As a Director of Angular Development at a consulting company, I review a lot of resumes. And because a lot of my clients are desperately hiring and need my expertise, I review a lot MORE resumes. I see a lot of things that I consider "red flags" on resumes of engineers with "6+ years of experience" that make me think they really don't know what they're doing. So here are 5 things that will make me chuck a resume into the reject pile almost immediately.
1. "Experienced in using Text editors like Espresso, eclipse, Text Wrangler, Sublime Text, Atom, NetBeans, XAMPP, Notepad and Notepad++."
Hun, you're a software dev. I really hope you know how to use an editor. I also hope you're very opinionated on the editor you prefer; it tells me a lot about your experience and ability to produce code if you're picky about your tooling. Unless you prefer Dreamweaver, in which case I might only trust you to update my myspace page.
2. Acronym Abuse
There are reasonable, well-used acronyms that are in a developers vocabulary, like CSS, and then there are weird things that NO one says, like "Responsive Web Design (RWD)". If you have a bunch of acronyms that aren't ever used or are made up, I'm going to bin a resume for that.
3. "Implemented a Service to Make API calls" aka "I implemented the thing the way it was supposed to be implemented"
In Angularland, we love our Service classes. And I'm going to guess with no actual statistical data that making API calls is the most predominant use-case for people writing Services. Don't tell me in a bullet point "I used x thing the way it was intended to be used", because that's the bare minimum. Also, if you're going to insist on a bullet point like that, make sure it's technically accurate.
"Implemented HTTP requests using RxJS Observable library to handle multiple values over time."
Phrases like this make me 🧐
Tell me instead how you refactored a Service to handle a new feature request or improved performance.
And a shoutout to one of my favorite resume rejection "I did the thing" bullet points ...
"Used Es6 arrow functions to map the Json data"
4. Buzzword lumping - "Created Typescript reusable components and services to consume REST API's using Component-based architecture provided by Angular 2."
There are so many things wrong with this bullet point I don't even want to finish reading this resume, let alone interview this candidate. TypeScript doesn't have components, components are typically a construct of frameworks like Angular or React. If you're going to apply for a role regarding a Framework know whats a feature of the framework, and what's a feature of a language, and make sure I know you know from your resume. Also, I reaaaaally hope you're always thinking about whether a component should be reusable or not, it's a pretty core part of what front-end engineers do now, so this isn't the flash of brilliance you may think it is.
5. Bad Grammar
I'm already assuming half the resumes that hit my inbox are copy-paste grabs written by catfishers, so don't end up in the reject pile by making grammar mistakes. If you're going to make a bulleted list of what you did on a project, make sure the tenses match.
Bad:
- Worked with NPM commands and using Package.json for managing dependencies and dev-dependencies of Node.js applications.
- Extensively involved in upgrading the existing system from Angular 7 to Angular 8.
- Responsible to work with 3-tiers UI, Business Layer and Data Access Layer
Good:
- Worked with NPM commands and using Package.json for managing dependencies and dev-dependencies of Node.js applications.
- Was extensively involved in upgrading the existing system from Angular 7 to Angular 8.
- Was responsible for working with 3-tiers UI, Business Layer and Data Access Layer
**
I'd like to make a note that as a manager, I'm currently heavily leaning towards preferring to hire excited junior devs looking for their first shot, vs. a "mid-level" engineer that has likely bounced from company to company without ever having written actually quality code, or invested in growing their own skillsets. Tell me about your projects, how they provided value to an end user, and how you used tech to help deliver that value. Or if you're playing buzzword bingo to get past a first line of recruiters, slip me an easter egg in there to let me know like "proficient in vanillaJS" or "implemented comcastifyjs". ;)
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