How to Write Your Best Software Engineering Resume

Summary

In this video, Mark Benliyan shares his insights on crafting the perfect software engineering resume. He emphasizes the importance of not only listing experiences but telling a compelling story about who you are as a candidate. He discusses the common mistakes applicants make, such as minor formatting errors, and offers actionable advice on structuring resumes with sections like Contact Information, Education, Skills, Experience, and Projects. Mark introduces his "what, why, how" framework for crafting impactful resume bullets, stressing the inclusion of impact (the 'why'). He ends with tips to quantify achievements and using varied action words to make your resume stand out.

Highlights

• Craft your resume as a compelling narrative that portrays your character as a candidate. 🎭
• Avoid common mistakes like format errors—they can cost you the job. 🚫
• Make your resume easy to scan, as recruiters won't read every word. 🔍
• Ensure each resume line adds value independently. 💡
• Include impact by answering 'why' in your resume bullets—show your work matters. 💪

Key Takeaways

• Your resume is not just a document, it's a story of who you are as a candidate. 📜
• Nail the basics by avoiding formatting errors and ensuring consistency. ✏️
• Optimize for scannability since recruiters spend mere minutes on resumes. 👀
• Use the 'What, Why, How' framework to create impactful resume bullets. 💥
• Quantify achievements and use varied action words to boost your resume. 📈

Overview

In this engaging guide by Mark Benliyan, he unveils the secrets to creating an impressive software engineering resume that does more than just list experiences—it tells your story. Mark, leveraging his extensive internship experiences, underscores the importance of weaving a coherent narrative about yourself through your resume. By focusing on crafting a character profile that aligns with the job role, you can stand out even before the interview stage! 🎯

Mark emphasizes attention to detail, advising against overlooked errors such as inconsistent tenses or varying font sizes, which can collectively weaken your profile. He provides a structured approach with five crucial sections: Contact Information, Education, Skills, Experience, and Projects. Each component is meticulously crafted to maximize its impact and alignment with your career goals. 📑

One of the standout strategies he shares is the 'What, Why, How' framework. This method encourages candidates to go beyond the norm by explaining the impact of their work, not just what they did. Coupled with quantified achievements and a diverse range of action words, these techniques ensure your resume isn’t just seen, but remembered. Mark’s final pro-tips help you present your hard-earned skills and experiences in the most compelling way. 🚀

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: The Importance of a Strong Resume The chapter emphasizes the critical role of a strong resume in the job application process, noting that over 95% of candidates face rejection based on their resumes alone. It underscores the importance of crafting an exceptional resume to avoid this fate. The speaker has dedicated two years to understanding what constitutes a perfect resume by analyzing successful resumes, including his own, and reviewing 348 resumes from computer science students on LinkedIn. This research led to the development of a framework that proved successful in securing job offers from leading tech companies, which the speaker intends to share in the video.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Introduction to the Speaker, Mark Delan Mark Delan introduces himself, highlighting his experience in learning to code over 18 months and completing internships at renowned companies such as Figma, Netflix, NASA, and Tinder. His goal is to assist students in securing their dream software engineering jobs. He emphasizes the importance of creating a resume that tells a compelling story about who you are, rather than just listing experiences.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Crafting a Compelling Story Through Your Resume This chapter focuses on crafting a compelling narrative through your resume to effectively convey the story of your professional journey. It emphasizes the importance of illustrating your experiences, career progression, and interests indirectly, creating a character profile that employers can understand. The key to standing out in applications, especially for unique companies, is ensuring your resume tells a cohesive story that aligns with the company's expectations and culture.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Common Resume Mistakes The chapter focuses on common resume mistakes, emphasizing that a resume should highlight the candidate's personality and relevant experiences to fit the desired role. It suggests structuring the resume to reflect diverse skills and passions, like a candidate interested in both software engineering and design, making them suitable for a company like Figma.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Optimizing Resume Scannability This chapter discusses the importance of resume scannability and common mistakes students make. A resume should be treated as the first project or deliverable a potential employer sees, emphasizing the need for precision and correct formatting. From reviewing 348 resumes from computer science students, many contained minor formatting errors that could hinder their impact.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Formatting and Attention to Detail The chapter titled 'Formatting and Attention to Detail' emphasizes the importance of attention to detail in resumes and professional documents. It discusses common errors such as inconsistent tenses, varying abbreviations, mismatched font sizes, misspelled words, and poorly designed templates. The chapter argues that if job applicants do not pay attention to these details in their resumes, it could reflect poorly on their attention to detail in a professional setting. This is especially crucial for software engineers, where meticulous attention to detail is necessary for effective coding.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Structuring Your Resume: Key Sections The chapter "Structuring Your Resume: Key Sections" emphasizes the importance of understanding the recruiter's perspective when creating a resume. It highlights the necessity of making a resume easy to scan, as recruiters only spend a few minutes on each resume. Therefore, optimizing for scannability is crucial. Additionally, since recruiters do not read every detail, it is important to structure the resume in a way that highlights key information effectively.
• 06:00 - 07:00: Contact Information This chapter discusses the importance of ensuring that each line in a resume adds value independently. It suggests that if a recruiter were to randomly read any five bullets from a resume, each should offer meaningful context and demonstrate the candidate's value. It emphasizes the idea of aligning the resume content to highlight why the candidate is a good fit for the role the recruiter is trying to fill. Additionally, it highlights the recruiter's role, which is to gauge their confidence in the candidate's potential to perform well, making the resume the first example of the applicant's work.
• 07:00 - 08:00: Skills Section The chapter titled 'Skills Section' provides guidance on formatting and detailing resumes. It highlights the importance of consistency in tense usage across resume bullets. This includes using past tense for past experiences and ensuring uniformity in the format. The chapter also advises on the correct formatting of dates and making strategic decisions about abbreviations, such as whether to abbreviate the month September. These actionable steps aim to enhance the clarity and professionalism of the resume.
• 08:00 - 10:00: Experience Section and the What-Why-How Framework The chapter focuses on the importance of attention to detail in resume writing, particularly in the Experience Section. It emphasizes consistency in formatting, such as the use of abbreviations, punctuation, and hyphens. Additionally, it underlines the necessity for resumes to be easy to scan, with a clear hierarchy that allows for quick identification of companies and experiences. Experience has shown that these detailed attentions significantly impact the effectiveness of a resume.
• 10:00 - 11:00: Education Section The chapter emphasizes the importance of resume structure for students, stating that it should be one page and consist of five main parts: contact information, education, skills, experience, and projects or activities. It promises to break down each part to highlight the core things students should know, beginning with contact information.
• 11:00 - 13:00: Projects and Activities The chapter discusses best practices for linking social media profiles and contact information in professional documents such as resumes. It advises against using icons, recommending text-based hyperlinks instead, as they are more compatible with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Key information to include is a LinkedIn profile, name, email address, and phone number. The text advises against including a personal photo, suggesting it's unnecessary.
• 13:00 - 15:00: Final Tips and Tricks The chapter offers insights into optional details one might include in professional profiles, such as location information, but it is emphasized that such details are not necessary if the individual prefers not to include them. The main focus is on the skills section, advising individuals to categorize skills rather than simply listing them. This is particularly pertinent for those in tech roles. A suggested categorization could include Programming Languages, Technologies, and Tools, emphasizing the importance of organized and relevant skill representation.
• 15:00 - 15:30: Conclusion and Next Steps The chapter discusses the importance of tailoring your resume to the job you're applying for, particularly highlighting the tools and skills relevant to the position. For example, for a software engineering internship at Netflix, it would be beneficial to mention familiarity with tools like Jira and Confluence. The chapter also touches on the placement of the education section for students, which should typically be at the top of the resume, whereas the placement of the skills section can vary depending on personal preference and the specifics of one's experience.

How to Write Your Best Software Engineering Resume Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 over 95% of applicants get rejected on the basis of their resume alone which means it's really important to nail the step but what actually makes an amazing resume over the last two years I've personally obsessed with what a perfect resume looks like I analyzed every previous resume of mine that made it past the resumé screen and reviewed 348 rums from other computer science students over on my LinkedIn profile I soon started to realize what actually matter and in this video I'll share that exact framework that I discovered which helped me land offers from some of the biggest names in Tech hey if you don't
• 00:30 - 01:00 know who I am my name is Mark Delan with an 18 month of learning to code I did six software engineering internships at companies like figma Netflix NASA and Tinder and on this channel my goals to help students land their dream software engineering jobs the first crucial component that you need to understand here is that your resume is not just about listing your experiences instead it's about conveying a compelling message of who it is that you are and the best resumés will lean further into the compelling message and crafting of the story rather than just trying to Ace
• 01:00 - 01:30 getting all of your experiences on the paper when a recruiter reads my resume they should understand the story of who Mark Ben leyan is this includes what have I done in the past how I've progressed over time and maybe even what some of my interests actually look like that's not to say that you need to explicitly State those interests but it should give it sort of character profile of you as a candidate and if you really want to know the secret to cracking particularly unique companies it really does boil down from having a story painted in your resume that match is the
• 01:30 - 02:00 type of character or personality that they're looking to fill into their role stick around until later in the video where I'll talk about how to actually structure your resume for example the resume that paints me as someone who is a software engineer that has actually dabbled a lot in design during my university courses and has built a few design projects but I really love engineering or working cross functionally makes me a pretty interesting candidate for let's say working at figman a company that is leading the design industry so now with this fundamental Concept in mind let's
• 02:00 - 02:30 move on to one of the biggest mistakes that I see students make with their resume the first one is that not enough people realize that the resume is actually the first piece of work that they're going to be submitting to the company that's potentially employing them your resume is not just some document or some PDF you could think of it like the first deliverable or the first project that the company sees from you and the reason I say this is because of the 348 resumes that I reviewed from computer science students it's kind of remarkable how many of them have just the minorous format errors changes in
• 02:30 - 03:00 tense when it doesn't make sense or different ways of abbreviating the same sort of thing different font sizes misspelled words sort of wacky templates and the list goes on if you can't pay attention to these little details in your resume then why should a company trusts you to pay attention to those little details at your job and this is particularly true for my software Engineers out there because code is definitely a pretty meticulous craft and attention to detail is something that we hopefully fully have to write your best
• 03:00 - 03:30 resume you're going to need to take a step back and put yourself in the recruiter shoots the train of thought should look like this what is it a common truth that I know about a recruiter and how can I optimize my chances given that truth so for example we know that it's true that a recruiter will only spend a couple minutes at most on a given resume so as a result we need to make that resume pretty easy to scan scannability is something that we should optimize for given this truth the next thing that we know a recruiter is not going to get to read every single thing on your resume that tells us that each
• 03:30 - 04:00 line on our resume should add value independently of the greater ho we want it so that if a recruiter read five random bullets on our resume each one of those bullets would convey context and value and in this case we can Define providing value as essentially showing why you're a good fit for the role that the recruiter is looking for the other fundamental truth is that a recruiter's job is to assess their confidence and your ability to do good work and since this is the first example of work that you're showing them this truth tells us
• 04:00 - 04:30 that in return we should make sure that everything is well formatted and Minor Details are paid attention to and to give you a quick list of what this should look like in terms of actionable steps let's say the first example of this is are the tenses in your resume bullets consistent are you using past tense in your previous experience but then present tense in experience before that that doesn't really make a lot of sense you should be calculated in the way that you're approaching writing this document another thing to be Havey formatted all of your dates correctly where are you choosing to abbreviate are you going to abbreviate September as
• 04:30 - 05:00 scpt or SCP are you going to add a DOT after that abbreviation are you going to put one hyphen between the two months or are you going to put two hyphens are you going to make sure to follow that same format for every single one of the resume experiences again these things may seem small but in my experience it's something that I've always paid a lot of attention to and I really have seen the effects of this pay out another one is is your resume tempet easy to scan is there a clear hierarchy of experiences can I quickly identify the company I'm
• 05:00 - 05:30 looking for or does it just sort of look like one big text compilation where I don't really know where to start if you're a student watching this here are some things that you should take as true your resume should be one page there going to be five main parts to your resume as a student contact information education skills experience and any kind of projects or activities so let's break down each of these five parts and go into what are the core things that you should know about each one first we have contact info keep the simple make sure
• 05:30 - 06:00 you hyperlink to your socials and your emails which means that I can just click on your LinkedIn profile and go directly there instead of trying to find you myself in my opinion you should avoid using icons next to these I've always stuck with just baking things text based and I do think they're a little bit better for some of the ATS systems that I've actually encountered and some of the things that you should include here are your LinkedIn profile your name your email address your phone number and I sometimes do see people include things like a photo of themselves you don't need a photo of yourself um sometimes
• 06:00 - 06:30 people will include their location like if they're based out of San Francisco or Los Angeles or whatnot I'd consider that optional uh it's not like a bad thing to do though um it's definitely not necessary if that's not something you want to include next up we have the skills section a big part here is to actually make sure you're categorizing your skills don't just write skills and then dump a bunch of skills on especially true for big Tech employees or software engineer a good split of what this could look like could be maybe something like programming languages Technologies and then tools and the reason I say tools is one of the things
• 06:30 - 07:00 that is actually helpful to include on your resume as skills is just examples of some of the day-to-day tools that you might run into on the job that you're applying for so say I'm applying for Netflix's software engineering internship I might include information like I know how to use a or jira or I'm familiar with Confluence for documentation there is some back and forth on where you should actually go about positioning your experience section as a student education should almost always be at the very top and then skills sort of varies I've usually
• 07:00 - 07:30 positioned it above my experience section and the rational there has been that experience is let's say a large longer chunk of things to scan over whereas skills are high impact but also pretty quick to read and so I prefer to have like more nuggets of knowledge being tossed out to the recruiter so I usually go like education skills and then experience and then contact information at the very up top with my name so it'll I guess it'll really go contact information education skills experience and then projects or activities and
• 07:30 - 08:00 things like that at the very bottom and this sort of follows the hierarchal structure of honestly what's most important okay next up we have the experience section this is your time to shine I want to introduce something that's really important here the what why how framework this is honestly been The crucial framework to this my success in sort of every single resume that I built the what why how framework essentially is a structure for what each one of your resume bullets should contain every bullet should answer two of the three questions and Rockstar bullets will will answer three for three
• 08:00 - 08:30 so what means that you want your bullet to specify what you did an example of this could look like I developed a web application the how is where you want to detail the methods or the technologies that you use so I developed the web application was the what but the how could look like with react and node.js for example most people will actually stop here most resume bullets will look like I developed the web application using these Technologies but they'll never hit the why and this is actually one of the second biggest mistakes I see students make because the Y is really
• 08:30 - 09:00 where all of the gravy or the value sort of livs the Y is your opportunity to actually convey impact why is where you give the reason maybe it's to automate some kind of internal process to tie this all together let me give you a bullet that I believe hits all three of these points and highlight why each one is so crucial let's take a bullet that I have written right here in front of me that is personally for my experience I CL the bullet reads developed signal sign on scripts using JavaScript to automate login for over 22 million
• 09:00 - 09:30 monthly users across 10,000 United States school districts okay so what did I do I developed single signon scripts how did I do it I did it using JavaScript developed single sign on scripts using JavaScript is a clear depiction of what I did it clever but the thing that it lacks is why anyone should care and why the recruiter should care this is why the why is so important when you take that and you append on that I developed single sign on scripts using JavaScript to automate logins for over 22 million users yada ya yada that
• 09:30 - 10:00 portion is where you actually convey the fact that you're somebody who's doing impactful work you're moving metrics you're doing things that matter and people want to hire someone who's doing work that actually matters so please please please if you take any step out of this entire video it's to really start adding wise into each one of your resume B finally we have the education section usually it's at the top for students does it have to be for let's say if you're a boot camp graduate sometimes boot camp grads want to put
• 10:00 - 10:30 their education sort of at the very bottom of their resume because it's not really what they're trying to highlight and it's not related to the job that they're applying for unless it is which in that case you should just bring it back up but here pretty simple you want to mention your degree you want to mention the university you don't have to mention when you started University it's pretty common practice to just say when you graduated or your expected graduation day on top of this if you are already graduated you also shouldn't feel super pressured to mention your graduation date if for whatever reason you don't want to include that but typically most of the rumes I review
• 10:30 - 11:00 will look something like I went to UCLA which is like University of California Los Angeles I got a Bachelor's of administration and computer science and Linguistics and I graduated in June of 2023 if you're recruiting for internships and new grads definitely make sure you're including that grad date because that's actually one of the first things that recruiters will look at when they pull up your resume to make sure that you qualify for the role that they're recruiting for internships and new guys are pretty interesting there because immediate qualification is grad date and nothing else matters if you don't hit the grad date often times cool the next thing for projects um I
• 11:00 - 11:30 actually am someone who ended up having a lot of projects on my resume I've reviewed this to other people but my biggest sort of best practice that you should follow here is again try to lean in on why the project you made is impactful and not just the fact that you did something you did something in step one but the Rockstar applicants did something of value did something of meaning did something of impact lean into that in any of the projects you write and it'll make each project that you talk about all the more value and
• 11:30 - 12:00 finally um if you do have any activities that you want to include I think things here definitely get a lot looser one of the ways that I approached this is before I had a lot of really Stellar technical experience I sort of shied away from including any projects that weren't value aligned to the engineering rules that I was trying to land because I was really trying to go all in on like adding to my value as an engineer or someone who knows that a coat I did take an interesting lens on this though of once I started to get a few internships under my belt with larger names I felt like my credibility in terms of
• 12:00 - 12:30 engineering was a little higher and so I actually wanted to round out my resume a little better by including some other activities like how I was like on the board of one of the nonprofits in my local city um and things like that so if you have lots of technical signal already it could be nice to include this activity section just to round out yourself as a candidate but if you're still sort of in the stage where you're struggling to convey technical signal then don't really worry too much about these other activities because you don't want your resume to look like you're doing a ton of activities not related to
• 12:30 - 13:00 engineering or whatever role you're applying for and then have that be the majority of your resume all right um some final tips and tricks that I want to leave you with to get a little bit of an extra Edge on top of all this first thing is instead of just stating tasks try to quantify whatever achievements you have everything looks a lot sexier when you're able to say some sort of metric a patented to it and it's honestly okay to fluff this a little bit or to it like estimate it a little bit everybody does this just don't maybe completely make them up out of thin air so for example you don't want to say
• 13:00 - 13:30 improved website loading speed you want to say improved website loading speed by 80% or whatever that happened to look like in your case next up is using action words words like LED developed initiated launched spearheaded whatever it happens to be those words tend to convey subtle proactive nature like leadership nature and it just sort of reads well subconsciously on the resume but the one bet here is try not to reuse the same action words multiple times don't say develop this develop that develop this develop that like as you mix up the action words it makes it seem like your experience breath is also
• 13:30 - 14:00 longer be like wider because it seems like you've done more things naturally because the word that you're using to explain what you did just changes simple psychology hack I'll include a list of action words in the description below which will hopefully be helpful to you maybe as you're building your resume you can sort of just like pull them up on the side uh and sort of just plug some of them in that's what I did when I was first starting out all right so now that you know how to write your best software engineering resume the next thing I'd explore you to check out is seven ways to actually go about Landing your first internship or actually just Landing whatever your next internship is these
• 14:00 - 14:30 are a lot of ways that you can go about really starting to rack up the experiences you have and building out that experience section on your resume so check out that video here and I'll see you in the next one