Resume feedback and questions for a pivot into junior back-end roles?
Hi everyone, I'm looking to optimize my resume (link here) and would love some feedback on it. I also have two specific questions about it.
- Should I even include my personal projects in my resume? Neither have any active users, so all they do is show that I can build something, not necessarily something of value. I've seen advice online about not including personal projects unless they have some sort of tangible value and/or active user-base, but I wanted to hear this community's thoughts about this.
- Is my resume too short? Can a resume even be too short? This partially ties into my first question because without those two projects, the resume would only fill up half of the page. My resume used to have a lot more points describing what I did during my professional experience, but most of it was fluff, so I decided to cut them out. I feel like I am stuck between a rock and a hard place here because if I want to fill up my page with more information, it feels like I would need to add fluff-like material. However, I don't want the few seconds a recruiter will spend looking at my resume to be spent looking at the unimportant fluff material I used to fill up the page, so I added the projects as a way to hopefully avoid the whole issue. I'm wondering if this is even something I should worry about.
Of course, if there's another issue with my resume that I didn't mention in these two questions, please feel free to point it out, even if it's a nitpick. Also, if it helps, for context, I am currently looking to pivot from data engineering to backend development, so I am aiming for more junior level roles.
Thanks in advance!
Discussion
(2 comments)- 3a year agoRobinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
Overall your resume looks good! The formatting and organization are great, and it's not too long.
My main piece of feedback is to stretch out your Meta section. I'm going to be real: So many recruiters are just only going to care about the FAANG-related part of your resume. You have been there for 9 months - I feel like that's probably enough time to have more than 3 bullet points?
Having the technical skills section at the bottom feels weird as well. It's already covered in the experience/projects section. It should either be at the top of the resume or removed entirely IMHO.
In case you haven't seen it yet, here's our masterclass on resume optimization as well.
- 6a year agoRobinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
Should I even include my personal projects in my resume?
It's true that most projects are effectively useless on a resume, but I do think it's better than nothing. Given that you're earlier in career, you probably need these to pad out your resume, and it is a bit strange to not have a projects section at all.
Now your goal should be to continue fine-tuning your projects and getting them users, so it becomes obvious that your projects have value on your resume 😊
Is my resume too short? Can a resume even be too short?
It's really awkward when a resume is shorter than 1 full page. I would try to add more material, particularly with the Meta section as mentioned before, falling back to "fluff" if you can't come up with anything. You can solve the recruiter going through fluff problem by front-loading the content on your resume: Best stuff first, worst stuff last. This is generally how you want to communicate in general anyways: Stack the important things at the top.
Worst case, you can increase the font-size by 1 to 2 points to take up more space 😆
