Spiria’s Recipe for a Tasty IT Resume

After all, it is your first opportunity to make an impression, and it can highly influence your success at securing a job. That’s why you want it to look good and whet the appetite. In this time of pandemic, when many of you have lost jobs, were laid off, or thrust in circumstances you were not prepared for, the Spiria Talent Acquisition Team would like to help you to spice up your resume and cook it up to our hiring managers’ tastes.

Below, you will find our recipe for a well done, professional IT resume.

1.  Make it short and sweet. Ideally, your resume should be 1 to 2 pages, or one page for every 10 years of work experience. In this competitive world, we receive dozens of resumes every week. Make sure yours makes us notice how great you are in one glance.

2.  Are you bilingual? If so, state it right off the top. We have both French- and English-speaking customers and, quite often, they are looking for bilingual specialists.

3.  Location. Indicate your city of residence, and whether you are willing and able to work remotely. With the COVID-19 situation, more and more companies are having their employees work remotely.

4.  Tell us who you are. Right after your name and contact details, add one or two sentences summarizing who you are and what your superpower is. Indicate your top three technologies (for example “Senior back-end developer, specializing in Python, 9 years of experience”; “Intermediate full-stack dev, 5 years of experience with JavaScript, C#, .Net”)

5.  Personal information is sensitive. We don’t need to know your date of birth, marital status, number/age of kids, gender, religion, race, colour, or national origin; even your photo is TMI.

6.  Previous professional experience. For each employer, state the name of the company, its location, your role and dates of employment. Summarize each of your experiences with 3 or 4 bullet points.

7.  Technologies. Indicate only those technologies that you are experienced and comfortable in working with. Don’t include all those that were quickly covered in class. And you can omit the basic technologies that go without saying, for example HTML for a web developer. ;)

8.   Do you have customer relations experience? Bonus! Spiria is a custom software company where employees have the opportunity to communicate with clients. So please, please mention that asset of yours.

9. Explain gaps in your career path. For example, you graduated in 2010 but only got your first job in 2015? Don’t let us fill in the blanks. Explain whether you were working as a freelancer, launched your business, travelled around the world or worked in a grocery store (customer experience is an asset, remember?).

10.  Education. Do include relevant school achievements, participation in hackathons and other sprint-like events. But please, don’t include your university transcripts, just the outcome.

11.  Personal achievements. If you have achieved something special, or if you are involved in volunteer activities, let us know, OK? We are interested in your personality and values.

12.  “References available upon request.” Not necessary. It adds nothing to your resume, and detracts from all the greatness above. Don’t worry, before hiring you, we’ll ask for your references.

13.  PDF, not Word. Don’t send your resume as a Word Document. All your careful formatting will just get messed up when we open the file on our platform.

What happens next?  If we like your resume, we will send you an email to invite you for a phone interview. Therefore, after submitting your resume, please make sure to check your emails regularly, including your spam folder; as an unknown sender, we might end up there. To find out the following steps in our hiring process, stay tuned and follow Spiria. We will tell you more in our next article.

Good luck to you all. And hopefully we will meet in person soon! :)