The Ultimate Guide To Writing A Fantastic Developer Resume (with examples)

I run a job board. It’s called Simple Job Listings and you can find amazing remote jobs on there.

One of the advantages of running a job board is that I get to talk to companies that are recruiting. Specifically, I get to talk to recruiting managers, HR folk, etc. I speak to companies about what they’re looking for, how they’re recruiting, the trends they’re seeing, and much more.

One of the biggest takeaways that I’ve had from these conversations is about resumes. What sort of resumes work, what are some things that companies like to see, things that don’t pass muster, and so on.

This blog is an attempt to structure all those conversations. We’re going to go through, with a fine-toothed comb, everything you need to know about how to create an excellent developer resume.

So, with that in the background, let’s get started

Know your audience

Before we begin with how to write a perfect resume, let’s take a moment to look at who you’re writing this amazing resume for.

First off, most resumes never make it past the first round of filtering. And the first round of filtering is done by software.

Essentially, what this means is that most resumes never get a set of human eyes on them.

It’s the software that your resume should first please.

And the software has a name — ATS (Applicant Tracking System)

Write for the ATS

ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System and it’s a software that 99% of the Fortune 500 companies use. In fact, if you’re applying for a position in a medium size or large company, you’re going to have to get past the ATS.

The ATS ‘reads’ all the resumes that a company receives, ‘figures out’ who the best candidates are, moves the applications of those candidates forward, and rejects the rest of the resumes.

We’ve got a comprehensive guide on how to beat the ATS here. But for now, let’s just look at a quick summary of how to get past the ATS.

Use classic designs and fonts

ATS software is made by a lot of companies. And the one thing all ATS software have in common is that they’re good at reading classic, old-school resume designs with classic fonts. So, you should be avoiding fancy resumes with tons of graphics and stylish fonts. Stick to the old stuff because that’s what ATS can read.

Use the right keywords

The way ATS selects candidates is by checking for keywords. Of course, it checks for experience and education. But those things can’t be changed anyway. What you can do is present your experience, skills, and knowledge in the right way and the right way is to use keywords.

Keywords are those words or phrases that the ATS will pick up on.

Example:

Let’s say you’re applying for a front-end developer job and the company is looking for expertise in React, Tailwind, and Redux. It’s an oversimplified example, but hear me out.

Now, the ATS will look for these words — React, Tailwind, and Redux.

Not only will it look for these words, but it’ll also look for the words around it.

“3 years of experience in React”

“Used Redux extensively”

“Tailwind CSS certification”

Things like this are going to be picked up by the ATS and these are the keywords.

Keywords are less about the actual words, and more about phrases.

You need to include the right phrases.

Keyword + context + correct phrasing = A resume that beats the ATS

NOTE: If you're not sure what the keywords are, just copy the job description and paste it into ChatGPT and ask it what the keywords are. It'll get it mostly right.

You can read how to use ChatGPT to optimize your resume here.

Recruiters

The first actual humans who read your resume. They don’t necessarily have in-depth technical knowledge, but they know how to match candidates to open positions.

These are the people who are using the ATS.

Once you’ve passed the ATS, you need to get past recruiters.

Here, it’s all about clarity, really.

Your resume should be easy to read and understand. It should state your skills, your experience, and your USP (Unique Selling Point) prominently.

If your skills match, you’re going to the next round.

Technical interviewers:

Your peers, colleagues, and bosses, essentially. The tech folk. They understand tech and will assess the depth of your technical knowledge. Here are the things they’re looking for:

1. Technical Proficiency: The depth of your understanding of relevant programming languages, tools, and methodologies.

2. Problem-Solving Abilities: Your approach to solving complex technical problems, preferably demonstrated through past projects.

3. Continual Learning: They appreciate candidates who continually update their skills and knowledge.

Hiring managers:

Finally, hiring managers. These are usually senior-level professionals who have a deep understanding of the team's needs and the technical competencies required for the job role.

They’re looking for candidates who can hit the ground running and contribute to the team's goals from day one. They are typically looking for:

1. Relevant Experience: Showcasing your experience in similar roles or projects that align with the job description is paramount.

2. Technical Skills: A clear, well-structured list of technical skills relevant to the job role is a must.

3. Results and Achievements: They are interested in the impact you've made in previous roles. Quantifying your achievements can be a game-changer here.

So, that’s your audience. You now know who’s reading your resume and what they’re looking for. Let’s move on.

Structure your resume — create an impact with the core sections

Your developer resume is much more than a laundry list of your past jobs and skills; it should be a meticulously organized narrative that showcases your professional journey, accomplishments, and technical prowess.

Here’s where you should be concentrating:

Personal Information:

This is your resume's header, carrying your full name, contact details, and links to professional online profiles, such as LinkedIn and GitHub. If you have a website of your own, you should mention it here.

It's your digital business card, ensuring interested parties know how to reach you and where to find more about your professional persona.

Essentially, what you’re doing is telling the recruiters a bit about yourself and showing them where to go if they want to know more about you.

Here’s how to do it right:

• Full Name: Start with your first and last name, ideally formatted in a larger, bold typeface to draw attention. It's essential to use the name you typically go by professionally to maintain consistency across various platforms.

• Contact Details: Include your primary contact information, namely your phone number and professional email address. Ensure your email address is professional, preferably using a combination of your first and last names.

• Location: Rather than providing your full address, which isn't necessary and could present security concerns, list your city and state (or country if applying internationally). This gives potential employers an idea of your general location and time zone.

• Professional Links: In the tech industry, it's not just about your traditional resume. It's also about your online professional presence. Including a link to your LinkedIn profile and GitHub repository allows interested parties to delve deeper into your professional persona and view your contributions, endorsements, and samples of your work.

Here are a couple of examples:

Objective/Summary:

A compelling snapshot of your career, encapsulating your skills, experience, and career aspirations.

Aimed to hook the reader's attention, this should be a carefully crafted pitch that answers why you're the ideal candidate for the job.

The summary isn’t simply a list of what you’ve done. It’s a list of things you’ve done that make you the perfect candidate for the job. That’s the approach your should be taking.

Understanding the Objective/Summary:

The objective or summary is a succinct snapshot of your professional persona, encapsulating your core competencies, career highlights, and aspirations in relation to the role you're applying for.

It's your elevator pitch, summarizing your value proposition in a way that resonates with the role's requirements and the company's mission.

Tailoring Your Objective/Summary:

The secret sauce of an effective objective or summary is personalization. Rather than a generic statement, strive for a tailored narrative that aligns with the specific role and company.

Research the company values, culture, and mission, and align your objective or summary to reflect these aspects.

Also, carefully review the job description to understand what the role entails and emphasize your relevant skills and experiences accordingly.

Writing Your Objective/Summary:

Your objective or summary should ideally be a 3-4 sentence paragraph. Start by highlighting your professional title and years of experience.

Follow this up by mentioning your key skills and areas of expertise, focusing on those most relevant to the job description.

Conclude with your career goals in relation to the role you're applying to.

Consider the following examples:

Technical Skills:

A showcase of your technical prowess, listing the programming languages, tools, and technologies you're proficient with.

This section plays a vital role in passing keyword scans from Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and impressing technical interviewers.

Highlight the skills that matter. Include skills that are relevant and will probably be the keywords that the ATS is looking for. Again, a simple resume is what you’re aiming for. A resume that conveys what it needs to, without anything else cluttering the space.

Here are a few tips:

List Your Technical Skills:

Start by brainstorming a list of all the technical skills you've acquired over your career. This list could include programming languages, development tools, databases, testing frameworks, deployment technologies, and any other relevant skills.

Relevance:

Not all skills carry equal weight for every job role. Once you have your list, compare it to the job description. Prioritize skills that are directly relevant to the role or commonly required in your field. Ensure the skills you list are current, showcasing your ability to work with contemporary tools and technologies.

Organization and Proficiency Levels:

A simple list of skills could appear monotonous and overwhelming.

Categorizing your skills and indicating proficiency levels can add depth to this section. For instance, you might group skills into categories like 'Programming Languages', 'Tools & IDEs', 'Databases', and 'Frameworks & Libraries'.

Within these categories, you could indicate your proficiency level (e.g., beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert) for each skill.

Take a look at these examples:

Work Experience:

Your professional history, detailing your past roles, responsibilities, and achievements. It demonstrates your real-world application of technical skills, leadership, and contribution to past employers.

Again, you should be customizing this for every job (we have a guide here on how to do just that).

The idea is to tell the recruiters about what you’ve done in the past that makes you a good candidate. A good resume is a resume that’s relevant to the job that you’re applying for.

Here’s how to ace this section:

Formatting Your Work Experience:

Start each entry with your job title, the company's name, and your dates of employment.

List these entries in reverse chronological order to give prominence to your most recent and potentially most impactful roles.

For each role, include a brief summary of your responsibilities, followed by a bulleted list of key tasks and achievements.

Detailing Each Job:

Each job listed should encapsulate your role, key responsibilities, and significant achievements.

When outlining responsibilities, focus on high-impact tasks and initiatives that demonstrate your skills and expertise.

When detailing achievements, quantify them wherever possible to provide a clear measure of your success.

Writing Strong Bullet Points:

Start each bullet point with a strong action verb.

This adds momentum to your statements and clearly communicates your active role in achieving results.

Quantify your achievements to give a tangible sense of your contributions. Finally, highlight the impact of your work, demonstrating how it benefited the team, project, or company at large.

Tailoring Your Work Experience:

While your work history is set in stone, the way you present it can be tailored to suit the job description.

Highlight tasks and achievements that directly align with the requirements of the job you're applying for. This not only demonstrates your suitability for the role but also shows that you've taken the time to understand what the role entails.

Handling Common Challenges:

If you've job-hopped or have gaps in your employment, it's essential to address these in a manner that doesn't detract from your qualifications.

For job-hopping, a brief explanation in your cover letter or a focus on transferable skills across roles can mitigate potential concerns.

For employment gaps, consider including any relevant activities during that period, such as freelance projects, courses, or volunteer work.

Consider the following examples:

Notice how the bullet points illustrate not only what the responsibilities were, but also the impact those responsibilities had on the company or the project. This helps to demonstrate your ability to apply your skills effectively.

Projects:

A platform to highlight your significant projects, including those from work, personal endeavors, or open-source contributions. It illustrates your problem-solving abilities and offers tangible proof of your technical skills.

This section is particularly potent for experienced developers, who may have a plethora of open-source contributions, personal projects, or even hobby projects to showcase. Here's how you can meticulously curate and present your projects to strengthen your developer resume.

If you've contributed to open-source projects, led personal projects, or created anything notable outside your professional work, this is the place to showcase it.

Projects can be a testament to your skills, initiative, and passion for development, even if they're not directly related to your professional work.

Detailing Each Project:

For each project, provide a concise but clear description of the project, the technologies used, your specific contribution, and if possible, a link to the code or any tangible output.

This not only allows the hiring manager to understand the nature of the project but also assesses your specific skills and contributions.

Selecting Projects to Include:

It's important to select projects that are relevant to the job you're applying for or that showcase key skills that you couldn't highlight in your work experience.

While it's tempting to include all your projects, carefully curate this section to avoid overwhelming the reader and diluting the impact of your most notable projects.

Consider the following examples:

In the first example, the candidate's contribution to an open-source project illustrates their ability to work with existing codebases and optimize performance, a key skill for many developer roles.

The second example shows the candidate's ability to handle a full-stack project independently, a valuable trait for roles requiring initiative and broad skill sets.

Education and Certifications:

A record of your academic background and any relevant certifications or courses you've completed. It validates your foundational knowledge and commitment to continual learning.

Even as an experienced developer, your educational background and any certifications you've earned can play a crucial role in illustrating your foundation of knowledge and commitment to continuous learning.

It's not just about showcasing your degree - bootcamps, online courses, and professional certifications all have a place on your resume.

Additionally, those who are self-taught or without a traditional CS degree can still present their educational journey in a compelling manner.

Here’s how you present your education:

Start with your education and certifications:

Begin with your highest level of formal education, whether that's a doctoral degree, a bachelor's degree, or even high school. Include the institution's name, your field of study, and the date of graduation.

Follow this with any additional educational experiences such as bootcamps, online courses, or certifications, listed in reverse chronological order.

Detailing Each Entry:

For each entry, provide enough detail to illustrate its relevance and value. For degrees, this might include notable coursework or projects. For bootcamps or online courses, highlight the specific skills you gained. For certifications, mention the certifying authority and any key areas of knowledge the certification covers.

Handling Non-Traditional Education:

If you're a self-taught programmer or lack a traditional CS degree, focus on showcasing relevant learning experiences.

Online courses, books, tutorials, meetups, forums, and any other resources you've used to teach yourself should be listed. Include the topics you learned, any projects you completed as part of your learning, and any tangible results, like open-source contributions or freelance work.

Consider the following examples:

In the first example, the candidate has a traditional educational background with an advanced degree and a relevant certification, providing strong evidence of their knowledge and skills.

In the second example, the candidate lacks formal education in computer science but has shown initiative and dedication to self-learning, which can be just as impressive to many employers.

Additional Sections:

Depending on your experiences, you might include other sections like publications, speaking engagements, awards, patents, volunteering, or professional memberships. These add an extra dimension to your professional persona, setting you apart from other candidates.

Here are the things you should include:

Publications, Speaking Engagements, Awards, Patents:

If you have written articles, spoken at conferences, received any awards, or hold patents, these achievements can demonstrate your expertise and recognition in the field.

They can also highlight your communication skills, creativity, and initiative, all of which are valuable traits in a developer.

Professional Memberships, Volunteering:

Being part of professional organizations shows your commitment to the field, while volunteering can demonstrate a range of soft skills and personal qualities. Both can provide further evidence of your passion and involvement in the wider community.

Why and When to Include These Sections:

These sections can add depth to your profile, showcase your interests and values, and demonstrate a well-rounded and active professional life.

They can be especially valuable when you're applying for senior or specialized roles, where such activities are often expected.

Even for other roles, these details can help you stand out. Include them when they're relevant and can strengthen your application.

Consider the following examples:

In both examples, the candidate showcases significant achievements and contributions outside of their primary work, demonstrating thought leadership, initiative, and community involvement.

These details can significantly enhance a developer's profile and make them more memorable to hiring managers.

While it's important not to overload your resume with too many additional sections, strategic inclusion of these details can showcase a well-rounded professional profile and give you an edge in the competitive developer job market.

Tailor your resume — every single time

As mentioned earlier, there’s a much more comprehensive guide that you can read here, but this is so important that let’s take another look at it again, with a couple of examples.

First off, a bit of context:

Why One-Size-Fits-All Doesn't Work for Developer Resumes:

Each developer role and company has its unique set of requirements, culture, and values.

Therefore, a generic resume may fail to highlight your most relevant skills and experiences, or it may not align with the company's specific culture or values.

Tailoring your resume to each job allows you to present yourself as a perfect fit, increasing your chances of being shortlisted.

Researching the Job and Company:

Start by thoroughly reading the job description to understand the required skills, responsibilities, and qualifications.

Look for keywords and key phrases, which you should aim to include in your resume. Next, research the company—its mission, values, culture, products, and any recent news or achievements.

This can help you align your resume with the company's culture and show how you can contribute to its goals.

Matching Your Skills and Experience to the Job Requirements:

Once you understand what the job and company require, tailor your resume to highlight your most relevant experiences and skills.

Revise your summary, skills section, work experience, and projects to reflect the job requirements.

Use quantifiable achievements that align with the job's key responsibilities, and include relevant keywords to increase your resume's visibility.

Consider the following examples:

What changed:

Before:

The initial version is fairly generic. It mentions the role (software developer), area of work (web and mobile application development), and some of the technical skills (JavaScript, Python, Java).

While it does state the candidate's ability to work in cross-functional teams, it doesn't specify the technologies, methodologies, or the culture that a start-up might be interested in.

After:

The revised version specifies the candidate's experience in full-stack mobile application development, which is directly relevant to the role.

It focuses on crucial technologies for mobile development like React Native and Node.js. It also highlights the candidate's experience with start-up culture, which is relevant for a job in a start-up environment. The quantification of project delivery improvement is another strong point that evidences their contribution to efficiency.

What changed?

Before:

The original version simply states the candidate's experience and technical skills, but it doesn't specify their senior-level responsibilities or how they have used data for decision-making and process improvement. It's not tailored to the specific role or the company's values.

After:

The revised version is specifically tailored to the company's values and the senior role. It emphasizes the candidate's data-driven approach and how it has improved team efficiency, which is a direct reflection of the company's value system. It also highlights the candidate's leadership abilities in facilitating project planning sessions and fostering a learning culture, indicating suitability for a senior role.

Proofread and edit your resume

So, there you have it. A fantastic developer resume. In fact, it’s perfect.

Only it’s not.

You see, there’s a very good chance that there’s a type in your resume. Or maybe you got the years wrong. Or maybe you’ve used too much jargon. Or too little.

The fact is, you have to proofread your resume. Multiple times.

There’s nothing as bad as seeing a great developer resume that’s chock-full of simple grammatical errors or spelling mistakes.

Here’s how to proofread your resume:

• Use spell-check tools

• Read your resume aloud

• Make sure there are no fancy fonts

• Check if you’ve used bullet points rather than rambling paragraphs

• Check if you’re using all the keywords

• Make sure you’re not overusing keywords for the ATS

• Are the font sizes right? Is everything easy to read?

• If you have links in your resume, are they right? Do they lead to the right website or page?

• Is everything factually right?

Once you’ve gone through that checklist, go through it again. You should be at a point where you can find no errors or scope for improvement. That’s when your resume is ready.

Conclusion

And that’s how you write a great developer resume.

Now, if you’re thinking that all this seems like too much work, it’s actually not.

If you didn’t know any of the pointers above and simply wrote a resume that you thought was good, you’d actually tick 60-70% of the boxes. This guide is there to simply elevate your resume. It’s there to take you that extra mile. So, if you’re feeling anxious, let me tell you that there’s no reason to.

Once you have a basic resume, it won’t take more than 10 minutes to customize it to a job. And the effort you put in for those 10 minutes will be repaid many times over.

So, go ahead and write that perfect developer resume.

After you’ve done that, if you’re looking for remote developer jobs, check out Simple Job Listings. All jobs on Simple Job Listings are remote, most jobs pay amazingly well, and a significant number of jobs that we post aren’t listed anywhere else.

Check out Simple Job Listings and find your dream remote developer job. Good luck!