Tech Resume Checklist

This checklist serves as concrete (but not complete) criteria that a resume for the tech industry should fulfill. It was originally designed for student organizations hoping to host resume critiques: have your reviewees check off all these items before coming to the critique so more time can be devoted to meaningful feedback.

A lot of useful tips were excluded due to their subjectivitiy. This way, there should be no discussion on whether or not your resume should tick a box. More detailed tips and explanations for all the checklist items can be found in this “Resume Tips” document, which was created and refined over time by experienced UWaterloo students.

Please feel free to open an issue to discuss any of these points or a PR to add/change/remove points!

Content Checklist:

• Contains the key sections/information: Experience, Relevant Projects, Education, and Contact information
  • A Skills section is optional depending on the role. General roles likely don't need one, specific roles (e.g. React Developer) probably do.
• No soft skills in the Skills section. They say nothing: anyone can claim to be good at “communication” or “critical thinking”. You should demonstrate these skills through your bullet points in your experience section.
• No Summary of Qualifications. Your whole resume should be the summary!
• Experience includes your title, company, dates worked, and (optionally) location
• For contact information, include your email and (optionally) links to your personal website, GitHub account, and LinkedIn
  • Unless the role asks for it, you don't need to include your physical address
• Resume is catered to the role. This can be as simple as re-ordering/selecting relevant skills and projects.
• Bullet points describe impact not just responsibilities (i.e. what was the result of your work, not just what your work was). The reader should also understand why your work was important to the company/project.
  • Basic template: <quantified impact> [by/through/via] <what you did/how you did it>, <why it matters to org>
    • Of course, this structure won’t work for all points
  • Quantified impact could be: reduced time needed to y from x to z, deployed feature with x% higher user satisfaction (you can get this info via a/b tests), improved latency/throughput by x%, acquired x new users, etc.
    • What you did (hopefully) had some impact, otherwise you wouldn’t have been paid to do it.

Format Checklist:

• Resume is one page max.
• For a one column resume, each bullet should be 2 lines max (3 lines max for a two column resume)
• No text has font size smaller than 10.
• Resume should be accessible and clear, even when printed in greyscale (no dark backgrounds, light text on light backgrounds, complex color patterns, etc).
• All links you have are clickable and not just plaintext .
• Bolded technologies/tools in your bullet points. This makes it easier for recruiters to see that you've actually used the tools/tech you claim to in your Skills section.
• Ensure capitalization is consistent throughout your resume, especially for the names of tools/technologies.
• All dates and date ranges use a consistent format (e.g. mmm yyyy - mmm yyyy as in May 2020 - Aug 2020).
• No acronyms unless they are listed in the job description (or are very common)
• Whitespace is balanced. If one section (e.g. skills, awards) is a bullet point list on the left side, consider making it a flat comma separated list or use two columns for just that section for visual balance.

Optional Checklist (don't have to check all of these off):

• Bold achievements/recognition/metrics in your experience/projects. This is optional because you may have too much bold when combined with bolded tech/tools, so be wary of that.
• If you have relevant experience/projects, put that above your education (but this depends on the role!).
• Remove or greatly reduce your Relevant Courses section.
  • You probably don’t want to include mandatory courses for your major, since your major implies you learned those things.
  • Specialized electives may be relevant, but it’s always better to demonstrate those skills via a project.
• Use between 1-4 bullet points per experience/project
  • Exception: when you only have one or two relevant experiences/projects, you MIGHT want to use more bullets to emphasize those.

Special thanks to Tech+ Fall 2020 Resume Critiquers and Data Science Club execs for providing feedback on this initial version!