Résumé Rejection Reasons – An Illustrated Guide – Part 2 – Résumé Sections
Part 2 – Résumé Sections
Let us take a quick and critical look at some of the common sections that a résumé is supposed to contain, in roughly the same order in which they are expected, starting with…
Name
Please use your complete name in your résumé header, properly capitalized and spelled the same way as your degrees and documents. I am sorry to have to even mention this, but I occasionally see candidates who misspell their own names.
Résumés with misspelled and incomplete names on a résumé do save the hiring managers some time by allowing them to make an early rejection decision, but we’d rather receive résumés that are good enough to spend some time on.
Some candidate pigeon-hole themselves by adding a byline with their names, mentioning the professional role that they identify with. If you are a recent graduate, realize that calling yourself a ‘Data Scientist’ might look attractive in 2021, but you might lock yourself out of other opportunities if the recruiter does not redirect your résumé for another relevant role, like ‘Software Engineer’, because other roles because you tagged yourself differently.
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| If you are really mononymous, there is no need for a comma. |
Contact Information
There was a time where there was no email. it was a dark time, when one had to submit a printed résumé for each job application, and the prospective employer had to respond by snail mail, or by calling a landline phone. Your complete street address was required in those days. You were probably not born then.
Times have changed, and the world is a better place. The only contact information you need to include in your résumé is your email, your cellphone number, and perhaps your city and country, but only if the situation calls for it.
Landlines are not really necessary unless you live in an area where cellphones don’t work, and adding multiple phone numbers or emails to your résumé could cause confusion. Your complete street address eats up precious pixels, not to mention the recruiter’s time, so put those pixels to a better use.
Give your LinkedIn profile a prominent place in your contact information. It probably has the same information as your résumé, but it may be updated after the résumé is submitted. It also lets the recruiters view your recommendations and mutual contacts, and all of that increases the probability of your application’s passage to the next stage.
| Space saved by not adding your address pictured above. |
Picture
Depending on the country that you’re applying in, including your picture might work against you, so error on the side of caution and avoid adding your picture, especially if it is a full body shot, taken at a wedding that you attended last week, or a scan of your paper photograph.
Technology recruiters are interested in your experience and skills, so your photograph is really not going to help you land that database modeling position, although a picture might help if you are applying to be a fashion model. In some countries’ laws, photographs can trigger biases and discrimination, so hiring managers may actually stay away from résumés containing photographs.
Avoid embedding your picture in your résumé, but if you really want the recruiters to take a look at your beautiful face for whatever reason, a good compromise is to place your LinkedIn profile in a prominent position. The recruiter could click through and see your profile picture if they want.
If you still insist that adding your picture to the résumé is the right move, go ahead, I can’t stop you, but at least ensure that it retains its aspect ratio and that it is a digital image and not a scanned picture of a printout, the latter smells of carelessness.
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| Be like Lena Forsén. |
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| Not like a squished Lena Forsén. |
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| Preferably like a professional Lena Forsén. |
(Too Much) Personal Information
Similar to the pointless practice of pasting a picture on your CV, including too much personal info that is unrelated to the job application is a waste of space and potentially hurts your chances of getting a job, not because the recruiter does not like your zip code, but because it depicts that you can’t distinguish between what is necessary and what is useless information.
This is not your Tinder profile, so does a recruiter really need to know your age, height, weight, religious or political affiliations, marital status, sexual orientation or your pet dog’s name?
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| The qualification and the email are the only useful facts in the above list. |
Personal Attributes
This section goes by many names, ‘Personal Attributes’, ‘Strengths’ and ‘Soft Skills’ are a few, and it is usually presented as a bulleted list of subjective opinions around your self-image that may or may not be accurate. Hiring managers will take this list with a bucket of salt, after all it is your self image, and you wouldn’t admit to being a little bit tardy, or that you have average problem-solving skills, on your résumé.
You know how awesome you are, but instead of enumerating all your positive traits in a bulleted list, allow the hirer the pleasure of discovering your potential and personality for themselves, during the interview, or after they hire you. Do work these adjectives into other sections’ content, such as Experience or Achievements, with supporting evidence.
A ‘Received the punctuality prize at OfficeA thrice’ in the Achievements section is more believable than a ‘Punctual’ in this list.
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| If you claim to be “detail oriented”, walk the talk and demonstrate it through proper grammar, punctuation and spelling. |
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| These attributes spark joy in my heart. |
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| Soft(ware)? skills. Very ‘Creative’. I think. |
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| Please tell us what did you do. Please tell us what did you do. |
Skills
Don’t SEO your CV by overloading it with all the skills that you possess, have read about, taken a Udemy tutorial on, or touched briefly as the name was displayed on your screen – unless you are a hundred years old and have lived on more than one planet.
Even though exceptional candidates do occasionally pop up, but if you are a regular freshly graduated candidate or one with an year or two of development experience, adding a long list of technologies that you [think you] are an expert in, could get you an interview, but the interview would not last long. The hiring manager would do some mental calculations and arrive at the conclusion that the probability of you having lived long enough to invest the time needed to develop an expertise in these fifty technologies, and that too while completing your four year degree and juggling five balls five hours per day, is extremely low.
Relax, and mention the top five or so technologies that you are really really good at, after making sure that those skills overlap the job description. You will ultimately be assessed on how well you know your languages, not how many languages you know.
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| This résumé came with a glossary, but it wasn’t alphabetized. |
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| This CV had PRESENTATION SKILL, and was partially alphabetized. |
Tools
Some candidates add a ‘Tools’ section to their résumé, where they list all the IDEs and other software that they have used, however briefly. The rule, or suggestion, of thumb is – if it takes a day or less to learn, don’t mention it.
Notepad++ used to be an excellent editor, but is it really worth a mention on your CV? If you list Microsoft Office as a tool, you may as well add Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and a dozen other browsers while you’re at it (and some candidates do indeed do that).
Imagine yourself telling ‘I know how to use [Tool Name]!’ to an interviewer – your résumé would benefit from having that tool listed only if your imaginary interviewer responds with a ‘Nice!’ or ‘Awesome, that’s what we use here as well!’ instead of an ‘OK…’.
Typing Speed
This warrants just quick mention for completeness’ sake. I have noticed a recent increase in résumés that mention typing speed. Maybe it is a Millennial thing – typing speed could be an exotic metric for the texting generation, but for a software development position, variables per minute, functions per hour, classes per day, bugs per feature or story-points per week would make slightly better metrics.
Don’t mention your typing speed, unless it is 200+ wpm, in DVORAK.
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| It’s a good thing we have a typing speed limit at work here. |
Education
The Education section is expected to be near the top in case of fresh graduates’ résumés, as they have no professional experience yet, but it is normally placed after the Experience section for candidates with a job history, so unless your education is more noteworthy than your experience, follow this convention.
Use Reverse Chronological Order
Recruiters are much more interested in the university that you graduated from than the kindergarten you attended, so listing your education in the latest first order should be a no-brainer, and yet many résumé authors still make this mistake. Use chronological order when you publish your autobiography, use reverse chronological order when you write your résumé.
If you have started applying for a job while still studying, mention the expected date of degree completion, so if you write ‘2016 – December 2020 (Expected Graduation)’ instead of ‘2016 – Current’ in your Education section, it enables the recruiter to decide if they want to wait till you graduate and keep a position open for you. A ‘Current’ does not tell them whether you are in a two year or a three year program, and when will you be available to start working.
Avoid Course Dumps
Most computer science degrees offer similar courses, but if you majored in a unique topic, or one relevant to the position you are applying for, feel free to briefly mention it in the appropriate section. In all other cases, please do not dump all the courses from your syllabus on your CV. It makes your CV boring. If you are a fresh graduate with a spark of brilliance and the potential to learn, it will show, and you’ll be hired even if you didn’t take the course that is the most relevant to the job.
An alternative is to mention each course along with the academic project that you are adding to your résumé, so ‘Online Applicant Tracking System using Node.js and Angular 3 (Web Programming Course)’ is a superior organization that links your projects to your courses.
If you mention the top three or five subjects from the twenty that you studied – ones that are actually relevant to the job that you are applying for, it shows that you paid attention to the job description and made the effort to tweak your résumé for the position, which earns you some more brownie points, as fresh candidates rarely do that.
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| Five more seconds wasted here. |
Your GPA Doesn’t Matter Much
Your GPA does not matter as much as you think it does. Some companies do have a lower limit on the GPA, but most seasoned recruiters realize that our education system is flawed and there is only a weak correlation between your capabilities and your GPA. If you have a good CGPA, do mention it on your CV, but don’t fret if it is low, and skip it altogether if your grades were below average. If you can demonstrate what you are made of, during the interview, your GPA will be disregarded, at least by me.
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| This candidate was rejected due to an 88.825% minimum limit. |
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| Skipping the grades would have landed this candidate an interview. |
For every degree, certificate and qualification, mention the full name of the institution and its location and not merely its abbreviation, to avoid confusion. For instance, there are dozens of BUs in the world, which one did you attend? Dates matter more for an entry-level position than one requiring a decade or two of experience. When appropriate, eliminate a few characters and keep your résumé clean by limiting the dates to the year only. Recruiters don’t care about whether your graduated in March or September, unless you are still studying, in which case, the hiring manager would be interested in when you’d be able to join.
Final Year Project
Fresh candidates usually mention their FYP in the education section, so if you do, make sure that you have an in-depth knowledge of the topics that your FYP focused on. A significant part of a fresh graduate’s interview is normally spent around their FYP as it is their most complex work to-date.
If your FYP was a group project, you can delight the hiring manager by explicitly mentioning your exact role in the group, as that will save them some time when they don’t have to ask the question during the interview.
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| Don’t call your ‘Final Year Project’ a ‘Final Year Project Project’. |
MOOC Addiction
MOOCs are the MORPGs of the cerebrally inclined. If you have completed more than a dozen MOOCs and intend to dazzle the CV reviewer with that list, try to make sure that you can complement the MOOC list with a project or three that demonstrate that you put your learning to actual use.
These days, those who can, do; those who can’t, do MOOCs. Recruiters are really not looking for people who can create a To-do list in fifteen languages and frameworks. A couple of interesting projects that you created from scratch without following a tutorial make your résumé shine more brightly than twenty introductory MOOCs.
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| This candidate had breadth but no depth. |
Experience
Experience is perhaps the most important section on your résumé, and like your education, should be listed in reverse chronological order. You may be tempted to name it ‘Employment History’ or something else, but you are creating a résumé, not a crossword puzzle, and the ATS may not like your interpretation of ‘Experience’, so avoid such creativity. Less is better.
For fresh graduates, ‘Internships‘ replace ‘Experience’, but the principle is the same. Each experience item should not merely contain the job title description that you were hired for, but also a brief description of what you were tasked with and what you accomplished in that position. If you made an impact on the profitability and the bottom-line of your employer, the hiring manager would like to hear that. If you worked at a small, relatively unknown company, a sentence or two about the nature of their business and a link to their website helps the recruiter as well, and anything that helps the recruiter make sense of your résumé helps you.
A résumé with an experience item that begins with ‘Successfully developed and deployed…’ wins against one that starts with ‘Worked on…’, or worse, ‘Had to work on developing…’. Action words and numbers that quantify your accomplishments are the way to go when writing your job experience. There are long lists of action words usable in résumés available online, so find one and use it.
If you ‘Improved IntSys for SomeDep by implementing the NOC-LUA-8L protocol’ at a past workplace, realize that the internal system for some department is something the recruiter will have absolutely no clue about. You should either simplify what you accomplished into something that a clueless recruiter, your grandma or your eight year old brother would understand, or not mention the technical details at all.
On the flip side, do use the names of the most important tools and technologies that you had to got to use during each employment period.
Versatile engineers get to fight on multiple fronts, so you may have designed databases, written back-end APIs and designed front-ends all by yourself in your present role. If that is the case, highlight the skills that are relevant to the job that you are applying for but mention the secondary roles that you filled, to customize your résumé for the position.
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| I find your lack of enthusiasm disturbing. |
Language Skills
Candidates normally mention English, and their mother tongue (Urdu in Pakistan) on their résumé as their language skills, but I personally think that it is a bad idea. Even if English is a secondary language for you, your education was most likely in English, so proficiency in English communication in all forms is an implicit requirement for most jobs.
Being a rock-star developer is sadly not good enough these days. If you aim to work for an international organization, the hiring manager needs to know that, once hired, you would be able to confidently represent his/her team in internal and external meetings where English is the official language.
If your English writing skills are lacking, get your résumé reviewed and edited by someone who knows English well, while you take up an English conversation course to improve your chances for the interview. If your résumé itself demonstrates your English skills through short, concise and clear sentences, you don’t need this section at all.
If you are a polyglot and can speak four international languages along with a couple of dead ones, definitely mention the fact in your résumé. Please do not add C++ or Java – that joke got old in the last century.
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| The words speak for themselves. |
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| Say no more… |
Personal Statement
Hiring managers expect an engaging, creative, relevant, coherent and unique personal statement, objective, or whatever they are calling it these days, if you can’t write one, don’t copy someone else’s life-goals as your own, or fill it up with clichés.
Even if ‘Working at a challenging position in a dynamic organization that allows personal growth’ is all you’ve ever dreamed of, please don’t be another brick in the wall by adding similar sentences to your résumé. Consider replacing the ‘Personal Statement’ with a ‘Career Summary’ – the former is more about what you want, while the latter is about what you have to offer.
Either way, definitely do not copy/paste a personal statement from some Google search results. We will know.
Avoid using ‘I’ – so instead of using ‘I am a front-end developer for the last two years. I have expertise in Angular.js and Node.js’, use bullet-point style text along the lines of ‘Front-end Developer with two years of experience. Expert in Angular.js and Node.js’.
Cheesy quotes in your personal statement are better avoided, but if you do quote Nietzsche, be prepared to discuss his books during the interview. Your personal statement would also be used to grade your English skills, so ensure that it as well-crafted as an international brand’s slogan.
Here’s an assortment of real-résumé snippets that demonstrate how not to write your personal statement. See if you can spot the problems in the personal statements below, and ensure that yours is clean of similar mistakes.
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| Exhibit A. |
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| Exhibit B. |
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| Exhibit C. |
Social Media Profiles
Opinion varies on whether including your social media profiles in your CV is the right thing to do or not, and is usually based upon the opiner’s generation. Gen Xers may think that social media profile links in a CV are unprofessional, Xennials like me may tolerate them, and Millennials and Gen Zers may welcome or even expect social media profile links. There’s no one-size-fits-all, so use your common sense (the one you used to buy that magic juice) to decide whether or not your social media links belong on your CV.
I personally like to see Facebook and Twitter profile links in résumés, as they give me a valuable, uncensored and honest glimpse into the candidate’s personality (and their communication skills), and their social media accounts contain a lot more information than their carefully crafted single-page CV. As a general rule, do not include any URL for your social media presence if you think that your profile, if projected on a huge screen at your future workplace, might cause you embarrassment.
That being said, here is my recommended set of guidelines to help you decide.
Do include your Facebook profile link on your résumé if your posts highlight your academic or professional achievements, your interesting hobbies and your original opinion on life, the universe and everything. Do not link to your Facebook profile if all you do is share memes, or if your posts supporting your favorite sports team tend to bend towards expletives. Make sure that your Facebook profile is public if you do share your URL, the recruiter is certainly not going to send you a friend request.
Add a link to your Twitter profile if you have been retweeting industry-specific accounts and/or your tweets contain original thought, we like people with focus, direction and creativity. Do not link to your Twitter account if your tweets are retweets or political commentary only, or if your account is protected.
If your Instagram account has original pictures taken by you, it might help ascertain that you are an artistically gifted individual, so you can consider adding it to your résumé. If it is full of memes, it does not belong on your résumé.
YouTube
If you are an online content publisher and have a YouTube account to show for it, by all means, link to it, especially if your content is relevant to the job that you are applying for.
Quora
Definitely share your Quora account link if you regularly answer questions relevant to your industry, or even if you are an authority on a unique topic or hobby and your Quora account highlights this fact. Do not link to your Quora account if you have no activity there.
Github
While not a ‘social’ platform, your Github account is the first link that a hiring manager would click if you are applying for a development position. It would add value to your CV if you have contributed to open-source projects, have been a consistent pusher on your own projects or even if you report bugs in the open-source projects you use, as this means that you want to make the world a better place.
If you have written original, clean and useful code and not merely forked existing projects, mention the fact in your résumé when linking to your Github.
Do not link to your Github if it is empty (that does happen) or if you created your account last month and quickly uploaded your university assignments there. It is disappointing to visit such an account.
Behance and Dribbble
Include your design portfolio URLs if design skills are fully or semi-relevant for the job you are applying for. If you are applying for a hard-core engineering position and the technical experience on your résumé is small in comparison with your website design work, it might suggest that you are a designer at heart and are applying for an engineering job because you have a degree. You might still get an interview, but do reflect on what you want to do with your life – it is probably not software engineering. On the other hand, including your design portfolio could be a positive if you are applying for a front-end engineer or a ‘Full Stack’ opening.
Code Pen and friends
Codepen is intended to share and test quick code snippets, so you should use Github to showcase your code instead.
Stack Overflow
As with Github, share your StackOverflow account if you have a good reputation there through answering questions, or even if you ask for solutions to complicated problems that you were stuck with in the past.
The questions you ask say a lot about you. Do not share your StackOverflow account if you were running out of time on an assignment and asked about how to balance a red-black tree during your studies – or such basic questions for which a Google search would have sufficed.
Upwork and Fiverr
Freelancing can be a double-edged sword when applying for a job. On one hand, if you have an impressive set of client referrals, it shows that you are an achiever. On the other hand, if you are too deeply involved in freelance projects, there is a high probability that you will continue to do so after you get a ‘regular’ job, and hiring managers have to consider the possibility that they won’t be receiving 100% of your focus.
In the past two decades of my career, there have been a couple of times when the person I hired was more interested in his freelance projects than his day-job duties, and his performance suffered due to this attention deficit.
In the end, the choice of whether to mention your freelance work and portfolio URL or not is yours, and there is no one-size-fits-all recommendation.
Medium
Definitely mention your Medium account if you have written more than one article there. Do not mention it if you go there to read and clap only.
Blog
Whether your blog contains your personal musings or your commentary on technology, if the content is not offensive, showcases your communication skills or highlights your creativity and connection with your profession, sharing a link on your résumé would obviously be the right move.
Reddit, Gist, Goodreads and Niche Platforms
The gist of the pattern is, any social network that is an evidence of you being a creative, intelligent, talented and interesting human being (that’s the type of a person that most hirers are searching for) should be included on your résumé. The person reviewing your résumé may not have the time to scan all your social media presence, but if they do, it will help increase your chances of at least landing an interview.
Achievements (and the Prime Minister Laptop)
Some context for the non-Pakistanis – once upon a time, in Old Pakistan, an Oprah-inspired Minister thought it would be a good idea to ‘promote’ the IT industry by distributing hundreds of thousands of free laptops to his future potential voters, because he could – so everybody got a free laptop. The eligibility criteria was to score marks above 60%-70% in school, which is an ‘achievement’ that would probably be tagged as ‘disappointment’ in our Asian tiger moms’ rule books.
If you are one of those students, please realize that a Prime Minister Laptop was not exactly an ‘accomplishment’ per se, it was just an event that you happened to be a part of, along with hundreds of thousands of others. Don’t mention that laptop on your CV, unless you created something worth mentioning using that laptop. Even then, share that worth-mentioning creation of yours, and not the fact that it was created on the Prime Minister Laptop.
I realize that the Millennials grew up around participation certificates where everyone is a winner, but the real world is still ruled by the Gen Xers, so anything that can elicit a ‘So what?’ from your brutally honest friends or your friendly recruiter should be excluded from your CV as a general rule, especially achievements that begin with ‘Participated in…’ if it isn’t followed by an ‘… and won…’.
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| I’d take a ‘Bought my first laptop from money I earned myself’ over these achievements anytime. |
Achievements (and the Tic Tac Toe Résumé)
Maybe Tic Tac Toe was the first game that you programmed, and experienced that Eureka moment. I totally get that, and yearn to relive the excitement of getting my first few programs to run correctly. Unfortunately, you’ve had four years of education since you wrote that Tic Tac Toe (you did write it in your first semester, right?), so your CV should reflect that. At best, a Tic Tac Toe program could be a kata when you are learning a new language, but all it does on a résumé is to eat up valuable space. If you have not created a moderately complex program to replace your Tic Tac Toe entry with, stop your job search immediately and spend a week to create a few.
Any simple project doable in a few hours and already completed by thousands of developers does not belong in a CV – unless the solution is original and solves an interesting problem using a novel approach – a Tic Tac Toe game that can’t be beaten, for instance.
I call such CVs Tic Tac Toe Resumés, because every other day, I get to see one. They receive a 0 score and are crossed off the list of candidates. Don’t make your CV be a part of that lot. To-do List Résumés are closely related and are left for the reader as a thought exercise.
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| OK | You | Win |
Hobbies
If you believe that your hobbies make you stand out and project you as an interesting person, feel free to ignore the advice out there and include your hobbies on your CV, especially if you have mastered one or more of your hobbies and are a high-ranked local amateur, or something to that effect. If the interviewer runs out of questions during the interview, they can use your hobbies as a conversation piece to assess how deep does your passion go for your hobbies.
On the other hand, if your hobbies are stereotypical, for example traveling, reading, “watching seasons” or music, they do not add much value to your CV and can actually tag you as an average person, instead of the awesome individual that you are.
Do not include hobbies just because they look cool but aren’t actually yours. If you say you swim, and live in a city that has sub-zero temperatures most of the year, with no heated swimming pools, you’ll be asked where you manage to swim. If you write that you play the guitar, but can’t name the notes in an A minor chord, or the open string notes in the standard tuning during the interview, chances are that this will be the cause of your rejection, even if your technical skills are great.
Before all else, though, when you include your hobbies on your résumé, try to do no harm.
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| Fricket, or Crickbee? I’d rather play a Mind Game. |
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| This candidate writes the best code. |
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| This candidate flies airplanes, raps, makes basketballs and wears wireless headphones. |
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| OK, but what about Netflix? |
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| This candidate couldn’t differentiate between a job website and Tinder. |
Extra-curricular Activities
As with Hobbies and Achievements, only share your extra-curricular activities if they set you apart from other applicants. If you participated in a dozen hackathons and speed programming competitions, so did thousands of other candidates. Did you win any? List those events. Your being a member of twenty societies does not impress anyone, unless you achieved a noteworthy accomplishment in a few of them.
If you volunteer for charities, list your achievements rather than just stating the fact. This section should exist only if it adds substance to your résumé and tells the reviewer why you’re a better choice than your competition.
| The space you save by not including an unimpressive ‘Extra-curricular Activities’ section imagined above. |
Publications
If you are a fresh graduate who managed to be involved in research during your academic years, or later, and your work was published, definitely list your publications, but make sure that you follow a consistent and standard citation style, whether APA or MLA, as a carelessly put together publication list would do more harm than good. If you had a co-author who did all the work, be prepared to answer questions around your publications if you are called for an interview.
Our focus is on résumés for fresh candidates seeking a job, but if your résumé is meant to be submitted to a research team or academia, a Publications section becomes almost mandatory.
References
“References will be/can be furnished/furbished upon request/demand” – of course they will, if that’s a requirement before you get the job, the recruiter will ask you for references, and you will provide them if you want to get that job. The section, therefore, is mostly redundant, and you can save some space by not including it in your résumé.