Top Items to Leave off Your Technical Resume

After you’ve selected a technical field that appeals to you and picked up the training and experience you need to land a job, you get to start the Happy Job-Seeking Dance. We’ve all had to go through a version of this at some point. We’ve dealt with lots of hunting through employment sites and a ton of resume submissions with the hope of getting invited to interview. It isn’t enough to throw your resume at folks, though. To make sure you succeed in your job hunt, you need to know which items to leave off your technical resume. 

Having a well-developed and carefully-structured resume can get your foot in the door. It can allow you to show prospective employers what you have to offer, which is why we created this article. We want to help you fine-tune your CV, so it leaps out at the folks who read it, screaming, “Hire me, jerkwad!” In this guide, you’ll learn which items clog up your resume and obscure the areas that make you shine. By the time we finish, your resume will represent the best you have to offer.

Don’t Include Inappropriate Contact Info

You might have heard that first impressions last forever, right? Well, you can extend that to resumes. Your resume acts as a text-based stand-in for you to potential employers, and the hiring manager gets their first (and often only) impression of you through those few pages. Your resume will get an initial five-to-ten second scan by the hiring staff, if you’re lucky. You don’t want them to spend that time on a piece of unprofessional contact information.

• Don’t include an address, phone number, or email from an employer as your contact info. 

Nothing says, “I don’t care if I get the job” to a hiring manager faster than someone who demonstrates zero respect for their current employer. 

• Use a dull, sober email address if you want to get job callbacks.

You might love pies and want to share your love of them with the world. Unfortunately, the web developer gig you hope to land is likely to go to someone with an email address a tad more professional than rhubarbfreak25@piespiespies.com as their contact info. 

Only Include Relevant Work Experience

When you apply for the top tech jobs, you need to load up your resume with all sorts of work experience that applies directly to the gigs. Employers need to know that the people they interview have baseline qualifications that make them worth bringing in for a closer look. They don’t have time to wade through unnecessary details in your job history to find that out, though. You need to make that sort of info easy for them to spot.

• Tailor your resume for each job type for which you’re applying.

Include the relevant work history for that job. Don’t be afraid to include unrelated work if you feel it demonstrates a quality that can help you in the gig you want. 

• Avoid packing your resumé with those sorts of jobs just to pad it out to a few pages.
  A short, clean, and relevant resume is a much better advertisement for your services than an overloaded and pointless one.

So, there you go. To make sure you get a job, you need to get interviews. And, to land interviews, you need to have a resume that highlights your skills without distracting or turning off potential employers. Follow these guidelines to get your resume in fighting shape so it will get you in the interview seat where you can blow away the competition.