**Why 97% of Programmer Resumes Get IGNORED โ€” Transcript & Summary | SozAI** Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/programmer-resumes-ignored-reasons/ Learn why most programmer resumes get ignored and how to create a readable, relevant, and impressive resume that stands out to recruiters. ## Key Takeaways - A readable and well-formatted resume is essential to avoid being ignored by recruiters. - Focus on your individual role and achievements rather than the overall project or company. - Quantify your contributions and use strong action verbs to make your experience stand out. - Tailor your resume to the specific job and company to increase your chances of success. - Keep your resume concise, relevant, and professional in appearance. ## What the video covers - Resume readability and proper formatting are crucial to make a good first impression on recruiters. - Keep resumes concise, ideally one page for juniors or new graduates, focusing on relevant skills and experience. - Highlight personal contributions in projects rather than describing the team or company achievements. - Order resume sections by importance and relevance to the job you are applying for. - Include contact details, LinkedIn, GitHub, and a personal portfolio website to showcase your work. - Use power verbs to start bullet points and quantify achievements when possible to demonstrate impact. - Avoid generic skill lists; instead, integrate programming languages and tools within project descriptions. - Keep the resume design simple and professional without flashy colors or unnecessary elements like photos. - Tailor your resume specifically to the job description and company you are applying to. - Exclude hobbies and personal social media to maintain professionalism. ## Chapters 1. 00:00 Introduction and Importance of Resume Readability 2. 00:23 Common Resume Mistakes and First Impressions 3. 00:50 Resume Length and Template Advice for Juniors 4. 01:15 Focus on Personal Contributions in Experience 5. 01:38 Ordering and Relevance of Resume Sections 6. 02:08 Education and Personal Projects Placement 7. 02:31 Contact Information and Portfolio Importance 8. 03:26 Writing Effective Bullet Points with Power Verbs 9. 04:21 Quantifying Achievements and Skill Presentation 10. 05:16 Resume Design and Tailoring for Specific Jobs Answers ## Questions about this video Why is resume readability so important? Recruiters often review hundreds or thousands of resumes daily, so a readable and well-formatted resume helps make a strong first impression and prevents your resume from being quickly discarded. Should junior developers use a two-page resume? No, juniors or new graduates typically do not have enough relevant experience to justify a two-page resume. Keeping it to one page is recommended to maintain focus and clarity. How should programming skills be presented on a resume? Instead of listing programming languages separately, integrate them into project descriptions to show how and where you used each language, which provides more context and credibility. ## Full Transcript โ€” Download SRT & Markdown 00:00 Speaker A And so now, let's just look at my current resume. So here it is in all its glory. And first of all, just some general advice: the most important thing about the resume is that it needs to be readable. 00:10 Speaker A Put yourself in the shoes of the recruiter, because what these recruiters go through is they literally go through like a thousand resumes a day or something like that. First impressions are crucial, and if you are sending them a resume 00:23 Speaker A that's poorly formatted, that doesn't have proper grammar, where you can literally see that the person has put absolutely no effort into it, it immediately sends a very unprofessional image of you, and probably they're just going to bend the resume after 2 seconds. 00:37 Speaker A Because the purpose of the resume is not just to fill it with as much text as possible. It is to communicate all the relevant details and the relevant skills, the relevant experience as succinctly as possible while having an overall nice 00:50 Speaker A looking resume template. And if you want to use this exact template I use, I will put this down in the description. Less is more. Don't go to two pages as a junior, as a new grad. You don't have enough 01:00 Speaker A experience to justify a two-page resume. Maybe if you have 10 years of experience, you can justify that, but as a junior, you simply don't have enough important stuff to justify two pages. When you're thinking about communicating anything you've done with your projects 01:15 Speaker A or your past experience, specifically focus on what you did, not what the company or the team did. Because a resume is about you. Don't spend any time describing like, "Oh, this is the cool project we worked on," because then 01:27 Speaker A they're going to go, "Well, the project was cool, but where were you cool? Were you important? What did you do?" This is literally a sales document. You're trying to sell yourself. So this is my template. You want to order them in 01:38 Speaker A order of importance, and everything has to be relevant. They don't care if you worked as a sales assistant in some random company if you don't have anything relevant to add. Then you first need to find relevant skills or relevant 01:52 Speaker A experience somehow. The great thing about software engineering is that technical projects or personal projects that you can build are relevant. Those are considered by recruiters as relevant experience. Sure, it's not as good as an official internship, but for me, I don't 02:08 Speaker A have a computer science degree. I do have a degree, but it's in economics. It is not relevant, so that's why it's at the bottom. And I have an internship, but it's not a software engineering internship. It's sort of relevant, so I still have it 02:19 Speaker A there. But my personal projects are probably the most important thing that's communicating my coding skills in this resume. For most people, if you have a computer science degree, I would have the education part much higher than what I 02:31 Speaker A have. Instead, I've just put some computer science online courses that I've done just to showcase that I have actually put in time of my own to actually learn computer science concepts. Now let's start going through this in a bit more 02:43 Speaker A detail. So the first thing you need to have is your name, obviously. You may optionally have your role like I do. Check with what's sort of the convention in your specific countries, but I know that at least in the US and the UK, including 02:55 Speaker A a picture is a no-no. They don't need to know what you look like. You're going to have your contact details, so your email and your phone, LinkedIn, your GitHub. Absolutely crucial to have them. And on top of that, especially if you don't have 03:08 Speaker A any formal experience, it's crucial that you have a personal website, a portfolio website to showcase what you have built. An additional benefit of having a personal website is that you can then link your resume inside your portfolio website so that if a recruiter finds 03:26 Speaker A your website online, they can also look at your resume and maybe you'll get a callback that way. Optionally, you can write a short description of yourself like this. Don't ramble. Don't make it wordy. Just do the point who you 03:39 Speaker A are. Just in my case, a junior software engineer, and maybe like a brief summary of your core skills. Keep it professional. Keep it brief. So if you then go into what type of information you want to include in your bullet 03:51 Speaker A points, first of all, please ignore this XXX here. As you can see, I've only just started this role in September of 2022, and I'm recording this literally one week after I started my job. In your bullet points, you want to start 04:05 Speaker A everything with a power verb. What does that mean? It means something that's positive and active, something that communicates something that you have done. So like delivered, designed, built, led. Like I'll put like a whole list on the screen now. That is how you want to 04:21 Speaker A think about every single bullet point that you're putting on your resume. You've done in your experience. And I think about what is the most impressive way that I could put this without lying. And this can actually be very hard. You 04:33 Speaker A might think that you didn't even do anything impressive. And seriously, during this internship, it was like four weeks long. I didn't do that much impressive stuff, but I just spent some time figuring out how could I communicate what I did in the most impressive way 04:48 Speaker A possible. Everyone else is doing it. You might as well do it as well. And whenever in any way possible, try to include numbers. 10,000 plus users, or if you can in any way think about like something that you did that may have improved 05:00 Speaker A the team efficiency. You can just estimate a number. Just go like, delivered X, which improved team efficiency by 30%. What many people do is they just include like a laundry list of skills that go, oh, leadership, 05:13 Speaker A communication, teamwork, and all those are obviously very important, but I think it's important to include some justification, some substance of like where you used those skills. Even when it comes to programming languages, what many people do is they just have like a list 05:26 Speaker A of like, oh, I know this language, this language, list this language. Anyway, anyone can do that. Anyone can just write a list. So that's why I actually haven't included a list of the languages and frameworks I'm comfortable with, because 05:36 Speaker A it's a lot more powerful to actually integrate them into this project, to show where you've used Java, where you've used Python, where you've used JavaScript, and in what context. In general, when it comes to what sort of template to use, don't 05:50 Speaker A try to go for some very fancy colors, like all of these rainbow kind of resumes. Just keep it simple, right? Keep it professional. This is a very similar resume template to what I've used for a very long time, and it seems to work very 06:05 Speaker A well. So I haven't seen the need to change it. If I was to actually apply with this resume first, I would wait that I don't have to buy XXX here, but I would also think about tailoring my CV 06:16 Speaker A specifically to the company that I'm applying for. Let's say I'm applying for Google. What I would do is go to Google's job description, look at specifically the skills they ask for, the experience they're looking for, and look to include 06:29 Speaker A those points in my resume. For example, if I was applying for a Python developer position, I would make sure that all of my projects showcase my Python skills. From my job, I would include any time when I worked in Python on like a Python 06:43 Speaker A project. For example, in terms of what other stuff not to have, definitely don't have any of your hobbies or like your personal social media. Topics: programmer resume resume tips software engineer resume resume formatting job application personal projects technical skills resume template junior developer resume advice Study this video - [Flashcards from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/ai-flashcard-generator/?from=transcript&id=75816) - [Quiz on this video](https://sozai.app/tools/quiz-generator/?from=transcript&id=75816) Free, made by AI from this transcript. 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