This is a continuation of sorts of a previous post in where I reviewed six years of resume changes from 2007 to 2013. I enjoyed writing that post and I think it helped other people refine their own resumes. I promised that in the future that I would discuss some of the crazier, more experimental resumes that I have made in the past. This is unfortunately not that post. However, I do have something different. A twist so to speak.

Aug 2013 - A Twist: Technical Resume

I went to App Academy from May 2013 to Aug 2013 to learn Ruby, Rails and JavaScript. It was a mixed experience (you can read about some of my experiences in the relevant post). At the end, it was time to get the knowledge that I had earned and get a job! Not something that I haven’t already done before - I have more job hunting experience than most - but with a new twist: Get an dev job without the passable dev work experience. Thus, a new resume to be built from scratch!

Work Experience

Dev work experience! To be frank, I did not have any. Zip, nada, zilch. So yeah.

However, I do have my two final projects from App Academy, built with the proper technologies and looking very nice. I also had the advantage of an iOS app in the App Store, having built it on my own before I started at App Academy.

With that in mind, I decided that it made less sense to talk about what I did than to emphasize what I felt was special about these three projects. So this “work experience” section became a misnomer. What this section did turned into was a showcase of the work and its features, to market the product to the reader. The way I figured, marketing the product even if nobody would eventually have any notion to buy it would in turn market myself as the person who created it. I chose three features for each of the two final projects (being the most recent ones) and then two for the slightly less recent iOS project.

Education

The key dilemma here is whether or not I should emphasize that time spent at App Academy. I received varying advice on this approach. Some people said that it makes sense to do so because it helps “fill in the gaps” and doing something is better than nothing. This would help alleviate concerns by recruiters that for several months after CareDox I was doing nothing much more than laying in bed with my hands in the cookie jar and watching NetFlix.

For this version 1 that you see above, you can see that I chose to put my experience there front and center. This turned out to be a poor choice as it became quickly clear that recruiters saw this experience as a red flag for a poor developer.

Layout

I worked from my previous resume (see the last resume in the 6 years of resume changes post) to generate this layout. It turned out to be as easy as a simple copy and paste with some text changes.

What came out felt really “white-collar” so to speak. It felt like something that people in the tech world would not really enjoy looking at. The kind of guy who would make a resume like this would show up in in the first interview in a starched collar suit and jacket. It felt really too formal. The realization of such dissatisfaction did not really hit me until much later in the recruiting process. For now, I was just happy that I was able to get the first iteration up and out very quickly. Gotta apply apply apply!

Outcome

While I did get a few different emails back from people, it became quickly clear that this resume turned people off. It felt pretentious, messy and crowded. The longer that I have been doing this resume thing, the more I realize that it is not about how long you stay blathering, but what you are blathering about. (Of course, also never forget that it is all blather all the same.) The goal then was to slim down the mental burden of perusing the content without diluting it. Ergo, I sat down and created version 2 below.

Aug 2013 - Version 2

While version 1 was okay, it became clear that I was not getting anywhere in the recruiting process. It was time to refocus. One of the great things about resume building is that it is more than just about creating a document for others. It is about formulating your entire recruiting strategy. Where you place items on your resume leads to what you want to talk about in your interviews. In this case, it was clear that App Academy had to get buried. In its place, my final projects.

Work Experience

The only relevant change made here (other than the positioning) was to change the name of the latest project from its original nonsensical name Bluetail to Rentform. This is more applicable to what it actually does - preventing the inevitably confused recruiter from having to waste brain cycles hunting down and figuring out what this thing actually did. Turned out to be a pretty good choice because I got more questions about that in my interviews, meaning that people were reading/understanding it.

Layout

Having to start a new resume from scratch presents a unique opportunity to rethink not just what you have to offer to companies but also the way in which you wish to present this information. As someone who has had to review dozens of resumes, it is sad and cynical but true that you have literally just seconds to catch people’s eyes.

The old layout had taken me a long way (I first originated it in 2010!) but I wanted to try something else. Less color blocks and walls of text. More white space and bigger fonts. There is the risk of being able to say less - but then again it just gives me the opportunity to make the most of it. I removed pretty much all of the formal fonts and kept it simple - just a few shades of red and boldcase at the headers to categorize the reader’s eye.

Education

In the version 2 I would relegate the App Academy experience to the top right, deeper in the parse tier. The only reason that I did not choose to take it completely out of my resume was that I felt that it could still mean for something if it were presented in context with my final projects. I wanted the tangible work that I had done to be the main attraction.

Outcome

I got two offers for a dev intern position with the goal of eventually converting into a full time. This interview got both callbacks and interviews for me. People enjoyed talking to me about the final projects that I created - where before they hardly gave it a second thought. I credit this newer, cleaner format for this.

In the end, I never took a developer job - eventually picking to join the marketing team for a lingerie startup. However, the experience of creating a technical resume and recruiting for a technical job was an invaluable one.