Background

Skip this and go straight to the tips

If you’ve read any of my recent blog posts, you might know that I have been working for a startup in Bergen for the past 5 months.

It is a relatively small company with around 20 employees, 4 of those being developers, 1 of them working part-time, one of our previous developers have recently quit to go work for another company.

Due to this a lot of work falls in the lap of the rest of the development team and we can’t handle the workload by ourselves anymore which lead to us putting up a job listing for one or two new web developers to join our team.

In my 4 months at this company, I have to my own astonishment managed to climb the corporate ladder enough to put myself in sort of a “management”-type position rather than purely a web developer which is what I was originally hired to be.

I am now responsible for deadlines, the development team and making sure shit gets done and works as expected, I have also been put in charge of filtering through job applications responses to listing, picking the candidates that I think are suitable and forwarding that to our CTO who is in charge of interviewing.

We’ve had good candidates and some less good candiates, but the topic of this post is not about us, but more about how you as a web developer can stand out from the crowd and get hired.

Here are my 3 tips on writing a Resume/CV that will get you noticed and put in the “call for an interview”-list.



1. Don’t send a bloated CV

When sending your CV to an employer you want to work for, don’t fill it with too much unrelevant experience/information, I don’t care that you took a summer job at a clothing store when you were 19, I only care about the topic at hand which is “why are you a good fit for my web development team?”.

Show me relevant work experience, hobby projects and courses you might have taken relevant to the job and leave the rest out.

2. Be visible on the internet

I have Googled EVERYONE that has sent us a job application, if you think that is odd, I would disagree and consider it a rather common practice at this point.

For every job candidate that I have gone through, I plug their name into Google, GitHub, Facebook and Twitter to see what comes up, if I find a GitHub account with a lot of repos and contributions, a Twitter account with web dev related tweets or god forbid a blog with interesting content, it is an extremely positive thing,

Having an online presence is a very powerful and important thing if you want to get hired as a web developer or a designer for that matter, not only does it make you stand out from your peers, it also shows me that you are invested in what you do, and that you like practicing and sharing your skill outside of work hours.

Fun Fact

I’ve been told by multiple sources that one of the reason why I was hired as opposed to any other applicant was because of my website and my GitHub account.

3. Highlight skills listed in the job listing

Several times I saw people send in job applications with experiences in languages, technologies and various “random shit” that we did not write in our job listing, nor has anything to do with web development.

For instance, there was several applicants who applied to a position which listed these languages/technologies:

PHP

HTML & CSS

Javascript & jQuery

MySQL

Java

Python

But on their CV, none of these were in it, however what was listed was various stuff like Signal Processing(whatever that is), Data processing, C++, Matlab and C#.

Although I can get impressed by CV’s with these languages and hardcore skills in various scientific fields outside of web development, It is nowhere near relevant to what we want or what the ad said.

When a job application is listing skills or technologies be sure to list the languages, programs or other relevant technology in your CV and Cover letter to be sure that I notice and put you in the “Call for interview”-list.

Thanks for reading

And that pretty much concludes my list, go forth, apply to jobs, get hired and be awesome.

If you liked this or any other post on my blog, be sure to share them on Twitter, Linkedin or wherever you feel appropriate.

Extra: CV and Resume Templates

If you want to stand out from the crowd a little bit more, try to grab a nice, clean looking CV template from any of the sites listed below instead of using the boring, default Word theme.