When I was writing my first resume, the selection process for a face-to-face interview seemed like magic to me. The people making the decisions seemed like “black boxes” that determine whether a candidate is “interesting” or “uninteresting” – according to incomprehensible criteria.

The articles “How to write a CV without resume checker” were partly useful, and partly confusing and frightening: their authors claimed that my letter could end up in the trash if the structure was not appropriate or the responsible employee did not see the key words in it in the first 5 seconds of reading.

Years later, I am now involved in hiring frontend developers myself and review resumes with other teamleaders.

In this article, I want to tell you:

• What points we pay attention to before inviting a candidate for an interview, and how you can pitch your experience favorably.
• What, contrary to popular myths about the job search, on the contrary, does not influence the employer’s decision.
• What to do if your current experience is objectively insufficient for a dream position.

And most importantly – I want to explain the logic that guides us, so that the process no longer looks like magic.

Do not take what is written as a universal prescription or requirements. Rather, it’s friendly advice and an outsider’s perspective. You may not have a resume at all if you’re a top developer, a conference star, you have a cool profile on GitHub, a friend recommends you, and so on. This article is intended for newcomers and those new to the job search, more at https://magictexts.com/.

Structure of resume

A standard resume consists of the following blocks:

• Full name, contact information, desired position (optional age);
• work experience;
• education;
• additional information you want to provide.

To spoil the part about the full name and the desired position, you have to try hard. So we’ll go straight to the second block.

Work experience

Obviously, this is the most important section of the resume (the exception is specialists without experience, advice for them below). Based on this information, we assess whether the candidate is a good fit or not for our team. There are several ways to describe your experience, let’s consider each of them.

I want to note that a poorly prepared resume does not always mean a less suitable candidate, as well as the opposite: the author of a great resume may not pass the technical interview or not work with the team. But if you’re not even trying to tell your story-how will your potential colleagues notice you among the other candidates?

Problems in stating experience

Sometimes a person has enough years of experience, but when we read the resume, we still think it’s “not our candidate.” What could be wrong?

Frequent job changes

It seems like everyone knows by now that frequent job changes don’t make a job seeker look good. To me, a frequent job change is three or more places where you have worked for less than a year. This is not an unqualified reason for rejection, especially if the reasons were neutral. For example, you worked on a project and it ended. This can be stated on the resume right away, so that the potential lead doesn’t have to guess for himself.

Nevertheless, I suggest that you think about this the next time you change jobs: is your new place really better than the old one, is there any growth prospects and opportunities there, does it bring you closer to your global career goals? And do you have them?

Experience in irrelevant technology

There are times when a candidate has a lot of experience, but even years of well-described experience can be irrelevant to the position.

What if there is little experience?

Good developers are always in short supply. And interviewers are people too and also started from scratch once. That’s why they are often ready to consider candidates even if they don’t have enough experience, but still have a desire to grow. All you need to do is to back up this desire and mention it in your resume in a clear way.

Self-development

If you lack knowledge of related or more advanced technologies, start to learn them yourself. Take a video course, now there are a lot of them for all tastes (I like Pluralsight, but you can find free videos of excellent quality). Write about your desired development path and your efforts on your resume – for example, in the “Additional Information” section or in your cover letter.

By the way, if you’re going to look for a job because you’re not happy with outdated technology or lack of good team practices, I suggest taking a moment to think: have you tried to change that? If not, I recommend you give it a try. Suddenly it can be both an opportunity for growth and a way to get hands-on experience in a real work environment