Resume design for foreign companies

Disclaimer

The text does not pretend to be the ultimate truth, described below is based on personal experience and recommendations of people with more than twenty years of experience in IT in the USA and Canada.

Recruiter Resume Analysis

Many people believe that if you spent a week on a resume, then it is ready. In practice, a resume is something that needs to be carefully updated and amended as your experience improves. The tips below help speed up the preparation process for those who don’t know where to start.

You have 3-5 minutes to interest your resume. This is how much time will be devoted to it at the beginning, at best. Often resumes can be eliminated after 10 seconds. Nobody knows you, you are a sheet of paper with text, and this is the only thing that can distinguish you from others. Imagine that you want to buy a new TV, you are unlikely to be interested in long manuals or 5 page descriptions. Choosing from dozens and hundreds of analogues, you need to do a preliminary screening for certain parameters in 5-10 seconds. The remaining 5-10 devices, you will allocate a little more time, and then still interrupt choose between two. Something like this is the selection of candidates.

Summary

Sections

The only important sections in the resume are:

• Hat
• Skills
• experience
• Education

It is important to note that work experience and skills are fundamental to any recruiter. If there is no experience, then education will have the same weight as work experience.

Hat

What should be present in the header:

1. Contact details: telephone, email and address.
2. Name and surname: write the English version, for example, Alex Petuhov. Do not use transliteration from passports, for example Aleksandr Petuhov. If you are called in for an interview in person, then you can give your name from your passport and say “Here is my legal name for tickets purchase.” (Provided that you get paid for the trip).
3. Briefly about yourself: you need to indicate who you are and what you can. Here is an example from my resume: Highly motivated senior technology director with twelve years of experience in web, mobile and cloud software development, team building and project management. You can also add one paragraph describing directly what you have been able to achieve during your career, but in general terms.

What you do not need to add:

• Hobbies and hobbies
• Marital status
• Photograph
• Various information not related to work: driver’s license, etc.

The presence of these items only distracts from the essence and can cause negativity against the background of personal preferences of the one who will look at your resume.

Skills

You need to understand that 99% of recruiters are not technical people, and they operate with keywords when searching for a particular candidate. In fact, they simply compare what you have written in this paragraph with what is written in the vacancy requirements. There are more egregious cases when resumes are entered into the database, where they are decomposed into components automatically. As a result, the comparison of resumes and vacancies occurs automatically and only those who are most suitable, in other words who have the same words in the resume as the words in the vacancy, will be considered.

Therefore, this section is important, and should be fairly simple. Sort of:

• Web: cloud computing - from Amazon AWS to Windows Azure to Rackspace, Flash, HTML \ CSS, XML \ XSL, PHP, ASP.NET MVC, SOAP and REST.
• Desktop: C ++, C #, Java, WPF, MFC, ATL, OpenGL, DirectX, SQL Server, MySQL, NoSQL - Mongo DB, WinAPI, Sockets.

Do not be surprised that partially horses and people are together, as well as primitive things on the list. This is important for recruiters. since they are not technical people and for them the difference between SQL and CSS is only in writing.

experience

This is the most important section. There is no place for copy-paste, only thoughtfully written every line. In a potential interview, questions will come from what is written, so be prepared to explain every line from your resume.

For each position, indicate:

• Company name
• Work period (month-year of start and month-year of end are enough)
• Geographical location of the company: if you have experience working for a branch of a foreign company, indicate where the headquarters are located.
• Responsibilities: no need to completely copy from the job description, just 4-5 lines
• Achievements: a very important point, many people forget about it and in the end it is not clear what exactly a person did while in office.

Work experience should occupy at least 50% of the entire resume, ideally 75%.

Education

If your university is unknown outside the country, do not allocate a lot of space. One or two lines are enough to describe what kind of education and area you have. Often people enter their degrees directly in the header, for example: Alex Petuhov, MBA. If the university is not very famous, then it is better not to put a lot of emphasis on education in a hat.

General tips

• See how others fill out their resumes, the benefit of LinkedIn now allows you to spend hours looking at who writes about yourself.
• Never copy pieces, it can easily pop up and cause a negative reaction instantly.
• Use the terminology relevant for today (seasoned, top-notch, bleeding edge, etc.), but not much. Too pathetic description as a rule will also cause a negative reaction.
• If you partially participated in the project, do not hesitate to indicate it in the resume, as well as technologies that you even encountered slightly. This is often abused by programmers from India, their resume is like a list of all the technologies that have existed over the past 10 years.
• Never make a resume of more than 3 sheets, better 2.
• Visual design should be without artistic design, unless you are succumbing to the designer.
• Never make spelling mistakes - always check every word.
• With little experience, it is best to go to companies that are far from megacities. There is a high probability that they have received 5 resumes for a vacancy. For Canada, it could be Nova Scotia.