Top 5 Resume and Cover Letter Mistakes for Software Engineers

Assuming you’ve already triple checked your resume for spelling, grammar and format, how impressive is the content of your resume?

We asked several experts about the top mistakes they see in software engineers' resumes and cover letters. Here’s your checklist of top mistakes to avoid:

1. Not Linking to an Awesome GitHub and LinkedIn

Linking to Github or an online portfolio showcasing your best code is a must. Try to be descriptive of your top three to five projects.

“We've also noticed that the best software engineers always share their code in online communities,” says Mark Slack, career advisor at Resume Genius. “These kinds of freely given contributions reflect a self-motivated and generous person -- exactly the kind of people we like to hire.”

Linking to your LinkedIn profile will help as well. Why? Employers can easily see your glowing recommendations. Recommendations can help sway an undecided manager in your favor.

Don’t have any yet? What are you waiting for? Request a recommendation from a colleague today.

2. Lacking Any Personality

Try to include a friendly, yet respectful tone in all of your communications with the company.

If your dream company is a little round in their edges, throw in a non-offensive joke. You’ll be sure to standout. For this tip, authenticity is key here. Hiring managers are mistrustful of folks whose online personas don’t match their real-life personalities. No one likes being mislead.

Instead, focus on what about this job truly excites you? People love passion…it’s contagious.

3. Not Self-Reporting Your Degree of Skill Level

A huge red flag is when you see a resume packed with a laundry list of programming languages and skills.

“We really appreciate it when applicants self-report their skills with qualifiers, like fair, advanced or expert,” Slack says. “In some cases, we don’t need our software engineer to have deep expertise in certain languages, or we are willing to train an applicant from the fair level to a higher level over time.”

It all depends on the company’s priorities and needs while they're hiring.

Go one step further by researching or interviewing folks who work at your dream company and ask them about what they’re lacking. Use their company blog, social media accounts and email to help you connect.

Above all, be honest about your skillset. Only list the skills you can truly speak knowledgably about.

4. Blasting Boilerplate Copy

It's hard for an employer to feel like you're a solid job match if you send out the same resume and cover letter template to every single company. That’s what most people do, and it’s so monotonous.

Tailor each of your resumes and cover letters to your favorite jobs. And then network with someone at the company who can pass your resume to the right person.

Know your audience.

If you’re submitting the resume to a recruiter, keywords in the job description are going to be your life blood. If you’re submitting to a CTO or engineer, it’s all about “algorithms, techniques and niche software,” Allen Cheung, engineering manager at Square says on Quora.

For instance: "Wrote sorted hash map" is more interesting than "used jsonp for Javascript AJAX UI,” Cheung writes.

5. Only Listing Your Tasks, Not Quantifiable Results

So, you spent 40 hours a week coding and completed a few projects? That’s nice. But what did those projects really do for the company?

Use Google’s simple formula for the perfect resume: ‘I accomplished X, relative to Y, by doing z.”

Here’s a great example for software engineers from CareerCup’s Gayle McDowell, former developer and recruiter: Reduced time to render the user’s buddy list by 75 percent by implementing prediction algorithm. 

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