Ideas to best support senior developer resume?

Question

As a self-proclaimed senior developer with 10 years of hands-on experience and with a notable reputation in my city, I'm wondering what are the MOST SUCCESSFUL techniques in resume writing? well, I mean as an extra to the regulars we see in every resume.

Please select one or more options as it fits, or share your innovative ideas in making the best professional resume...

1- Testimonials
2- Employment history + briefly listing main tasks/duties for each
3- Project reports showing impact of your contribution
4- Online reputation (professional social networking, forums, ...)
5- Goals achieved and success stories
4- Previous employment references
5- Friendly colleague references
. . .

And some more questions:
A- how many pages do u believe a senior developer resume should be?
B- do you recommend maintaining both short and long C.V.?
C- do you recommend having many extra stuff (something more than long resume) to put on the interview tables

Thanks in advance...

Answer 1

I suppose that the key factors are #2, #3, #5, namely:

• Employment history + briefly listing main tasks/duties for each
• Project reports showing impact of your contribution
• Goals achieved and success stories

The employer is interested in knowing what kind of tasks you were solving previously and how successful the solution was.

Try to keep it short - within two pages. If you put the right emphasis on how good you are two pages will be just enough.

Answer 2

The resume is there to get you an interview, not a job. Think of your audience there: managers.

Have two resumes: one longer career management document with more details that you don't send to anyone. Instead, you trim it down to a short resume, optimized for whatever job you're applying to. This resume you send out should be short: one page only. Remove stuff that is not related to the opening and highlight stuff that is. Also remove most ancient history stuff since only the past one or two jobs are likely to be relevant for your next job. If you're already a senior bit-flipper, spending many words on describing a junior burger-flipping job is not effective.

Being on the hiring end for software developers for many years, here are the key things I look for in resumes:

• Length. Overly long resumes are likely to end in the no-interview pile. Of course, if you're in the Linus Torvalds category, you can have a longer resume, but you really don't need one anymore.
• Job history: Achievements, not responsibilities. Especially achievements that surpassed role expectations. Progress over time. Signs of learning, also surpassing role expectations.
• Natural inclinations towards programming. Those who started early and spent some of their free time programming are more likely to have the necessary (but not sufficient) hours of practice for being a great programmer. Volunteer projects, hobby projects, open source development and geeky hobbies are some examples of such signs.
• Spelling and grammar. It's an indicator for attention to detail required for programming, and also indicates how much effort you are really willing to put to get a job.

References are in my opinion a bit overrated legacy artifacts. They really only work when the referrer is someone I know and trust.

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So in summary:

• 2, brief
• 3, achievements

• 4, when relevant showing your natural inclinations towards the job you are applying to i.e. programming

• A: One page

• B: Yes but only share the short one
• C: If you get the face-to-face interview, you can take a portfolio of your projects etc. with you. But only then.

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Edited to add:

If your audience is not the hiring manager but some HR consultants, they are not likely to know the intricacies of the job you are applying to and simply do some buzzword-matching to score you. You get an interview based on the score you get. In this case, you have to do some buzzword name dropping in your roles and responsibilities part. Include things like names of programming languages and technologies you worked with and some self-assessment of proficiency (beginner, intermediate, expert).

Answer 3

In documenting past work history, don't forget to note which technologies were used so that it is clear where your experience is.

Bad:

• Developed interactive websites used latest technologies on multiple machines on a global scale.

Better:

• Using Agile methods and Subversion for source control, developed web applications on IIS 6.0, using ASP.Net 2.0 in C#.Net with SQL Server 2005 using Visual Studio 2005.

It can get a little wordy but sometimes it is useful to be able to show X years of experience in Y technology by noting which jobs used which skills as some recruiters or other HR people will look for these details and if not found, off to the reject pile or shredder that resumes goes.

I'd be tempted to leave references until you have had an interview as you don't want every place that sees your personal information contacting your references, do you? In terms of length, I like submitting no more than 2 pages of a resume but on hand keeping a larger one that can be customized in a few ways. I also would stick to a "Just the facts" kind of approach with the bullet points though I'd think this is common sense.