4+ Tips for Software Development Applications

Resumes for software and tech positions are more than just a list of projects and coding languages. Recently we spoke with a long-time IBM employee about what he looks for when he’s reading resumes, and these are his tips.

1 Emphasize the entire Engineering Process in resumes and interviews

• Gather requirements from clients/stakeholders
• Design/architecture
• Development (including programming)
• Test/QA
• Maintenance and documentation

2 Go beyond a programming skill set

• Companies can pay for programmers in other countries for much cheaper than what they’re hiring for in the US, so additional skills need to be demonstrated
• What was the purpose of the project or system?
• What was your role?
• What results did you personally achieve? What results did the project achieve?
• What innovations did you bring to projects?
• Don’t start accomplishment statements with “used”
  • Start with big picture/purpose info then moving into technical
  • Ex. “Improved…performance and scalability by implementing…”
• C++ and Shell skills are almost a given if you have a computer science or electrical and computer engineering degree
• Bigger companies like to see leadership skills

3 When describing projects on a resume

• Specify where a project was done (course project, internship, et al.) and with whom
• Go beyond basic, common projects such as a Tic-Tac-Toe game
• Emphasize the quality of a project and experience by providing lots of detail. Don’t try to fit more projects onto your resume at the cost of details. In this way, quality is better than quantity.
• Title projects to convey more about the purpose than about the technical details
• Statements at the end of projects can summarize that “the system resulted in…”

4+ Other resume tips

• Results are more important than activities
• Engineers are detail-oriented, and so should be their resumes
• Passion needs to come through, mostly through the details and skills beyond programming
• They’re looking for people who want to contribute to the success of the company, not just looking to learn
• Remove basic coursework and feature only specialty courses