How to create a resume for foreign it-companies
Is it time to make a resume for moving to another country?
Then come in, sit down, pour coffee. I will tell you how to do it.
First of all, the standards, which I will discuss, are relevant for the United States and Canada, but such a summary is also suitable for other countries outside the CIS. Each country may have its own particularities for preparing a resume, for example, in Germany.
')
Generally, if you are a star and top companies are waiting for you, then you can write a resume on your knee purely for formality.
Conventionally - the first line about what worked in Google. The second is what N startups did. The third is about studying at the university. This summary ends.
But, if you do not have this situation, then the resume should meet the expectations of Western recruiters.
There are quite a few opinions about what these expectations are, I will share my experience.
I am not a recruiter and not HR, so my opinion may differ from the opinions of some people from this profession.
A resume is an occasion to start a conversation with a potential employer. Good companies get an incredible number of resumes, if you do not have a recommendation from an employee of this company, then a resume may simply not reach the decision-makers.
In addition to the internal content, you need to make the appropriate design, the LinkedIn autogenerator does not fit here.
The first thing you need to do is throw out a photo, gender, age, marital status, hobby and any other personal information that is not relevant to work. If this is not done, then your resume is likely to be immediately sent to the basket to avoid possible accusations of discrimination.
In the resume must be specified contacts - e-mail and telephone. It is advisable to have a local telephone number of the country where the resume is sent. A good option would be to have voice mail on it, because It is common practice to leave voice messages in many countries. If there is no local number, you can omit the phone number.
Click on the link to the online version of the resume, or to the LinkedIn profile, or to the current version of the summary on Google documents. The resume may lie with recruiters for years.
If there is a standing profile on the githaba - point it out.
Do not overdo it with the design! Smaller than any separators, font sizes, etc.
I have seen several two-column resumes. In my opinion, this is not worth doing.
The summary should be a maximum of 2 pages, and better - by 1. It may seem difficult to fit all your experience on 1 page. Concentrate on your really worthwhile achievements, and do not push the implementation of the next framework on the front.
Some details can play you in the negative, for example, a conditional certificate for Microsoft Excel. Are you really so proud? A professional should distinguish useful skills and achievements from insignificant.
Do not specify an irrelevant experience in the hope that in the eyes of the employer this will be a plus. Show that you are a suitable candidate, but do not tell your biography.
Move all important information as close as possible to the beginning.
It is best to use the pdf format, as it is cross-platform.
If your English is far from ideal, be sure to give it to the test - grammatical errors in the abstract are unacceptable.
At the top of the resume should be indicated the position to which you are applying. The name can be made smaller and removed a little further. For an English-speaking recruiter, your name does not carry much meaning.
Then there should be a section where you describe why you can be of interest to the employer. Sometimes this section is called “Objective”, but you can not call it at all.
Below you can list the main technologies with which you worked. This may not be relevant for top companies that hire a person not for a specific technology. But for lesser-known companies that are looking for people for a particular project, this makes sense.
Then comes the description of previous companies and positions. Point out the main duties and achievements, show what you have done. Not a company, not a team, but you. What was your contribution?
Do not use words like “participated”, “developed”, “helped” and so forth. Use “implemented”, “developed”, “made”, etc.
Try to use specific numbers, for example:
Be prepared to explain how these figures were obtained - I was asked about this at the interviews.
It is best to arrange these entries in the following form: company name, position, work dates, country, description of responsibilities, then bullets indicate achievements.
You can specify the technology used.
Further enter information about education.
If there are professional certificates, they can be indicated after the education section.
At the end, you can specify additional information that is not so relevant - a blog on YouTube or a profile on a litcode.
Now we will consider the stages that a resume goes through, getting into the company and what should be in the resume for their passage.
In a good way, you need to make a resume for three groups at once: automatic systems, recruiter and technical specialists.
It is better to adjust the resume for a specific position and company, or to find a referee who is already working in the company. These options are time consuming and are only suitable for those companies where you really want to go. In other cases, massively send a universal resume.
If you are serving in a small company, or someone recommended you, most likely your living person will look at your resume. In other cases, recruiters often use the Applicant Tracking System. This is the first stage of screening a resume. These systems were created for large corporations, which were filled with an inconceivable number of resumes and recruiters could not view them manually. Such systems are looking for keywords that match the text of the vacancy. For this stage it is good to have a lot of keywords in the resume.
Test resumes in similar systems. Use services, for example, TopResume, which will run a summary of several ATSs at once.
The second stage is a live person, HR or recruiter.
This is the gateway to the company. HR does not decide whether you will get an offer, but without it, the resume will not fall to those who decide. Here a large number of relevant words can play into your hands, because Many recruiters do not distinguish between Java and JavaScript. But on the other hand, verbosity can play against, since hr looks at the summary for ten seconds. Keep the balance.
A technician (or group of people) is one who is more dependent on getting an offer. Depending on the company, the interviewer can either ask questions, relevant summaries, or look through the resume 30 seconds before the start of the interview and chat for a few minutes on topics of interest to him. In any case, at this stage, unnecessary keywords and large amounts are not desirable. For example: Javascript, Angular, React, JQuery, c ++, C #, java and a lot of words about which you heard and, perhaps, even did something with it, but you have no real knowledge. You may be asked about everything that is written in the resume, and without answering, you may find yourself in a very awkward situation.
Do not use words in the resume that few people know. They should be understandable to a person who does not understand these technologies specifically. If the interviewer cannot understand what you did there, it is your fault.
A couple of words about cover letter. In discussions, there are often statements that a cover letter is simply necessary and without it will not be considered a resume. I can not agree with this, but it definitely increases the chances.
In the cover letter you need to explain what motives you have, why you are applying for a particular position in a particular company, what interests you in it, why a recruiter should pay attention to you, why you are suitable for this role. Edit the cover letter for a specific job.
Here I will talk about my experience with one of the most popular resume writing services - TopResume.com .
I often stumbled upon their advertisements, job sites offer to check resumes for free with their help. It is clear that a free resume check is a lure, and a living person in this check, if he participates, then spends no more than a couple of minutes on it. Why do I think so? I used their services and received a resume from them, and then sent this resume from another account to them for free checking. And in response I received a standard "your resume should be rewritten by a professional writer." Interesting, yes?
It is enough to read reviews on the Internet to understand that this is a money-withdrawing service (why didn't I do this before paying for their services? I hoped that monster.com would not advise the bad?).
But let's move on to my experience.
I had a draft, which in general was not bad and corresponded to most of the tips that I gave here. He was not quite typical for the US market design and, perhaps, a lot of spelling errors.
I paid for topresume.com services and sent them this draft in the hope that a perfectly written resume would come to me. In the end, I had to make a lot of effort to get something acceptable at the exit. Several times I had to write to tech support and ask to change the writer, because The first people considered it normal to take sentences from my draft and alter them in such a way that they lost at least some meaning. I feel that the writers from this service are very far from IT.
About compiling an linkedin profile is generally tin. You just send the file, which says what fields to copy information from the summary.
Anyway, I hope in my resume, at least, there are no grammatical errors. Together, we brought him to the imputed condition (in fact, it still needs to be completed).
As a result, I got a resume that does a good job with its functions. He was enough to get an interview in top companies and in little-known ones. It helped me to find employers in Canada, the USA, Europe who are ready to do a work visa (and later a green card in the case of the USA).
In general, I do not like this version of the resume much, but it seems that it does its job.
Looking at this resume, you probably have a question: “Artyom, how is it that your resume does not always correspond to the advice that you have been talking about here for so long. Especially with regard to brevity. "
Yes it is. There are several reasons for this.
Such a verbosity was introduced by the writer from topresume and I was kind of sorry to throw out paid words and sentences.
I mainly focused on the United States enterprise and overlooked a lot of resumes from this area. It seems that such verbosity is acceptable for resumes in this area.
Perhaps in the future, when I already have a substantial foreign experience in my resume, I will cut out all the excess and sharpen it to 1 page.
In general, it is rather difficult to estimate how much a resume becomes more attractive for recruiters after some revisions. Therefore, the topic of writing a resume is controversial.
When you already have a resume in your hands that claims to be the final version, send it to other people for evaluation. From the side it all may not look so rosy as you think.
Despite my negative experience with TopResume, I still recommend sending a resume to their (and similar services) free check - you can get a couple of practical tips, if only for optimizing for ATS.
I also recommend posting a resume on a forum where more experienced people criticize it. Do not immediately correct the summary of the recommendations from the forum, but it is worth considering. Here is an example of a topic on the forum where you can place a resume if you are interested in the US market: Please criticize your resume .
A word of advice - don't wait until you have the perfect resume. Start sending the first versions as early as possible and look at the responses.
Then come in, sit down, pour coffee. I will tell you how to do it.
First of all, the standards, which I will discuss, are relevant for the United States and Canada, but such a summary is also suitable for other countries outside the CIS. Each country may have its own particularities for preparing a resume, for example, in Germany.
')
Generally, if you are a star and top companies are waiting for you, then you can write a resume on your knee purely for formality.
Conventionally - the first line about what worked in Google. The second is what N startups did. The third is about studying at the university. This summary ends.
But, if you do not have this situation, then the resume should meet the expectations of Western recruiters.
There are quite a few opinions about what these expectations are, I will share my experience.
I am not a recruiter and not HR, so my opinion may differ from the opinions of some people from this profession.
Why do I need a resume?
A resume is an occasion to start a conversation with a potential employer. Good companies get an incredible number of resumes, if you do not have a recommendation from an employee of this company, then a resume may simply not reach the decision-makers.
In addition to the internal content, you need to make the appropriate design, the LinkedIn autogenerator does not fit here.
Typical mistakes of people from the CIS
The first thing you need to do is throw out a photo, gender, age, marital status, hobby and any other personal information that is not relevant to work. If this is not done, then your resume is likely to be immediately sent to the basket to avoid possible accusations of discrimination.
Small retreat
Recently, I came across an article where the director of a large IT company in the CIS accused candidates of hiding their age and other data in resumes. This, of course, tin, outside the CIS, he would immediately be sued. Well, okay, if you decide to leave, then it does not concern you anymore.
General tips
In the resume must be specified contacts - e-mail and telephone. It is advisable to have a local telephone number of the country where the resume is sent. A good option would be to have voice mail on it, because It is common practice to leave voice messages in many countries. If there is no local number, you can omit the phone number.
Click on the link to the online version of the resume, or to the LinkedIn profile, or to the current version of the summary on Google documents. The resume may lie with recruiters for years.
If there is a standing profile on the githaba - point it out.
Do not overdo it with the design! Smaller than any separators, font sizes, etc.
I have seen several two-column resumes. In my opinion, this is not worth doing.
The summary should be a maximum of 2 pages, and better - by 1. It may seem difficult to fit all your experience on 1 page. Concentrate on your really worthwhile achievements, and do not push the implementation of the next framework on the front.
Some details can play you in the negative, for example, a conditional certificate for Microsoft Excel. Are you really so proud? A professional should distinguish useful skills and achievements from insignificant.
Do not specify an irrelevant experience in the hope that in the eyes of the employer this will be a plus. Show that you are a suitable candidate, but do not tell your biography.
Move all important information as close as possible to the beginning.
It is best to use the pdf format, as it is cross-platform.
If your English is far from ideal, be sure to give it to the test - grammatical errors in the abstract are unacceptable.
Summary structure
At the top of the resume should be indicated the position to which you are applying. The name can be made smaller and removed a little further. For an English-speaking recruiter, your name does not carry much meaning.
Then there should be a section where you describe why you can be of interest to the employer. Sometimes this section is called “Objective”, but you can not call it at all.
Below you can list the main technologies with which you worked. This may not be relevant for top companies that hire a person not for a specific technology. But for lesser-known companies that are looking for people for a particular project, this makes sense.
Then comes the description of previous companies and positions. Point out the main duties and achievements, show what you have done. Not a company, not a team, but you. What was your contribution?
Do not use words like “participated”, “developed”, “helped” and so forth. Use “implemented”, “developed”, “made”, etc.
Try to use specific numbers, for example:
- increased system performance by 30%
- developed a new service that can process 10 times more data than the old
- brought to pradakshen 3 projects
- increased SLA by 1 percent
- etc
Be prepared to explain how these figures were obtained - I was asked about this at the interviews.
It is best to arrange these entries in the following form: company name, position, work dates, country, description of responsibilities, then bullets indicate achievements.
You can specify the technology used.
Further enter information about education.
If there are professional certificates, they can be indicated after the education section.
At the end, you can specify additional information that is not so relevant - a blog on YouTube or a profile on a litcode.
CV life cycle
Now we will consider the stages that a resume goes through, getting into the company and what should be in the resume for their passage.
In a good way, you need to make a resume for three groups at once: automatic systems, recruiter and technical specialists.
It is better to adjust the resume for a specific position and company, or to find a referee who is already working in the company. These options are time consuming and are only suitable for those companies where you really want to go. In other cases, massively send a universal resume.
1. Applicant Tracking System
If you are serving in a small company, or someone recommended you, most likely your living person will look at your resume. In other cases, recruiters often use the Applicant Tracking System. This is the first stage of screening a resume. These systems were created for large corporations, which were filled with an inconceivable number of resumes and recruiters could not view them manually. Such systems are looking for keywords that match the text of the vacancy. For this stage it is good to have a lot of keywords in the resume.
Test resumes in similar systems. Use services, for example, TopResume, which will run a summary of several ATSs at once.
2. HR specialist
The second stage is a live person, HR or recruiter.
This is the gateway to the company. HR does not decide whether you will get an offer, but without it, the resume will not fall to those who decide. Here a large number of relevant words can play into your hands, because Many recruiters do not distinguish between Java and JavaScript. But on the other hand, verbosity can play against, since hr looks at the summary for ten seconds. Keep the balance.
3. Technician
A technician (or group of people) is one who is more dependent on getting an offer. Depending on the company, the interviewer can either ask questions, relevant summaries, or look through the resume 30 seconds before the start of the interview and chat for a few minutes on topics of interest to him. In any case, at this stage, unnecessary keywords and large amounts are not desirable. For example: Javascript, Angular, React, JQuery, c ++, C #, java and a lot of words about which you heard and, perhaps, even did something with it, but you have no real knowledge. You may be asked about everything that is written in the resume, and without answering, you may find yourself in a very awkward situation.
Do not use words in the resume that few people know. They should be understandable to a person who does not understand these technologies specifically. If the interviewer cannot understand what you did there, it is your fault.
Cover letter
A couple of words about cover letter. In discussions, there are often statements that a cover letter is simply necessary and without it will not be considered a resume. I can not agree with this, but it definitely increases the chances.
In the cover letter you need to explain what motives you have, why you are applying for a particular position in a particular company, what interests you in it, why a recruiter should pay attention to you, why you are suitable for this role. Edit the cover letter for a specific job.
Resume Writing Services
Here I will talk about my experience with one of the most popular resume writing services - TopResume.com .
Spoiler
Addressing them was a big mistake.
I often stumbled upon their advertisements, job sites offer to check resumes for free with their help. It is clear that a free resume check is a lure, and a living person in this check, if he participates, then spends no more than a couple of minutes on it. Why do I think so? I used their services and received a resume from them, and then sent this resume from another account to them for free checking. And in response I received a standard "your resume should be rewritten by a professional writer." Interesting, yes?
It is enough to read reviews on the Internet to understand that this is a money-withdrawing service (why didn't I do this before paying for their services? I hoped that monster.com would not advise the bad?).
But let's move on to my experience.
I had a draft, which in general was not bad and corresponded to most of the tips that I gave here. He was not quite typical for the US market design and, perhaps, a lot of spelling errors.
I paid for topresume.com services and sent them this draft in the hope that a perfectly written resume would come to me. In the end, I had to make a lot of effort to get something acceptable at the exit. Several times I had to write to tech support and ask to change the writer, because The first people considered it normal to take sentences from my draft and alter them in such a way that they lost at least some meaning. I feel that the writers from this service are very far from IT.
About compiling an linkedin profile is generally tin. You just send the file, which says what fields to copy information from the summary.
Anyway, I hope in my resume, at least, there are no grammatical errors. Together, we brought him to the imputed condition (in fact, it still needs to be completed).
An example of my resume
As a result, I got a resume that does a good job with its functions. He was enough to get an interview in top companies and in little-known ones. It helped me to find employers in Canada, the USA, Europe who are ready to do a work visa (and later a green card in the case of the USA).
In general, I do not like this version of the resume much, but it seems that it does its job.
Looking at this resume, you probably have a question: “Artyom, how is it that your resume does not always correspond to the advice that you have been talking about here for so long. Especially with regard to brevity. "
Yes it is. There are several reasons for this.
Such a verbosity was introduced by the writer from topresume and I was kind of sorry to throw out paid words and sentences.
I mainly focused on the United States enterprise and overlooked a lot of resumes from this area. It seems that such verbosity is acceptable for resumes in this area.
Perhaps in the future, when I already have a substantial foreign experience in my resume, I will cut out all the excess and sharpen it to 1 page.
In general, it is rather difficult to estimate how much a resume becomes more attractive for recruiters after some revisions. Therefore, the topic of writing a resume is controversial.
Conclusion
When you already have a resume in your hands that claims to be the final version, send it to other people for evaluation. From the side it all may not look so rosy as you think.
Despite my negative experience with TopResume, I still recommend sending a resume to their (and similar services) free check - you can get a couple of practical tips, if only for optimizing for ATS.
I also recommend posting a resume on a forum where more experienced people criticize it. Do not immediately correct the summary of the recommendations from the forum, but it is worth considering. Here is an example of a topic on the forum where you can place a resume if you are interested in the US market: Please criticize your resume .
A word of advice - don't wait until you have the perfect resume. Start sending the first versions as early as possible and look at the responses.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/447502/
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