Making a resume for foreign companies

Disclaimer

The text does not claim to be the ultimate truth, described below is based on personal experience and recommendations of people with more than twenty years of experience in IT in the United States and Canada.

Resume analysis by recruiter

Many people believe that if they spent on a resume a week, then it is ready. In practice, a resume is something that needs to be carefully updated and edited as your experience improves. The tips below help speed up the preparation process for those who do not know where to start.

You have 3-5 minutes to get your resume interested. This is how much time will be spent on it at the beginning, at best. Often resumes can drop out after 10 seconds. Nobody knows you, you are a piece of paper with text, and this is the only thing that can distinguish you from others. Imagine that you want to buy a new TV, you are unlikely to be interested in long manuals or 5 page descriptions. Choosing from tens and hundreds of analogues, you need to make a preliminary screening of 5-10 seconds for certain parameters. The remaining 5-10 devices, you allocate a little more time, and then still hesitate choose between two. As it happens, the selection of candidates.

Summary

Sections

The only important sections in the resume are:

• Cap
• Skills
• experience
• Education

It is important to note that work experience and skills are essential for any recruiter. If there is no experience, then education will have the same weight as work experience.
')

Cap

What should be present in the header:

1. Contact details: telephone, email and address.
2. Name and surname: write the English version, for example Alex Petuhov. Do not use transliteration from passports, for example, Aleksandr Petuhov. If you are called in for an interview in person, then you can give your name from the international passport and say, “If you are paid for the journey).
3. Briefly about yourself: you need to specify who you are and what you can. Here is an example from my resume: team building and project management. You can still add one paragraph describing directly what you were able to achieve during your career, but in general terms.

What not to add:

• Hobbies and passions
• Family status
• A photograph
• Various non-work related information: driving license, etc.

The presence of these items only distracts from the essence and can cause a negative against the background of personal preferences of the person who will look at your resume.

Skills

It is necessary to understand that 99% of recruiters are not technical people, and they operate with keywords when searching for one candidate or another. In essence, what is written in this paragraph with what is written in the vacancy requirements is simply compared. There are more glaring cases when resumes are entered into the database, where they are automatically decomposed into components. As a result, the comparison of resumes and vacancies occurs automatically and only those who are most suitable, and in other words, who have the same words in the resume with the words in the vacancy, will be considered.

Therefore, this section is important, and should be fairly simple. Sort of:

• Web: cloud computing - from Amazon AWS to Windows Azure to Rackspace, Flash, HTML / CSS, XML \ XSL, PHP, ASP.NET MVC, SOAP and REST.
• Desktop: C ++, C #, Java, WPF, MFC, ATL, OpenGL, DirectX, SQL Server, MySQL, NoSQL - Mongo DB, WinAPI, Sockets.

Do not be surprised that the horses and people are partly together, as well as primitive things on the list. This is important for recruiters. since they are not technical people and for them the difference between SQL and CSS is only in writing.

experience

This is the most important section. This is not a place for copy-paste, only each line thoughtfully written. At a potential interview, questions will be based on what is written, so be prepared to interpret each line from your resume.

For each position, specify:

• Company name
• Work period (start-month and end-month and year are sufficient)
• The geographical position of the company: if you have experience in a branch of a foreign company, specify where the headquarters is located.
• Responsibilities: no need to completely copy from the job description, 4-5 lines are enough
• Achievements: a very important point, many people forget about him and in the end it is not clear what exactly the person did while in office.

Experience should occupy at least 50% of the entire resume, ideally 75%.

Education

If your university is unknown outside the country, do not allocate a lot of space. One is enough - two lines that would describe what kind of education and area you have. Often people enter their academic degrees right in the cap, for example: Alex Petuhov, MBA. If the university is not very well-known, then it is better not to place much emphasis on education in the cap.

General tips

• See how others are making their resume, the benefit of LinkedIn now allows you to spend hours looking at who writes about themselves.
• Never copy pieces, it can easily float and cause a negative reaction instantly.
• Use terminology relevant for today (seasoned, top-notch, bleeding edge, etc.), but not a lot. Too pathetic description as a rule will also cause a negative reaction.
• If you participated in the project partially, do not hesitate to specify it in the summary, as well as the technologies that you even encountered lightly. Often this is abused by programmers from India, their resume looks like a list of all the technologies that existed over the past 10 years.
• Never make a resume more than 3 sheets, better 2.
• The visual design should be without artistic design, unless you are applying for a designer.
• Never make spelling mistakes - always check every word.
• With a weak experience, it is better to go to companies that are far from megalopolises. There is a high probability that they have 5 resumes for the vacancy. Using Canada as an example, this could be Nova Scotia.