't comfortable talking about or working in.

11. Spelling and Grammar

It's important that your resume doesn't have any mistakes. Check spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

12. Formatting

Your resume should be clean, simple, and consistent.

Use black text. Send out your resume as a pdf.