Writing My Resume

Back in the days in school and college, we were asked to write a CV or resume during English exams. Resume templates were found in different writers' books, sometimes teachers gave us their own templates. All the templates were almost the same under the hood. They would begin with a cover letter stating something like: "Dear Sir, I've seen your job posting in Daily Ittefaq on day X..." and then continued for one or two lines. The rest of the first page would be covered with a giant table. You would throw out all your personal information in that table: your name, father's name, mother's name, current address, home address, marital status, religion, nationality and what not. After that, there would be another table where you would list your educational qualification, from Masters to SSC. And you would list your interests, extra-curricular activities (debating was a common choice for everyone) etc. Finally, you would close your resume with some references. Any recruiter would probably throw out these resumes now.

I wrote my first real resume when I applied to TopOfStack as a software developer. Saadi vai (CEO of TopOfStack Software) later told me he was pretty impressed watching my resume, he didn't expect the projects listed in my resume from a 2nd-year undergraduate. After that, I didn't care to update my resume. Some days ago I came across some Quora questions regarding software engineer resume. That reminded me that I haven't updated my resume for more than 1.5 years. So this Eid vacation might be a good time to create a new version of my resume.

Before starting, I've done some research on how a software engineer resume should look like. I got some pretty interesting advice:

Don't put anything irrelevant

We all know that, right? But have you thought what information is really relevant to your job? Recruiters only care about your skill. Why would they want to know about your marital status or father's name? Why would they care about your SSC result? Why they would be interested in whether you like Cricket or Football?

Don't put your picture

Once I thought putting a picture in my resume would make it look cool. But it turns out than most people highly recommend not to put your picture on the resume because the recruiter can subconsciously discriminate you from others. Besides, it's distracting.

Keep it Short

A long resume means you don't know how to prioritize important things over little details. Most people recommend one to two-page resume, depending on your experience.

Formatting might not matter

Might not, because I don't know about Bangladeshi companies, but many companies use resume parser to extract information and present only the plain text to the recruiter. And all your careful formatting, colors - they are gone. (Good for me, because I hate spending time in formatting some piece of text.)

There are numerous other common advice like being specific while writing, being careful about spelling and grammar, using third person etc. Note that I'm not an expert on resume writing, all I've written is a result of my one hour research. So you should better not take it seriously and do your own research before writing your resume ;) 

Anyway, I've finished my resume and uploaded it here. Let me know if you've any suggestion.