How do you make work look good on your resumé when you feel like you haven't done anything impressive? Only the people who work with you know the value of what you did, so how can you communicate that in a bullet point?
How do you make work look good on your resumé when you feel like you haven't done anything impressive? Only the people who work with you know the value of what you did, so how can you communicate that in a bullet point?
Happy Friday, everybody. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to another Friday Refill episode of Developer Tea. I'm going to start off the episode by thanking one of our Discord community members, the Drowsy Archer, who asked a question that kind of spurred on this particular episode, the Drowsy Archer, in our Discord community. You can join that community, by the way, and you can ask questions that may turn into episodes by heading over to developertea.com slash discord. And we'd love to have software engineers who are looking to level up, who are looking to grow in their careers, who are looking to have meaningful conversations. That's developertea.com. So I'll summarize what the Drowsy Archer mentioned in their question. They've been working at the same company for around six years. They're kind of struggling putting that six years of work into a resume format. And they've attempted to kind of generalize it, but they're having trouble creating kind of the wow factor. Part of the reason that they feel this way is because they didn't necessarily have direct access to the production data for the projects, right? They would deliver it to another team who would take it forward. That data turns out to be impressive, but only to their internal team. It's hard to kind of explain the value of that externally, right? So this is the setup that we have for today's episode. As we go into the weekend, we're coming out of... a time in the world, many of you certainly already know this. And if you don't, you've probably been asleep for a year. A lot of people are probably looking for jobs right now. And a lot of people are probably hiring right now. And if they're not now, they will be soon. And not only because of COVID, but because it's kind of hiring season. This seems to be a time when people's budgets are kind of firming up. And new jobs. They're popping up. It tends to be a hiring season. There's another one, another hiring season that happens later on in the year. But because of this, a lot of people are also looking at their resumes. And they're trying to figure out how to make themselves look good to recruiters, look good to hiring managers. How do we do this? How do we make our resumes look good? And we're not going to cover the whole subject of that today. Certainly. There's a lot that you can do to make your resume look good. The most important thing you can do is good work. Good work is going to make your resume look good because that is the core of your resume. And even if you do have a good looking resume, if you don't have good work to back it up, then any reasonable hiring process is going to uncover that. Right? So now let's be clear. When I say that a reasonable hiring process is going to uncover your good work or your lack of good work, I want to be very clear that if you don't have a massive portfolio of work, that doesn't mean you're unemployable. That should be hopefully a very loud message that you take away from this because there are a lot of people listening to this right now who, for the exact reason, that your work is insufficient for what you would call a legacy. Right? You don't feel good about all the work that you've done. And you want to improve. You want to take the next step. So if you were to have this portfolio full of incredible work, well, you probably wouldn't necessarily have to go and look for a job. That's not true for everybody. Sometimes people look for jobs for entirely different reasons. But for a lot of people, the reason you're looking, for a job, is because you want to grow. You want to do something different. You want to continue doing more complex or more involved or more interesting, exciting work. And for that reason, you're looking at your resume. And this is a very important factor. You're looking at it through your own experience. And you can't look at it through someone else's experience. It's impossible to do. But it is possible to remember that your perspective, of your experience, colors it. In other words, your way of thinking about those projects, your way of thinking about the bullet points on your resume, is necessarily going to be different. In fact, perhaps drastically different from anyone else's, including that hiring manager, including that recruiter. So with that in mind, let's remember that our own perception of our work, is going to be colored, especially when we're looking for another job. Right? There's going to be things that we think are very important on our resume that aren't. There's going to be things that we don't think are important that are. And there's going to be some things that we are struggling to communicate, that would be important, but end up being underplayed. These are all kind of ways that resumes can go wrong. Now, here's a very important factor, in, clarifying the, impact, points, on your resume. All right. When I say impact, I mean, the things that a recruiter, is going to point at and say, this sets this person apart, or this qualifies this person, above the last five candidates, I looked at. Right? The impact points. There is a pervasive feeling, when you are writing your resume, that, if you accidentally, take too much credit, that you are somehow, you know, being an imposter. Right? So in other words, and we'll talk about how this plays out, but if you take credit for a project, or for work on a project, that someone else was the lead on, this is a very common example, right? Maybe you were not the lead, you contributed to the project, the project went well, it had a major impact on the business, but you don't feel right taking credit, because, maybe you started on that project, halfway through, or, you know, maybe you, feel like the work that you contributed, wasn't necessarily, absolutely critical to the success of the project. I know I'm talking to a lot of you, very directly right now, because I had this exact experience, on many occasions in my career, and I know other people who have as well. They felt like they were not a critical part of the team, they felt like their contributions, were not, you know, incredibly important, and that if somebody were to put it under a microphone, or a microscope, they would say, oh, we could have, you know, cut you out, and it wouldn't have mattered, so you can't really take credit for it. And you have to stop thinking this way, right? This is, this is a thought that you need to eradicate from your memory, okay? If you were a part of that team, if you were a part of that project, then look at the project, and the impact that it had, no matter where you were, in the stage of that project, focus on that impact, communicate that impact, and then explain your role along the way. Start with the impact. And when I say impact, for the vast majority of cases, this is going to be a business level measure, something that a, a non software engineer can look at and understand the value of, right? You're, you're going to communicate some measure, some metric, something that is tangibly important, right? Something that is important to the business first, right? So, and the way that this tends to be formed is you use some kind of action verb and don't go over the top. Don't choose something really obscure and certainly don't choose something that is vague, but choose an action verb and then explain what that action resulted in, in that particular impact metric. So maybe you worked on a performance team, let's say, right? You can say, uh, cut, uh, cut load, page load, time cut homepage load time in half resulting in, uh, you know, a 1.4 X increase in total sessions. I don't know. These are made up numbers and certainly the, those are not necessarily connected, but you can imagine, you know, putting that together as an impact metric. Now, did you directly do all of the work to make that happen? No. In fact, if somebody is reading your resume and expecting that you are solely responsible for the work that's on your resume, then you probably don't want to work in that place, right? Because they don't understand that teams tend to be the ones that get the best work done together. Very, very seldomly does an individual actually do all of the work on their resume. That would be a ridiculous assumption, right? So take credit for the work that the team did and then explain your role. So you cut, uh, you, you helped cut that page load of time in half by optimizing the, uh, the image loading sequences or the, maybe you, uh, worked on, I don't know. These are all very, very ridiculous, uh, examples, but you can understand that you had a part to play. Right? And that your role in this, you're connecting it back to the business impact. But here's what I want you to do with this. All right. I want you to come up with, let's say three, uh, of these kinds of impact metrics, impact moments, projects that you worked on that had some kind of impact. And then I want you to go ask somebody, go ask somebody in, in our discord. You can ask us in there. You can ask another engineer in the industry, maybe a recruiter, somebody that you feel has, does not have the internal context, uh, of your company. Doesn't understand kind of what that project necessarily is. Ask them to read over those. They don't have to do a whole review of your resume. Just look at those particular points and ask them, do, first of all, do these things make sense? Do they seem like things that people would care about? Right? Do they seem like something that made an impact on, uh, on that business in that moment, on that project? And specifically, I want you to look for places where they seem confused, right? Clarity is of utmost importance here. If they seem confused about anything, you either need to cut that thing entirely, or you need to change the way you're communicating it, possibly change the metric that you're using, right? It's possible that you're using a metric that only makes sense to your internal team. Maybe you're using some kind of jargon that you don't even realize that you're using, because it's become second nature to you. Once you get this kind of external review from people who are not exposed to your internal culture, they're not exposed to your clients or your work. They don't have any context on any of that. Then you might have a clearer picture of something that makes an impact, right? That's really what we're going for here. We're not trying to prove to your team, prove to your clients, prove to you, even, right? That's probably the hardest one to get over. We're not trying to prove to you or any of those other people that you've done good work. We're trying to get you to the next step in that interview process. That is the whole point of these resumes. There's no other, you know, maybe there is some pride that's wrapped up into it. Maybe there is some sense of worth. But if your goal is to get a job, then really what you're trying to communicate, is a truthful picture of the business impact that you participated in. That's what you care about. And that's what your recruiter cares about. That's what your hiring manager cares about. They're trying to get proof. They're trying to get proof that you have the, uh, the makeup of someone who's going to have a tangible impact on metrics that they care about, that they actually want to pursue. And there's plenty of other things that we can talk about on a resume, uh, that might, that might allow them to see that you're a culture fit, for example, right? Uh, but this specific thing asking about how do I make my work look good is, and should be entirely focused on finding those critical points of business impact and communicating those first, and then your role in that process. Thank you again to the drowsy Archer in our discord community. You can join that discord community by heading over to developer t.com slash discord, thank you so much for listening to this episode of developer T the Friday refill of this show comes out every Friday. We also have two other episodes that come out each week, so it's a total of three episodes. It's a lot of content and it's easy to miss out on something if you're not subscribed. So go ahead and subscribe and whatever podcasting app you use if you don't want to miss out on future episodes. Thanks so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea. .