You should revise your resume at the start of your job search. You may also need to come back and make resume improvements later on if you are having trouble getting invited for interviews.
When you apply to a role, your resume is usually the main way the hiring team will decide whether or not you should be interviewed. Organizations receive so many applicants, they only invite a small fraction of applicants to interview, and they may spend a very short amount of time (often less than a minute!) to evaluate each resume.
If you get rejected or do not hear back from roles you applied to, it does not necessarily mean you are not qualified. However, you should work on making your resume stronger so you can get to the interview stage more often.
The resume reader is looking for these kinds of things:
Programming Experience: Since you are applying for roles suitable for students and new/recent graduates, the hiring team should not expect many years of experience, but they do look for other signs that the applicant is comfortable in a certain programming language. Work experience in that language, projects using common libraries, and features that seem difficult to build all contribute to forming this impression.
Professional Experience: Again, the hiring team should not expect internship candidates to already have professional experience in software engineering. Instead, they will look for projects, coursework, research, hackathons, teaching, or any other technical experience. New and recent graduates may be expected to have internship experience, but the other kinds of technical experience can take place of this.
Role Match: If the company uses specific programming languages, frameworks, or techniques, the hiring team may filter down only to candidates that have those things listed on their resume, possibly based on keywords. When you search for role postings pay attention to the requirements and responsibilities to decide which ones to highlight in your resume.
Involvement: Hiring teams may also give bonus points to applicants who have technical experience on their resume as well as other kinds of community involvement like teaching, volunteering, student leadership, or activity in student organizations.
In addition to the Illinois Tech Career Services Resume Guide (PDF), here are some techniques you can use to improve your resume:
At Scarlet Data Studio, we typically recommend Illinois Tech students organize their resume into these sections, in this order:
We recommend this order because it matches what the reader is looking for:
If you have relevant awards, club involvement, or volunteering experience, you can also add this under the education section.
Because hiring teams can only interview a limited number of applicants (or review coding submissions from a limited number of applicants), they often focus on candidates whose resume they think shows a lot of technical experience in coding, software engineering, or computer science. To strengthen your resume, add more of this content. Revisit each section of your resume and use these tips:
One resume mistake many people make early in their career is only describing what they did, not why it was important. This is important because the resume reader may assume your project was not very difficult or important. To demonstrate your skills, you need to describe your projects well.
Enhance the descriptions of your experience and projects in these two ways:
Consider this example before and after revision:
Before: Worked with Chicago sanitation data to create data visualization.
After: Transformed 4.6M sanitation requests with SQL and created visualization in D3.js to show mean response times by community area in Chicago.