Ask an Expert: CV/resume review with a Tech Recruiter

hello everyone sorry for the short delay there fire alarms going on oh no we're good i i may mute it occasionally but we're good okay as long as nothing's actually on fire but that's good yeah caffeinated pixels says someone burnt the toast again yeah oh look jose has sent a fireman i believe lovely um so yes once again i'm welcomed i welcome even jermaine jupiter tech recruiter thanks for coming jermaine lovely to have thanks for having me i i always love the scrimba community great people see somebody already volunteered to fight love the potential fire in my building you gotta love it yeah look at them all brilliant yes um so you were with us yesterday in our fireside chat on discord giving lots of wonderful job hunting tips i hear so thank you for that but now we're here to review some cvs which have been sent to us in advance so very much looking forward to hearing all of your tips but first people have already started doing this so i will advise them to continue and that is leaving tigers in the chat yes and what this does is one one sorry one second yeah what this does is it tells us whether you are new here or if you have been before so if you're new put it up no put a bunny and if you've been before put a tiger and i have got plenty of tigers already here so that is super exciting yes i am so sorry they are nice my build this for contacts they they're doing the annual fire inspection so because i wasn't opening the door they let themselves in to check my fire alarm that's right i was like who's in my house all right well that's a surprise yeah totally awesome yes um so if it's okay with you i would like to start with a few um general questions about cvs and job hunting and so on and of course if you have a question for jermaine drop it in the chat and i will do my best to ask as many as possible yeah um so one question i get asked quite a lot is do i really need to write a tailored cv for each application what's your take on this my take on it is yes and no so you don't want to write a tale a tailored cv for each application but you want to write a tailored cv for each type of role or skill set that you want to show off right for a lot of people especially ones that come from communications background or just the ability to do a lot you're going to want to be you're going to want to create a resume that focuses and centers specific skills that are relevant to specific opportunities you know somebody may have a great skill set as a sales manager and also as a software developer but you wouldn't want to have software developer experience on your sales manager resume because it's not relevant right so rather than having to customize for each specific job just keep it to specific roles now if a job appears at like a dream company i was i always talk about sony and playstation 2 and you know what would happen if i ever went to apply there then by all means like you got to give it your all and that's when you want to customize a cv but affect your energy you know protect you know work work smart work work smart and work hard but mostly work smart you know if you're looking for one if uh one set of skills for one set of jobs uh can be reflected in a resume it can save you a lot of time and energy yeah i really like that tip of protecting your energy chuca says hi jermaine you rock yes thank you great interesting question from jose if you get a concrete job offer and turn it down are you burned for the employer or do you think you can apply again at a later time you can always apply i i say this you never really burn the bridge until you go and you sign an offer and then renege on a signed offer that is the point of no return when you put your your your ink to the paper but it happens all the time like people understand it's a very competitive market so you're kind of expected to almost compete for talent and if you lose out on a good deal you lose out of a good deal it's it's it's not there's no there's no beef so to say um but if somebody makes the commitment that hey i want to join the team let me put my name on the signature you close the job and you close up all contacts with other candidates you know that person has now set you up first for failure because there's a chance that the people that you had in your pipeline that were like second and third place they've already found offers it's not unlikely it's not uncommon um so that's where a lot of the animosity comes from and on the recruitment side you just look bad because it's like like the recruiter didn't do their job to vet this person to know that this wasn't their ideal situation before they sign so a lot of ill feelings can get lost in the mix hmm yeah that makes total sense so if you haven't signed it's pretty safe jose so yeah but thanks for the good question though very interesting one yeah i was wondering should i hunt me personally should people hire cv writers because i have friends and acquaintances who've used them quite successfully other people seem to get on fine without them do you think there's a use for them shameless plug i am a cv writer so now i i say it's it's all it's all it all comes down to a couple of different things like if you yourself understand how to properly write a cv and how to like put it together and how to properly highlight your skill set you don't need a cv writer but if you're a type of person that wants to explore all like maximize your your opportunity for success uh hiring a professional that specializes in cv writing is an investment in yourself as i like to say now the thing that you have to do is you have to vet your cv writer to make sure that they a understand your needs and your goals and b that they can actually understand the language or um even the the achievements that you're you're putting on you're asking to put on paper right you know um it might not be it might not be a good idea for somebody that's extremely technical like a software engineer to go for someone that specializes in writing government cvs you know because they just have different needs and different wants and different expectations um so always vet the people that you're you're trying to work with that includes your cv writer if you find that you're at a block where you're you're trying different cvs and you're not getting the same result you're not getting the result that you want you know there's that whole definition of insanity uh then that's when that's the time when i would encourage you to like explore other options or um just other other other paths in because you might be missing something yeah no i think that's a really great tip so javier is asking i've never worked in tech what can i expect in the process of being hired hmm interesting one yeah um that is a very interesting one um surprisingly i don't only get i don't really get that that question too often so the process generally looks like this you you'll have a touch point with a recruiter or somebody in hr and what they're looking for are uh signals that you can not only do the job but that you'd be a good fit in the environment that they have right they i like to say add not necessarily fit because a fit kind of talks about kind of includes or emphasized exclusion fit is adding to a culture and adding value to it because that's who you are um so they they kind of did that initial assessment and then they pass the recommendation off to the hiring managers some hiring managers like to um either talk directly with a candidate kind of get a sense from like again that soft skill cultural skill aspect if they'd be a fit on their team and then there'd be a couple rounds of technical interviews the the more uh the more complicated or more technical the interview um the more stages that you can expect uh usually there's some sort of collaborative programming session there might be uh uh what you call like a a second project review maybe a system design maybe you know um walk us through one of the projects that you've done and then me and then finally just a technical interview technical conversation with like the lead or the the initial manager that you met with in the beginning but you can always count on three things you can always count on a recruiter talking to you you can always count on doing something technical you can always count on engi uh leadership being at the end of the tunnel um yeah so i hope that has answered your question javier a question i have been wondering myself today um while looking through the cvs we're going to review shortly is should they be plain documents so what kind of format is best when you say plain documents now i always think that you should send your cv as a pdf it keeps integrity off your formatting and it's guaranteed to open up the same way every single time no matter what the screen is if you mean playing documents in the sense of i've seen people put illustrations and artful stuff on their cvs pictures as well um i think it depends on the context of your role you know for software development you know i would say that would be like a colorful resume would be very appropriate for a front-end engineer or somebody that's like on the design side and not that it would be a bad thing for a back-end engineer but it could be distracting um but at the end of the day you want to make sure that the content that's actually on the cv itself is where the most of the impact is happening yeah you don't want to be style over substance exactly yeah so on the topic of faux pas what is the most common cv mistake you see uh i would say it's twofold one i see cvs that are way too long if you have less than five years of experience you only need one page for your cv if you have more than five years of experience and that means five years to 99 years you only need two pages um so that's the absolute max that's the absolute mask you can after a certain point you can the only thing that the old experience is really doing is just confirming ten years so you really just need to put the dates you don't need to put any information to be to be honest with you um the other cv mistake i see is that people think that including responsibilities um instead of achievements will get them the job and if you think about it if you're just listing out responsibilities you're basically just repeating the job description back to the person that wrote the job description so they're not really getting an idea of the sense of scale or scope or even just the complexity of the work that you were doing um so those are the two major points they're literally tied neck and neck one a one b type of scenario yeah definitely things to bear in mind and what you're saying about experience brings me to my next question which is i have job hooked very common these days is that a problem and if so how can people show it in a good light yeah you see how leanne said that's very common these days i think that kind of touches on the fact that it's not a problem anymore it's it's actually quite expected um full disclosure i'm on my third full-time employer during the pandemic alone um so and i i always think it's a good it's been shown in a good light um people ask what do you say when you know you have a short stint or you're hopping and people ask questions about why you moved on i always say be honest um let them know that hey this wasn't the right this wasn't the right environment for me it wasn't a good fit that's why i moved on um for a lot of people kovid i you know it's a it's a really blanket go through what happened covet oh okay no questions kind of asked and other times it's just like the way to show it in a good light is that you have experience with multiple industries and multiple perspectives right multiple ideas so you definitely are bringing something new to the table and i always encourage hr leaders right not to fall in love with the silver spoon theory think that only good people have like perfect like resumes right like somebody went to harvard and from harvard went to google from google went to facebook right that doesn't mean that they're talented it just means that they've had a great uh landfall opportunity fall into their lap right give me the scrappers give me the people that you know have jumped from jobs to jobs because they were either bored or because the environment didn't stimulate or because it was toxic you know those are the people that develop skills in order to survive and do the job well those are the people that can give you new perspective and inject new life in a project that can carry it from good to great and that's how you should be showing it in that light you because of your multitude of different experiences and different scenarios in different environments you inhibit you intrinsically know what it is that's going to take something from good to great because you've seen it done multiple times in multiple settings awesome so own it basically own it lean into it great angel asks any tips on the dreaded tell me about yourself question yeah so this question i'm surprised this question is such a interesting question because it's something so simple but it enlisted so much anxiety i think the first thing you got to do is realize that you want to tell a story and you don't want to tell a report right so a lot of times when i say i i don't say it anymore because i i always like nine times out of ten i'll get the you know i was born on a sunny november day in 1990 all the way up to like what they did in college and like halfway through the story i'm like oh my goodness uh focus on like to tell me about yourself really reframe it as why are you here why this job why did it interest you right explain the threat to me right and tell people you know you don't have to you can you can talk high just high level right you know i got into software engineering because i was interested in fixing interesting problems i've been doing it for three years i've worked in startups i've worked in big companies i'm here because i really like your product and what your product sets out to do i'm actually somebody of one of your flat that could be a potential user so i definitely see the value and that's why i'm here you know it really interested me it aligned with what i want for my future that's actually a really good buzzword that people like to hear align with my future align with the goals of the company align with what we're doing here align with the team and the values that they uphold so remember that one yeah right it's a good one ahmed asks can i put my stack overflow account link on my cv yes i haven't seen that but that's an interesting idea yes one thing that i've i've started encouraging people to do is to add hyperlinks to your resumes um especially if you have portfolios right you don't want to put the whole elongated url you just put portfolio and hyperlink it and a lot of people will be like you know um what if they print out my resume i been working in this industry for like five six seven years at this point i think it's been like six years since i last held a physical resume yeah everything is digital so put that at you know hyperlink it put that account link on your cv and encourage them to click it because they will yeah yeah that's true i mean these days it's hard to find a printer that works for more than five minutes so i think you don't need to worry too much about that perfect shall we have a look at a few cvs and um we can return to the questions slightly later or continue looking at cvs play it by ear sounds good yeah so um everyone who uh sent in a cv uh well mostly like redacted them or alternatively i added these lovely pink squares um yeah i'm zooming in the wrong one there we go yes so hopefully this is a s what is your initial thought on this yeah feel free to tell me to scroll up or down or yeah continue scrolling down okay all right so one of the first things i like about the resume is that it's it's nice and short and it's to the point um i like that they did not include a personal summary so you jump right into the skills and then right into the experience as somebody as a recruiter recruiters are skimming your resume so you want to write to your audience you want to make sure that the information is tight and the information is easy to digest um i do like uh that they do talk about you know uh the type of articles that they wrote and they use they're using numbers and like things like talking about their jira experience to kind of give us an idea of what they were doing during their internship um education is fine and so is like the the personal skills at the bottom is decent but the reason why that this isn't necessarily an impactful resume is because a for as a junior developer it is in your best interest to list um all of your interesting projects um on your resume they think two best projects that show off your ability um the biggest thing for juniors is that you have to show um both a theoretical understanding of how products are built but also the practical application of building said products right the best way to do that is by showing off of like the projects that you've worked on and when you're highlighting the projects you would want to add things like you know say you haven't launched it it's all theory you want to add things like um projected user base right or functionality or like you know making the app making uh get telling the value of what your users get out of the app or the or the program the more useful the project or more novel or interesting the easier it is going to keep someone's interest and kind of show you that kind of dynamic thinking you want as a developer so that'll be my biggest thing minute uh minimize and like make the font for the education smaller and plug in some projects and you can take out the personal skills all right yeah so these are the bottom kind of not too worried about but it's great that we have the technical skills at the top yes yeah perfect that is a good one well now bring up the next one i'm being careful because i don't want to um yeah reveal anything i shouldn't be so this is a a yes what do we think of double a um same thing as before like that you you have the personal skills and you jump right into the portfolio and the experience um so for your portfolio uh you know let me hold that thought till the end do you mind scrolling down because you might have he might have done something with it or they may they they might have done something with it okay okay oh there's a second page yeah all right so i'll i'll chalk that up to the fact that it's a doc file and potentially um just the way that we're opening it on the browser pushed it to that second page and we'll just assume it's a one page so i do like that you have your your your high level off your portfolio at the top going in to like some off the project that you've done i think you could have done a better a better way of listing out the actual projects themselves and again we we want to you have to assume that the person that's reading your resume knows nothing about you your project or who you're doing the project for so you kind of want to add a little bit of context there um you could have highlighted like because you have yourself as a freelance front web developer and i love that gives yourself a lot of flexibility for like talking about like your own development but under the guise of like a work um you could have mer you could have potentially just merged these two uh the portfolio and the your experience together um you could have just highlighted high level some of the projects that you've built and like what their value gain is right or their biggest accomplishment you know built a react project that was downloaded 500 000 times on the app store for instance is a bulletin that you would want to put up there all this stuff about built a responsive survey form designed and managed professional websites for a law firm that could have gone down under your freelance web developer experience now with regards to your freelance front web developers experience for some reason self-employed in freelance still still raises a couple of uh not warning signals for some recruiters for some hiring managers so whenever you have your freelance experience it's always best to brand it as you would any other business any other experience right so a double a if you want to put this as double a ventures and your job at double a ventures is a front-end web developer that would be a better sell because again you're giving yourself more experience there but you're also positioning it where someone has to take the experience and the projects that you did seriously because their first impression is this is work that you did for clients yeah is there kind of a minimum amount of work you need to have done to call it um well to present it in that kind of way so if you've just made kind of one website i guess that's a bit tenuous right it is it is and there's always a balancing act with these sort of things because at the end of the day it comes down to um are whatever you put on your resume are you able to talk about it in detail are you have somebody verify that you did the work and what is the diversity in the work that you did and when i say diversity i i mean in the sense of like are you just making uh templates uh model after like already existing websites or are you having a mix of websites it makes a platform a mix of apps you know that variety in in application of what you're doing with your skill set matters because it shows a lot of critical thinking and analysis ability yeah thank you for answering that i'm wondering what you think of uh the certifications this person has put on their cv so ins with when it comes to certifications i only put certifications that are complete um if for all intents and purposes it's it's it's good what what what is it someone said to me someone said that we're judged on our achievements and not our intentions right for all intents and purposes you could intend to finish these sort of shirts but it could be two weeks or no or it could be ten years from now yeah it's not it's not over till it's over totally yeah how about this unrelated degree yeah i i'm i have a mixed bag on this one so like uh in all intents and purposes and in my opinion the there shouldn't be any like there shouldn't be any need for us to be putting in our like our our university degrees if there's no relevancy but some people feel like seeing a university degree because they believe it's some it's some archaic way to say that somebody can follow through on a commitment and honestly if you're a parent you've already proved that you can follow through on a commitment so why yeah plenty of otherwise but you know just just in in terms of putting yourself in a position to succeed if you have a completed bachelor's even if it's not relevant put it on your resume yeah why not they cost enough so you might as well get the most out of it yes sushant asks i've made a website using only html and css and simple js in my final year i guess obviously um is it okay to use in a portfolio or cv or do i need to use some other technology like react or other things it's okay to put it in your portfolio and on your cv the problem is if it's the sole thing on your portfolio or on your cv the stuff that you do in class uh won't matter much to be completely honest unless they continue after you do stuff with them in class like if you start like there have been some startups that have started out as school projects that have come become full-fledged startups that's stuff that you could put on your resume but like the stuff from the courses you can use in your portfolio but it cannot be the sole thing in your portfolio because they're like everybody in your course has done it so how do you stand out from the rest right and the idea is that why would your learning just stop at school if you're especially in this type of industry you want to get as many projects in as possible so it's great to be a part of it but you need more uh and it sounds like you if you have your eye on some new technologies that's a great excuse to go and explore with those new technologies and people love hearing the path yeah absolutely and louise is asking what's the best path to follow to apply for a remote position so specifically from country to countries that oversees positions yeah i would say the first if what i would do the first thing i would do is i would uh compile a list of companies that have that are hiring globally right a company that does this is automatic they are a totally asynchronous company they they hire all over the world um you may know them they they i like to say that they're the unofficial owners of wordpress because they are the biggest contributor to wordpress and like when they say like thirty percent of the of the websites on the web or wordpress they they're pretty much automatic wordpress websites but they're totally asic you know um so i would compile a list of companies that hire uh globally and then look at the positions that they have open and then look at the people that work at that company and see if i can build a couple of relationships or connections within that company or companies um and start from there the the challenge is and the reason why i say that is because immigration is a comp is a complicated matter even for the most simplest of immigration terms and i'm in canada it's it's simple for somebody from canada to get uh to get immigrated into the u.s and vice versa but even then that still has its own layers of complication um so unless a company specifically states that they are looking to bring talent in and help you immigrate and relocate you're better off targeting the companies are already set up to hire globally yeah on linkedin for the location you can actually choose remote so maybe try that louise yeah that's a good one there are actually also a couple of sites that um specifically cater to remote opportunities um i think remotely is one of them i do love angel list myself because ageless you can actually click off i only want opportunities shown from companies that hire everywhere okay well that's good to know yeah muhammad is asking um basically is it a good idea uh to pursue lots of certificates if you don't have a cs degree so yeah should you get certificates to make up for that so here's the thing with certs right searcher search are kind of backwards and i mean that in the sense of i would put more stock in somebody who got a cert years after doing like projects and computer science stuff and like applications and development maybe their self's hot right and they wanted to get the cert just to get like some a third-party institution to validate their experience that's when assert would matter to me if your experience of tech comprises exclusively of certifications it's not going to do anything the degree wouldn't do anything either right at the end of the day theory theory can only get you so far unless you're coming from one of the one of like the specified institutions where it's like hey this is where this is where we get all of our tech talents then chances are it's going to be like you know chances are it's not going to go the way that you want it it's going to go the same way as if you had the search because no one's going to be like have i do actually have experience pulling this off so again project work tangible work hands-on work trumps all yeah totally lacho asks do some enterprises or awesome systems relevant uh enough to the dev industry to put in a cv when you say enterprise systems i'm gonna i i'm gonna assume you need like hr systems or like white label systems that companies use uh yes those are most definitely relevant to put on your cv because even though they're a white label all that coding and all that all the all the binary stuff still went into there um maintenance is a thing and being able to build customizable software is a big plus as well so i i would definitely put that on my cv yeah great and mohammed asks will this be saved on the channel later yes it will i hope so it will yes so you can catch all of our live streams back on the scrimba youtube channel yeah okay let's take a look at another cv this is a mr john doe yeah unusual mysterious here we are all right um first thing i want to say is oh i've lost your sound oh sorry my my finger slipped okay education should always go on the bottom reason being is because um when it comes to your education you know if a company relies on your education in order to give you an offer they will go looking for your education on your cv the first half of your resume is quite possibly the most important real estate for your resume so that's that's where like the attention span for recruiters tends to be at its strongest so you want to make sure you're putting in skills or relevant work experience there to be captured immediately so the first thing i would say is um we would want to move your education down below yeah that makes total sense uh so with the rest of this now the same it's the same thing i said before in terms of we want to make sure that we're talking in achievements and not responsibilities if we read some of this uh like let's say the quality assurance analyst the first the first line create and maintain detail comprehensive and well-structured test cases it's very vague i don't know is i don't know specifically what you may have achieved in your environment or even like again what your impact on the team actually was so this is where we want to talk in achievements and we want to talk in being more specific with um with what we're reporting on and putting on our on our resumes and that's the difference between an achievement and a responsibility where there's a clear-cut cause and effect this is what was going on before i came in and this is what happened after i worked on it yeah that sounds great sorry just going to grab my charger okay um now for and like that kind of follows the rest of it because i'm not really seeing many successes on here like even for so i know for like quality assurance for instance right um a big part of quality assurance is like how many how many things have you qa that that'd be like one of my first things to go to in terms of trying to detail scope i'm trying to explain to people you know how how many things i qade what the value uh or the impact was you know how much money did i end up saving the company in terms of like preventing a catastrophic bug from going through if you caught a catastrophic bug that's something that you would want to actually put front and center right and how you went about fixing it and the impact that it had that's very impressive for like an intern um you might just scrolling down is this is this a one page as well or is that a little bit more it's a one page i think yeah just the one yeah um so like in terms of format this is actually like a really clean really good resume look at the leadership experience accomplish nine fields workshops with 200 plus participants and successfully guide them to upload proposals in cic that is quite possibly the perfect example of an achievement versus a responsibility so i want everyone to like just like keep and like kind of commit this line to memory and leanne if you don't mind just scrolling back up let's read let's read this first line of quality assurance in turn from january to june experienced in all stages of sdlc and stlc activities following agile methodologies continuously sharing new ideas and scrum planning backlog grooming and retrospective sessions now for the most part this sounds really really general there's nothing too specific here if we scroll back down to the leadership one like that's that's clear cut you've told me like your impact you've told me what you're doing um you've told me the people that you worked with and i have an idea of just how complicated your work is um that's how we should be structuring your sentences and your your uh your experience if you're having trouble finding kpis that they may have measured you by that's where you come up with you make up your own kpis you know think about the role that you did and think about the stuff that you didn't contextualize it right well i know that as a qa assistant i i did at least 30 different qa tasks with 30 different qa products a day right so if you are any if you are doing 30 products a day or call it 30 products a month right you're doing 30 products a month and you are catching bugs at sixty percent of the time you could say that you have a sixty percent success rate for catching um qa bugs or qa issues on a monthly basis right now that we frame the experience there's impact there and like as a recruiter as somebody that doesn't know anything about your situation or the company that you're working for i have context on how to understand and quantify your experience um yeah great very interesting i have a question here yeah from ahmad can i put my github account under experience section instead of the project links some people i've noticed in the seabees have put both um is that a good thing to do i think it comes down to like how it's like what's the information around it um like i said if you are so if you it all comes down to like the story that you telling like the reason you put behind your github being there if you're saying that you know you did some some work for like clients or some stakeholders and you were able to put it on your github then by all means put that under your experience your github is just showing like projects that you've done you might be better off putting it on your project links because it just it just flows better from like a narrative standpoint and how you would kind of contextualize that experience being there yeah i think that's answered that really well um i had another question here i work in health insurance field but i'm learning web development for a career change um should i make changes for my previous linkedin profile should i create a new one now you wanna you wanna um keep your same linkedin profile even if you are in the insurance field um one it makes for a really great story honestly intac people love those transition stories of being in non-related industries and making the change over um you'll also fit you'll also know for like a product standpoint you know i hope you're targeting health or insurance related tech fields or tech jobs because your actual uh actual work experience from that context would help them in terms of building a better product um but you want to keep your linkedin profile consistent because it gives you like sort of like an origin point you know think about it the same way we think of like credit and credit history right they say that you know uh part of what makes your feet your fico score or your equifax score is the fact that uh the length of your credit and how long you've had it comes into play linkedin is the same man you've already built up and added a bunch of connections on linkedin and how many connections you have tells me as a recruiter how active you are on linkedin right the more connections the more i feel like i have a shot at getting you on linkedin and i'm more willing to message you on linkedin um so you should keep your original linkedin profile now if you're looking to avoid questions from like your boss then maybe you might want to make a separate linkedin profile but even then most bosses um unless you're in a really really toxic environment and by all means at that point maybe you should update your linkedin bosses aren't sitting down and watching your linkedin like that yeah if they are then deadget is wondering um basically um they're a self-taught php uh laravel dev working as an intern and they've got a few open source projects on github very good currently learning react they want to know should they find a job or get some more knowledge and then try so really this boils down to how do you know when you're ready to apply yeah actually i think this came up in the discord as well um you got to do both you need data points in order to make proper decisions um about your job search the best thing you can do for your job search is be totally intentional with the opportunities that you apply for and you're not going to know what's working and what's not working and how the market's reacting to you without going out into the market and seeing how the market reacts to you right as bad as it may feel to get that rejection that rejection keeps you better informed than if you were to just theorize on what would happen um so you should go out still look for the job and you should still get some more knowledge along the way i would also like to say that using your project and your your knowledge gain as an excuse to connect and talk with senior developers is a great thing it's a great way to go about it you know let's say that you're working on a project you think the project's super cool and like you've developed it to a certain point where you don't know how to improve it you know messaging a senior dev that you follow hey i like your profile love the experience i'd like to be someone like you one day or i'd like to have your job you know i'm building out this this project that's supposed to do this um i think it's done really well do you mind just taking a look at it and you know giving me your and if you can bold this brutally honest feedback and that will make them go oh yeah i would love to to tear you apart here you go but it's a great learning experience because because like especially in this industry people love curio curious learners people of intellectually curious people people love people that want to learn and like show broadcast like learning signals right if you want to be a bit um if you want to be a bit intentional and you are re doing that reach out with somebody at a company that you want to work for hey you know what's wrong with that um the worst thing is that they tell you what you could improve on your project the best thing is they're like hey you know we're hiring for a position do you want me to refer you yeah great i saw on twitter recently someone was answering the question of how to know when you're ready to reply and what they said was um it's not for you to decide basically let the employers decide yeah just go for it yeah go for it pull it i have an interesting cv here there's another john doe what are the chances um here it is ah what do we think of this one i like the green yeah yeah from an aesthetic standpoint really good i like the green it's it's very simple it's giving me bank vibes we're very banky so you might have you might have a lane you want to experience john one thing i'm gonna say this uh everybody please um please please please please please avoid putting these graphics these graphs avoid putting fractions of your skills avoid putting very good with certain things just list the skills you know you do yourself with disservice i've seen people put like for example html5 10 out of 10 right 10 out of 10 to like a director or a president or like a head of engineering is a different 10 out of 10 from your peer you you are unintentionally setting yourself up for for uh not meeting their expectations by setting their expectations so far right just listing out html see like just listing out the skills implies that you're good with the skills because why would you put skills that you're not good at on your resume is is the line of thinking that they're going with so that's one of the first things i would say um with i don't i'm not i'm not the biggest fan of the professional summary uh if you're gonna do professional summary try to keep it short maybe like maybe like one line or like one pair one one paragraph block but three is too much um with the freelance web developer like i touched on earlier you want to brand that as an actual job um and with the research analyst stuff so some of this i would i would question whether or not the experience is relevant right i don't think it's relevant for me to know that you were an ict clerk or an ict supervisor um because that might not be x that might not be really relevant to a software engineer or a web developer position now like i said we made we made the joke that you have like a a bank vibe resume and like if this was like banking experience and like say you worked uh customer service at a bank and you want to go for a fintech opportunity then that's when it would be relevant because you could kind of make the direct connection as to how this would be a transferable skill but as it is currently um it just seems like filler to fill in your resume i mean that's not the impression that you want to give you would have been better off replacing all these non-relevant experience with um actual just projects that you did yeah and keeping it to a page yeah it's quite long yeah totally so going back to these progress bars if you have some skills which are really really good and the rest of your skills are just good is there a way you can indicate that some of them are better than others or should you just avoid that no you you can definitely indicate it you would indicate it in um your the body of your resume when you're talking about your achievements and your impact right you know tell me about that super cool project that you built from the ground up in react and tell me like tell me what the goal of the project was tell me how tell me um how it executed and then tell me how you built it with the technologies and that will let that i will be able to make the connection on my own that you're really good with this language because you just told me how you use it to build out a really dope project yeah yeah let your projects speak for themselves danny is this a good basic guideline for ordering your cv content one basics two skills three projects four experience five education what's basics i imagine it's sort of the contact details and things okay all right just just wanted to confirm that if if that's contact details um i would go so my so yes yes and no to to this order uh i say the no part comes because depending on which which uh which one paints you in a better light you might want to swap projects and experience right if you have if like let's say later on your career you have five years of experience right let's say you worked at disney for five years um you would want to put the experience right after the skills because you'd want to show them how the skills were used in the experience right but if you let's say you're you're a junior just starting out and you don't really have much experience kind of like john doe on the last resume you would want to switch that you'd want to put the projects ahead of the experience and emphasize the skills and views building up the projects and minimize the experience unless it's relevant yeah so it all kind of boils down to your own personal circumstances but broadly speaking that sounds good danny denny has confirmed yes contact details pratik asks i'm working for an application development or as an application development associate wants a transaction transition into android app developer role uh do google certifications of android help in the resume as i'm not getting any reply back um like i said before the certifications um don't really move the needle and they used to in the beginning when they were first introduced but with as many people having access and performing them um there is a bit there's a lot of saturation so it comes down to your projects again um if you've been if you're having trouble with your resume i would say that i i have a feeling that you're not highlighting enough android exp projects that you've been doing or experimenting with um i would encourage you to you know find some people to build an android app around you know you know find somebody that has a good business sense that can't program and figure out what kind of app they want to build and and build it for them and and put them down as a client on your resume um that would probably go a long way in into you getting some more responses and when you say one year experience of it that could be very general but my my go-to to understand is that it might be something like help desk right which might not be too too relevant but one thing i like about help desk is that you get a lot of exposure to phones so if you want to build an android app and you want you want to highlight that it experience highlight the fact that you help people out with their phones yeah definitely always look for the way to make your experience relevant exactly great lat show i am working on um one company that is a famous tech company and ceo told me uh that i should no react i now have a chance to move on to the tech team should i create a cv for an internal transfer or only use my portfolio i would ask you how badly do you want the job um because that would that should guide you i think either way you're good to to be honest um internally you're already you're already good so the portfolio should be all right but like if you really want to make a strong impression you know i would put the extra like a little bit of effort in and create a custom cv let them know just how seriously you're taking the opportunity and like you know you don't want them you're not holding back i would even show up in a suit in the interview to people that already know me they could be like like jermaine why are you in a suit i just saw you in a hoodie at the meeting i'm taking this seriously that's how you know nobody nobody knocks you for taking the job for taking the opportunity or taking them seriously they actually like like it even if they tell you that it wasn't necessary yeah one slightly related tip to this i have you need to do the groundwork in advance when it comes to things like this i suppose in a world of covet this is less of an issue but you know if you want to go to an interview and it's a bit awkward because you don't want everyone to know but you have to kind of be dressed up to go to the interview you don't want people asking questions my solution to this was always just to be overdressed so i would basically wear a suit all the time and then no one would know if you leave the office for an interview yeah i i used to tell people i'm getting lunch with my mom yeah there you go got some options yeah one um tv i would like to look at is this one mr um yes the reason i wanted to bring this one up is because it has something at the bottom of it which a few of them have which i want to ask you about but let's look at it first and then we'll get to it what's your initial impression like that i like the way that the skills are actually lined out um yeah especially when i consider john doe's graph i think this is a good contrast this is how i would want the skills to be to be to be lined up right yeah you can't miss them you can't miss some bullet points no graphs like everything there is is actually really great and the skills themselves are really good as well they're specific they're not general um like i said web development search and education at the bottom yep okay um portfolio if you mind just pausing right here yep i like the okay so i like i like the format that they have this set up i like the fact that they have the portfolio link there and i like the fact that they have project descriptions um i wish that they highlighted and specified a singular project or a few rather than giving a general description of what is in the portfolio because i already know what's going to be in the portfolio um you're going to have sample projects that demonstrate your ability to code but like what are the projects what's interesting because not guaranteed that i'm going to click on it right but you make it worth my while i will click on it yeah it's quite a lot of work history yeah so the resume is too long already um like i said at this point you're just showing off tenure right um can you scroll back up for me leanne yep i just want to see what is what he's current what they're currently doing customer dispute analyst so i think yeah i think you could definitely have kept so i the reason why a lot of people put the work history is because they want to show people that they understand like the basics of working in in an actual workforce like they know what it means to clock in they know what it means to like work with annoying people they know what it means to deal with hr so they got it for all that tenure there and and they don't um so like like really mr you could have just taken out everything that wasn't your current company um and um i want to see what's at the bottom before i give like a definitive thing because you hinted at now i'm like what is it the thing i was wondering about is they've mentioned their military service and a few people have done this um so i don't know the full context of this obviously in some countries there's mandatory military service in others there aren't um but is that something you would recommend putting on a cv i most definitely would um i think first of all i think i just want to give props to mr because i think anyone that joins the army you know regardless of what i think of like ideological leaders or political leaders i think being joining the army takes a lot of guts and it's a selfless thing to do so like kudos to you i will always i will always encourage people to put their military service on the resume um nothing shows a higher a higher character trait than military service in my mind um and also just from um uh uh i want to say from a marketing standpoint for yourself it helps distinguish you um so yeah definitely one i definitely encourage you to keep that military service there um i would even say like and like and like yeah i would keep it there but i'll still take out everything else uh that's not relevant um to like what you're doing more recently and now that i've seen the bottom i can say this wholeheartedly um i would emphasize uh the middle portion of the resume the uh the project and portfolio portion i wish there was more here yeah in general like i the the amount of text that you've used for um your customer dispute analyst stuff and i like the fact that you have your selected accomplishments that's amazing i needed that for the port we need that for the portfolio yeah yeah totally perfect one more question about military service and there was another one um they evidently lived in a country where there was mandatory military service but they were exempt and they put that on their cv would you recommend leaving that in no i would leave that out ah hold on so if you're applying in the country and it's mandatory um i think you would have to put it or you would at least at the very end at the very least be prepared to answer the question of what happened yeah and others in other circumstances i i would leave it off yeah that makes sense supposedly if you think you're likely to be asked about it then stream yeah exactly i suppose kind of answers uh the question for a lot of situations yes well i can't believe our hour is up already wonderful to speak to you michael agrees i would um just like you to know i'm here listening and i'm learning a lot and i mean a lot thank you yes that is fabulous to hear well as usual it was an absolute pleasure to talk to you jimmy thank you very much for coming on and for sharing all your knowledge it was very insightful and useful and i'm sure we will welcome you back again can't wait to come back thank you for having me scrimba team um if you ever need me hit me up yeah absolutely give germaine a follow he's over on twitter jermaine jupiter and if you enjoyed this consider hitting subscribe and then you might catch the next stream with jermaine and we'll be back next week i'll be back next week uh with another live stream so have a wonderful week all the best hi everyone [Music]

Channel: Scrimba

Views: 1,264

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: cv review, cv, cv tips, resume tips, how to write a cv, job hunt tips, job search tips, how to find a job, job search, job search advice, tech cv review, web development, coding, learning to code, learn web development, web development 2021, front end developer, frontend, learn coding, web dev, software development, coding tutorial, web development tutorial, become a developer, software developer, how to become a developer, software engineer, self-taught software developer

Id: -F67VnFaadA

Length: 57min 29sec (3449 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021