How to Write a Resume / LinkedIn (Solo Show)

Good morning, good morning. Happy Friday. Hopefully y'all are doing well. Say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Oh man, it has been a week. It has been a week, but I'm excited to hang out with y'all this morning. Um, got a lot to go over. You know, I, I was looking back through, so if you go to my YouTube If you go to my YouTube, um, basically, uh, I have not seen any, uh, lives recently that I've done around resumes and LinkedIns. Now I know me and Alicia Novin, um, have our series we do. Whoa. And my camera just went out. We are doing great this morning. Good morning, everybody. If you are tuning in, say hey. We'd love to hear from you. Uh, dealing with some technical difficulties this morning. It's always something. It's always something on this Friday. But say hey. We'd love to hear from you. LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube. It's great to see y'all this morning. Say hey. We'd love to hear from you. We're gonna go over resume writing and all that jazz. But first, I gotta get my camera working again. And boom! We are back. Sweet. All right. A lot going on. A lot going on this week's been busy. Uh. Was at South by, what, 2 weeks ago? Then was in Raleigh last week. So it has been a heck of a travel schedule. And, um, if, if you, if you saw my vlog this morning, I had about 7 meetings each day the last 3 days, about 21 meetings. So I'm very sleepy, I'm very tired, my brain is mush. So we're gonna try to get through this together. Um, but if you did not know, my YouTube— um, I'm gonna throw my YouTube up here. Uh, I, uh, with the help of Jason Torres, who's my project manager— shout out Jason— We've kind of completely redone my YouTube. So again, for those of you tune in and say, hey, we'd love to hear from you, but I'm gonna throw this up here. So if you guys go to my YouTube, we've completely restructured it and it's very, very, it's very simple to navigate. It's basically my daily vlogs. And then we've broken up everything from my conference talks to my educational videos to my lives, right? So my lives are now separated between just solo lives. And my guest lives. So my solo lives are very tactical around the job search, how-tos, to-dos, all that jazz. And so I haven't done a LinkedIn and resume series in a bit, so I'm really excited to dive in with y'all. But if you do want other resources to help you on your job search, go to my YouTube, basically youtube.com/taylordesseyn is what it is. I don't know what that C is in there, but it's basically just Taylor Desseyn. And go check out my playlist of my solo shows again. I think there'll be a lot of good information. Um, I think it'll be a lot of good information for you with a job search. So today we're gonna talk about resumes, LinkedIn. So I'm gonna talk about a super high level. I'm here to answer any questions you may have. I've been talking a lot about resumes, a lot about LinkedIn, and so I was like, you know what, any consistent themes I get time and time again, I want to talk about it, um, live. So, uh, also another thing, I'm also going live on the Gun.io Discord at noon today, noon Central. So if you do want to come hang out, I will throw, uh, the invites in the channel. Um, but come, come hang out with me at 12 PM Central, kind of talking about the same thing, to be honest. Um, it's just to the community, but hey, if you want to hang out on a Friday with me, come on, uh, in our Discord. I'm gonna start doing more— I'm gonna start doing more lives in the Discord, so In full transparency, I've been thinking about this. I may not go live on LinkedIn as much on Fridays and may go live in the Discord more, right? So really want to build out the Discord. We have about 800 people in the Gun.io community in the Discord. Would love to have you a part of it. I, of course, will throw the invite up in the comments after the show. So again, please continue to say where you're coming from, where you're watching from. I'd love to hear from you. Becky, it's good to hear from you. Sarah, it's good to see you. Joe, long time no see, my guy. Hopefully you're doing well. Jeremy and Chris, it's great to see y'all this morning. Again, please continue to comment. I always love hanging out with you on a Friday. Again, TikTok is great to see you as well. So again, talking about LinkedIn and resumes today. Before we dive in, want to give a shout out to my partners this morning. First off, That Conference. Thank you again, That Conference, for the coffee sponsor of the show. Appreciate you. Go— I do have some tickets. I will be doing a giveaway here very, very soon for that conference. So more to come there. Probably will be in the Discord, just FYI. So go join the Discord. And then also shout out to Render ATL, the Platinum Premier Pro, whatever, whatever, whatever gem or fancy thing you wanna say. Render, thank you for picking up my show again for the second year in a row. Think South by but in Atlanta. After going to South by in Austin, it's basically South by but Atlanta and all strictly engineering, which is fantastic. So you need to go June 12th through 14th. I will be there. I can't wait to announce in what capacity I'll be there, but I will be there. Very excited about that. It'll be the last show. It'll be the last show. It'll be the last conference I'll be at before my wife has Our second kid. So, all right, uh, what else? Anything? Oh, hey, listen, um, throw up any accomplishments, right? If you, if, if you have done something professionally you want to brag on yourself on, throw it up there. Whether it's you got a promotion or a raise, or you deployed code on a project and you didn't burn the house down, you know, throw it up in the comment. I want to celebrate you. I feel like in today's world, we're always on to the next thing, right? We're always on to Hey, I got the top. I got the job change. When's my next job change? Right? Hey, I got I got my raise. When's my next raise? Right? So please throw it up in the chat. We'd love to celebrate you this morning. So I want to go and get started on resume writing, and and and and I want to talk. I want to go ahead and bring up on ghosted dot live's resume template while we're at it. So let me go and pull that up real quick. Where is it? Where is it? There we go. The unofficial. And again, we need to bring this back. So I'm gonna go ahead and share. Erica, it's good to see you, girl. Great to see. It's great to see y'all this morning. I love. I love Friday hangs. It's probably my favorite. It's probably my favorite episode to do. All right. So we're gonna go ahead and dive in here. So this example is on unghosted.live, right? So unghosted.live is a series. I'm actually gonna throw it up here. unghosted.live is a series that me and my friend Alicia Novin do. We have not done it in a month because things have been crazy, but I wanna go over and why I like this resume template so much, right? So this resume template, is very simple to understand. It's very straightforward. Basically, Alicia Novin, he is a director. He was a director of engineering. Now he's a senior product owner at Microsoft. And, and, and this— and he and I kind of collaborate on this resume template. So he took some of my ideas and I took— and then, and then he obviously implemented some of his ideas. And I love this, right? So I love this, and here's why. So the career summary is so incredibly important, right? Right here, this, this career summary, so important because Because it basically, like, when I open up your resume, when a recruiter opens up your resume, I need to know exactly what you do immediately, whether you're in tech or not, right? I need to know some high-level accomplishments, some keywords, and I need to look at your resume and it needs to scream, hey, this person is a Java developer. Hey, this person is a front-end JavaScript engineer with these technologies, right? Very, very important to put here. Um, it stands out. I will tell you this, I did a one-on-one counseling career session yesterday with somebody. I do do those. If you are interested, please shoot me a DM. But we talked about how important this is because that one individual I was counseling, um, I was like, I was like, man, I, I don't, I don't know what you do. I don't know what you do, right? There's so many different technologies. If I opened up your resume, I would get overwhelmed and I would kind of like, I would kind of like move on, right? It's just the way it is. And so be very specific. Career summary is incredibly important. So let's get into kind of the meat and potatoes. And this is, this is where people really, really struggle. When it comes to resume writing is, is the, the format is where it needs to be. Also, I do need to— Alicia, if you're watching this, I, I need to talk to you about it. We need to take out the italicized. I don't like the italicized. Um, it's, it's, it's a little— it's, it's, it's definitely distracting. Let's keep everything plain text here. But again, technologies recap of all the languages and tech you used. Again, if I'm moving on to your profile and I want, I want to see specifically, okay, This person has done this at this time. These are the technologies they've used, right? And so, and then go and moving on, it says, like I said, don't give a description of the company or describe the generic role that is not needed. Again, if you are a developer, right? I'm trying to think like of some like common theme developers do, but like if you're a developer, you don't put HTML. Like this is just an example. Don't put HTML, CSS. If you're a developer, I'm assuming you know HTML, CSS, right? Chris, it's good to see you, my guy. It's great to see you. Hopefully everything's going well at DigitalOcean. Love keeping up with you guys. All right, so then focus on the wins, right? Focus on the responsibilities, right? The accomplishments, right? Also, 3 to 5 bullet points. You could probably go a little further. Avoid full sentences. When I say full sentences or paragraphs, I just mean like run-on sentences, A lot of y'all write your resume in like paragraph form and it's very hard to read. Again, you don't understand hiring managers and recruiters are looking at 200 to 300 to 400 resumes per job application right now. We do not have time to sort through everything. Like we, we, we just do not. And so like with that being said, please, like when you look at this stuff, like please be specific, straight to the point. Don't use fluff words, right? So for example, I, I think that we put this in here, part of a A 7-person team delivering a product serving 1,500 users, releasing updates every 2 weeks on a code base with more than 150,000 lines of code, 100 classes, and 15 tables. Alicia did that. Alicia added that. He's a tech guy. I did not do that. But that's an example. That is a very specific thing, right? The guy I helped counsel yesterday on a one-on-one, his resume was written so well. It was like, developed 4 apps. That totaled eight million users across four apps that leverage blah da blah da blah da, right? Very specific, very to the point. Again, that is what I want to see. And then again, kind of the same thing here, right? So so so the projects down here, this is for if you're junior here, right? This is this is for this is if you're junior. Another thing too. Oh, so this actually look at this. So I didn't even know Alicia did this. So. This document is formatted. Try to keep things down to one page. So, so here's the deal, right? Alicia and I disagree on this. If you are somewhat senior, if you are somewhat senior in your career, it needs to be more than one page. So the guy that I helped counsel yesterday, very senior in his career, he only had a one-page resume. And I was like, I was like, bro, you have too much good information. You have too much good information to keep it just one page. So again, if you are, if you are hearing this, if you are senior in your career, mid to senior, you do not need just one page resume, right? Um, uh, let's, let's go through these a little bit. I didn't know this was here, so this is good. Don't take up room with a career objective. Yeah, yeah, that's where your professional summary, your career summary needs to go. Don't 5-star rate yourself on languages. Please do not. That is so arbitrary. Some of y'all do like all of this stuff, like I'm a 4-star It's like you're a dang college football recruit, right? It's all subjective. I don't care if you think you're a 4-star outta 5-star in React. Don't put that. Yeah, I love this. If you've been a manager or a team lead, been involved in open source projects, note that leadership. 5 years as a team lead and mentored 2 developers, right? Better use URLs and hypertext links. Love that as well. If you don't have a professional experience or you don't have relevant professional experience and you only have non-tech, swap the professional and project section. Yep. Just like we just said. Uh, oh, here, here is— here's an example. Actually, Alicia, I've never opened this up, right? So this is a junior developer right here. He actually wrote it out. I think this resume looks great. Again, I would take out the italicized font, um, when it comes to your resume. So big thing on your resume that I consistently see: one, formatting. Formatting— there is so much that comes into play when it comes to formatting that is so overlooked. If you look at this resume It is consistently well formatted. There is no crazy spacings. There is not a ton of bold font. It is consistent. The only thing I would change here is all the italicized stuff. So again, keep it simple, very, very short, to the point. Another tip that I would recommend when it comes to writing your resume is to the point, right? So like the, uh, the amount of bullet points that I read in a resume and I tell the person So what, right? So like, I wish I could come up with something on the spot. Okay. So the guy that I mentored yesterday, he was like, he was like, one of his bullet points was like, I'm kind of making this up here. It was like, met with a Scrum, like, like met with upper leadership to discuss strategy, right? It was a little bit more involved than that. But I told him, I said, hey, you have a team lead slash like manager title on your resume. I already figured that you talked to senior leadership. Like, so what? Like, so what that you talked to senior leadership, right? So for me, it was just kind of like, Matt, take that away, right? You wanna give specifics when it comes to your resume and then specifics about your job that already isn't assumed, right? If you're a leader in your organization, I assume you talk to other leaders in your organization. You don't need to put that in your resume. Does that make sense? Another part of your resume writing, again, that I consistently see over— it's okay to go over a page, especially if you're more senior in your career. If you're more junior in your career, like Dave, here, right? Dave, Dave's junior, right? Again, this is just an example resume. This isn't a real person. But so Dave's been coding for, uh, really at this point, uh, you know, at this point, 4 years or 3 years. So, um, so anyways, yeah, I, I, I think again, this is one page. I think this is really, really good. The only thing— oh, and then obviously he has his tech here, which is incredibly important. So that is my thoughts on resume writing. Um, let me know if there's any questions. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen. Uh, there's any questions? Let's see here. Uh, you have my resume? Uh, I don't have your resume. Uh, I don't have your resume immediately available, Chris. Um, but you did have a good resume. Um, all right, so let's talk, let's talk LinkedIn's real quick. Um, again, I mean, let's, uh, let's dive into this again. If there's any questions, uh, please let me know. I'd be glad to answer them. But I, I want to get through LinkedIn's real quick, and I'm going to talk about LinkedIn's at a high level. I'm not necessarily going to share my screen. So LinkedIn's at a high level. There are different thoughts, right? I always caveat this stuff is like, you can take, you can take my things that I'm saying here today and you can shop it around. And people will tell you something different, right? Like, my way is not the highway. I am not the end-all be-all. I am just giving you tips and tricks of what I've seen has worked in my career. I feel like my screen's a little fuzzy right now. So, so let's talk about LinkedIn. For the most part, if you are more senior in your career, if you're more senior in your career, your LinkedIn needs to be a summary of your resume, right? Your LinkedIn's 3 to 4 bullet points, right? I said this to, to this leader that I did one-on-one yesterday, right? Tell me what your position was at a super high level and what you're responsible for, right? So at Gun, I would say, I would say my role is responsible for creating meaningful content to the developer community and also educating hiring managers. Or I would say, I've never done this live, so I would say my role at Gun.io on the first bullet point would be, this is a lot harder to do live, would be creating content and creating content to help drive awareness for software engineers to the platform. as well as consult on a variety of top— a variety of departments within the organization, right? And then what I would do on, on, on bullet point 2, 3 is I would give specific accomplishments, right? So one specific accomplishment is I started a virtual meetup that we've never had before at Gun.io. Another accomplishment is I've driven over 400 engineers to our platform and I've brought in close to probably 30 leads at this point, right? And so those are some specific things. And that's what goes on the LinkedIn, right? Your resume is more in depth, right? Your LinkedIn is just to get me interested to call you, right? Your LinkedIn, your LinkedIn needs to be jam-packed with keywords too. Um, the exercise I did with this person yesterday, my one-on-one, like I Googled and I did an example on LinkedIn when I ran a search and said .NET engineer, right? And we went through profiles that popped up. The more buzzwords that you can cram in your LinkedIn, the more of a chance you're gonna pop up on the first page on LinkedIn, right? LinkedIn is just like Google. If you want to hide a dead body, go on the second page of Google search, right? Or the— or like LinkedIn search. So you got to have all the keywords in there. Now, if you're watching this and you're like, hey, but I'm more junior in my career, then it needs to be— it needs to be more in-depth, right? If you only had one position, if you've only had one technical position in your career and that's it, I need you to give me 6, 7, 8 bullet points, right? And they need to list all the buzzwords, and you need to basically list out everything you did in your job. But again, the more senior you get, the more high-level summary that you can get as well. Also another thing around LinkedIn, make sure the top banner portion you have something, right? So the top banner portion is, I'm gonna share my screen real quick, is let's see here. So up here I need, I wanna update mine eventually, but like see the cowboy hat right there? That needs to be something to tell me about yourself, right? So like, what do you do? Like, so, so the guy yesterday I talked to, I was like, in your, in your top banner portion, again, for those of you watching and/or listening, it's the picture at the very top of your, um, it's at the very, very top of your, uh, LinkedIn. You need to have something that tells me about yourself before diving in. So this person I talked to yesterday, I told him to go to Canva, C-A-N-V-A, go to Canva, create a LinkedIn banner and say, The intersection of product engineering, leadership, and development, right? Because this individual had so much experience and that needs to go there. Because what happens is, is if I pull up your LinkedIn, I wanna know exactly what you do from the banner portion. That banner portion is such a great way. The banner portion is such a great way to like tell your entire career story immediately. I also think it's just fascinating that LinkedIn a text-heavy platform, put a customizable image at the very, very tip top. So take advantage of that. A few more comments. Jason, oh joy, Chris Mars is here. And only include keywords for what you do. I had Java in it for a long time. Yeah. Listen, recruiters, recruiters do a Ctrl+F search in your LinkedIn and your resume. So any tech, any tech that, that, that you haven't touched and/or you don't wanna mess with, do not have in your resume and your LinkedIn, right? If you have ColdFusion and COBOL, like, I would not put that in your resume. So, um, uh, what else? Thomas, good to see you. Yeah, Jason, I would agree. Getting good at Canva can elevate you for sure. Um, what else, uh, regarding LinkedIn? Let me, let me look over real quick. Oh, the title portion of your resume is in— or LinkedIn's incredibly important. So I'm gonna share my screen again. Um, let's see here. All right, right here. All right, so right here, these need engineering engineers quickly, right? So that is incredibly important to put on your, uh, that needs to be like, that is the thing to get people to click on your profile, right? So I'm gonna run a quick example real quick on why that's so important. And for those of you listening to audio only, obviously this will be kind of hard for you to, to catch along with. So when I go to search bar, I'm gonna type in .NET developer. Right? And let's say I need to find a .NET developer in, um, let's say I need to find a .NET developer in Nashville. So I go to, um, all right, so I go, so .NET, so I go to people, .NET developer in the search bar. I click on people, I go to locations and I go to, let's just say I'm gonna do Nashville. Okay. All right, so there's 529 people in the Nashville area on LinkedIn that has .NET developer somewhere in their profile, right? So that— this is why the title portion is so important, right? So if I'm looking for a senior .NET developer, I'm going to look at Aaron's profile immediately. Why? Because he has senior .NET developer in his profile, right? What you don't want is just the word software developer. So like, so like right here, James L just says software developer. Like, I don't know what that means, right? Is that— are you a Do you do Java? I mean, obviously you came up in my .NET search, right? I love Thomas, a team lead .NET developer. Love that. Um, uh, you know, senior .NET developer at Evocore, right? I love that. So that is the title portion, and it's so incredibly important to— for the title portion to have exactly what you do or what you wanna do and the technologies that you're very skilled at. So that is it for me today, folks. That is it. Super short, to the point. going over LinkedIn, going over resumes at super high level. Obviously I could talk. I, I literally, when I give my one-on-one, uh, career sessions, I literally like, I go over 30 minutes of resume writing and 30 minutes of LinkedIn writing. So again, we can go much more in depth about this, but for today's purposes, I just wanna go over it super high level. Uh, let's see here. Obvious question here. What's a good motivation to keep your LinkedIn updated? A good motivation to keep your LinkedIn updated is it is the single most valuable place to look for candidates for recruiters. Like, LinkedIn is where it's at. Like, LinkedIn is the bread and butter when it comes to finding software engineers, uh, on your job search. So again, uh, very, very important, um, to keep your LinkedIn updated. Um, what do you recommend for generalist devs? It's good to see you, buddy. Um, uh, so when it comes to generalist devs, Right now in today's market, people do want specifics, right? So when the market was ripping in 2021, 2022, a lot of hiring managers were like, hey, we just want polyglot engineers. We just want engineers who kind of do everything, right? Not that we're not, we're not in that right now, right? Hiring managers wanna hire somebody to fix a specific need. Um, Brad, who was on my show early on Tuesday of this week, he is, he is potentially getting an offer because they specifically need somebody to come in and help with Remix specifically. Right. And so again, incredibly important for that. So for generalist devs, find 1 or 2 skills that you kind of really more wanna do and then make your LinkedIn or your resume about that. Eric, absolutely. Thanks for tuning in. But again, yes, Jason gave a shout out too. I'll be going live 12:00 PM Central on the Gun.io Discord today. We're gonna get into a little bit more tactical stuff. I wanna answer specific questions that you have. So again, I'm gonna post a Discord link here after I'm done. But y'all have a good one. Hopefully you learned something here. If this episode resonated with you, please share it on your LinkedIn feed. Um, but again, as always, appreciate y'all's support. Y'all have a wonderful, wonderful weekend, and I'll see y'all next week. Peace.