“Your resume is your first impression in front of recruiters. You don’t want to give a vague idea of yourself just because you were too lazy to put enough effort into your resume.”
I take a lot of interviews and go through a ton of resumes on a monthly basis. From my experience, I noticed that most candidates don’t know how to write a proper resume.
When I was looking to switch my career to Devops, I did detailed research about writing strong resumes, which paid off well. I ended up with five great offers from world-class companies.
I am going to share the same knowledge with everyone so they can also get some benefit out of it.
Here are the things you should consider to make your resume stand out from the pile and impress recruiters.
- Keep your resume short. It should not be longer than two pages. Compress all your experience and knowledge and lay it out beautifully.
- Tailor your resume for the job role you are applying for. If you are applying for a senior/managerial level role, mention some experience with managing teams. Mention some experience with mentoring people.
- Highlight the skills you really have and the tools you really know. Don’t unload the list of skills/tools around your particular field. (I see devops candidates put all the cloud and tons of devops tools, most of them they never looked at.)
- Most recruiters skim through resumes for 15-20 sec, and that’s all you got to impress them. Use clear headings, short paragraphs, and bullet points.
- If you have mentioned some skill, provide specific examples where you have used it. You don’t need to write all the skills/tools you hear about– Mention the ones you know.
- Do not copy-paste lines from some resume you found on LinkedIn. (I see it all the time where people have pasted lines with the tools they have no idea about, and they couldn’t answer when asked about that). If you only have a basic idea about some tool/skill, mention it with “Have a basic understanding about this tool/skill”
- Mention links to your GitHub page if you have done something interesting, mention your LinkedIn. If you have a blog, youtube channel, add it to your resume. These will give you added credit. If you have some hobbies(honest ones), mention them as well. You might get some bonus points, you never know.
- Mention the certifications you have related to your field. It acts as a validation of your having an understanding of that skill.
- Format your resume to look attractive, and use some creativity. You can use free tools like Canva (website or app), choose a premade template, and edit with your information.
Choose some beautiful yet professional fonts and use limited color. - Go through your resume to ensure there are no spelling/grammatical mistakes. I used Grammarly to write my resume, it helped me write a clean and professional resume.
- For your resume to have better reach(Recruiters pull the resumes from Naukri and other job portals using AI-based tools which use the keywords) mention your skills separately and talk more about them under experience.
- Don’t hesitate to show yourself in your resume. Put a professional photo of yours.
Note: For the people who want to switch to devops but do not have real working experience, don’t worry. You can take references from other resumes with similar roles and try to write in your own way using the skills/tools you have studied.
Learn and practice those tools/skills deeply so you can answer complex questions to convince the recruiters that you have real working experience. It might sound difficult but it is totally doable.
Talk to people already working in the devops field. Ask them about their day-to-day activities, and responsibilities.
What kind of work do they do?
How do they deploy infrastructure, what tools do they use, and for which use case, and branching strategies they use for testing and production?
Use the information you gather in your resume. Ask your friends in the same field to look at your resume and suggest changes.
