Writing Your Resume
The most important document needed to begin applying for internships/jobs is your resume. You may have already made one before or this could be your first experience making one. In this section, we’ll be referring you to a very solid resource on how to build your resume including various tips to bolster your experiences to include them in your resume.
Main Resource: Kim’s Resume Guide
Created by CSE’s former career counselor Kimberly Nguyen, Kim’s Ultimate Guide to Building Your Resume is an incredibly well-made resource on building your resume tailored for students seeking software roles. Instead of repeating the information from Kim’s guide in this document, we highly recommend reading her guide and following Kim’s advice as it covers lots of great info and also links to other great career resources within it.
However, while most of the guide is valuable and relevant to CSS students, the guide was originally written for CSE students and thus includes some information pertinent only to CSE. You can just skip over these tips/sections -- they don’t make up a major portion of the overall guide.
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) & Resume Parsers
What are Applicant Tracking Systems?
When you apply to a role at a company, you will almost always be sending in your resume and filling out your personal information on an applicant tracking system or ATS. ATS is an application platform that companies use to store and compare candidate applications with a variety of different features/tools. Common ATS platforms include Workday, Taleo, Brassring, and Lever. Each platform has its own layout and application process, and some platforms are less work than others to fill out and send in your application.
For example, Workday is often disliked because it requires applicants to go through multiple pages and manually fill out more information. In contrast, Lever and Greenhouse both use single-page applications that automatically fill out most of the information by parsing it from your uploaded resume -- which brings us to the next important point about ATS.
Automatic Resume Parsing
A very important quality of your resume that is often overlooked by students is how easily your information is parsed by automated resume parsers. This quality is fueled by the fact that almost all ATS platforms include automated resume parsers that will digitally scan your resume and attempt to extract your personal information, education, experience, and skills. This extracted information is then summarized for company recruiters and possibly _scored _relative to other candidates. In order to make your resume parsable, you should try to build your resume using a simple format with most of the information in plaintext format (instead of using lots of custom images/graphics).
For example, take these two sample resumes (see next page):
Image 1: Heavy Graphics-Based Resume (Resume 1)
Image 2: Simple Text-Based Resume (Resume 2)
As you can see, these two resumes are written with the same content of the same person, but Resume 1 uses a large amount of graphics and custom formatting to display the information, while Resume 2 uses a more simple layout with most of the resume being in text form. While Resume 1 may look more appealing and interesting, it is a nightmare for automated resume parsers and may cause lots of information to be missed. In most cases, you will want to opt for resume layouts like Resume 2 to ensure your information is parsed correctly and fully.
Many solid resume templates are available online from a variety of sources, like this list of GitHub repositories containing free LaTeX-based resume templates for you to edit your information into. As a side note, LaTeX is a great way to build your own resume templates or make edits to templates like these. Often, it is difficult to achieve the same level of customization and professional formatting in common document editors like Microsoft Word which makes LaTeX very useful for resume building.
If you want to test if your resume is able to be parsed correctly, we recommend sending your resume through resume parsers that are free to use online. Some examples we recommend are:
Note: It is not expected that the parser will correctly parse 100% of your resume, but it is important to make sure the parser is able to find important fields like your work experience, education (and graduation date), and skills. If you notice that your information is missing or incorrect, this may mean you need to reformat your resume and test it again. We also recommend running your resume through multiple parsers to see how each extract your resume information.
Other Resume Tips
Which file type do I save my resume as?
In most cases, you should save your resume as a PDF file. In PDF format, your resume formatting will be preserved when sending it to the ATS or recruiter(s), so you don’t have to worry about your resume looking different on another computer. However, you may also want to have a DOCX (Microsoft Word Document) version of your resume as some companies do not accept PDF. Also, in some cases, DOCX files are more easily parsed by ATS which may be useful if your PDF resume has tough parsing issues (note that DOCX files don’t always preserve formatting, so there is a tradeoff).
Resume Reviews
On top of making sure your resume is parsed correctly, it is always good practice to have your resume reviewed by a real human who can point out formatting, grammar, or content mistakes that make your resume less solid. As a student, you have access to a few different options to have your resume reviewed.
Official Technical Resume Review Sessions/Events
Every year UWB advertises a variety of events hosted by top tech companies where you can go over your resume with real software engineers or recruiters from the representing company. These events can be very informative and valuable to hammer out mistakes and make adjustments to meet resume requirements/preferences for certain positions and companies. If these are available, we recommend attending them with a digital and/or hard copy of your resume to get some solid feedback.
CS Discord Communities: Resume Review Channels
In a less official capacity, it can also be helpful to have your resume reviewed by other students who may have valuable advice and experience applying to the same companies and roles you are applying to. There are a variety of different CS Career-oriented Discord communities that offer channels specifically for resume reviews where you can send out a copy of your resume to be evaluated by others in the community. Some communities that offer resume reviews include:
UW/UWB Communities
CS Career Communities
These resume reviews come from students with a variety of opinions and experiences, so all advice given is up to interpretation. However, you can still gain some solid pointers and general advice from those who are already experienced with career hunting.
NOTE: If you are sending out your personal resume to these communities, it is recommended you censor/edit out your personal information for privacy and anonymity. This includes your name, email address, phone number, social media links/handles, and other personally identifiable information. You can replace this information with placeholders like: John Doe, me@email.com, (555) 555-5555, linkedin.com/in/me, etc. or visually censor/cover it using a photo editing tool.