If you survey anyone that spends time screening resumes and ask them how long they spend reviewing each one, nearly every response will be seconds, not minutes. Avoid having your resume stand out for the wrong reasons. I will illustrate a few tips, what to avoid, and why. Trigger warning for those who unknowingly follow some of these blunders (and stand in defense of them).
Resume length
If you have a multi-page resume with less than 8 years of experience, look to shorten it to 1 page. Portraying your career across multiple pages demonstrates an inability to succinctly communicate what you have to offer. More often than not, multi-page resumes are far too verbose, and much of the content ends up repetitive.
Formatting and other problems unrelated to content
- Avoid constant bolding or italicizing of random terms throughout your resume.
- Avoid capitalizing words for no reason, like "Test Plan".
- Do capitalize things that make sense, like "Selenium WebDriver" or "Jira".
- Typos will show a true lack of attention to detail (probably the most important trait for a testing role) so inspect for those closely.
Bad content
Avoid describing experience with something like "Good experience with..." or "Good knowledge of...". There are so many other adjectives other than "good".
Get into the job history as soon as possible. A very lengthy list of "skills" bullet points (or humongous table!) will always get skipped over. On the other hand, a quick, eye catching 2-3 liner summary (that avoids sounding too generic) is something I personally like reading if it describes their story in a unique way.
Maybe this is a cultural thing, but it is not necessary to see what the candidate looks like. Avoid inserting a photograph on your resume.
And finally, if you don't know how to code, please don't lie about it.
I promise you that if you follow some of these tips, your resume will be in the top 5% of resumes that get in front of hiring managers. The rest of 'em are just tossed into the virtual trash bin.
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