In the Waterloo co-op program, you’ll have 6 internships, which means you’ll have to create 6 resumes, and interview with companies 6 times. I’ve reviewed a lot of resumes over the years and I’ve seen that good resumes follow a certain pattern.

The Resume is not a Summary

The resume is an advertisement highlighting your best relevant qualities, not a summary of everything you’ve done. Recruiters have to sift through hundreds of resumes, and they don’t have time to read every one. To save on time, they shortlist a handful of resumes by quickly skimming over them, and they don’t consider the rest. The hardest part of finding an internship is getting your resume into their shortlist. Once you’re there, it’s very likely that you’ll get an interview, and if you get the interview it’s likely you’ll get the job. If a company receives 200 resumes, they will shortlist 30 of them, interview 10 candidates, and give out 5 offers. Make the resume look really good for the snap-judgement phase by highlighting your best qualities, instead of summarizing all your accomplishments.

Concise Format

Keep the resume to 1 column and 1 page. 2 columns are difficult to read, and you don’t have enough experience to span multiple pages.

At the top should be your name, your program and current term number.

Next should be a list of technologies and languages that you know. Recruiters will often quickly scan through resumes looking for a certain technology, so having this information right at the top is useful for them. With technologies/languages, the more you have the better.

Then should be your job experience: past internships, and other tech-related jobs if you have any. Don’t put unrelated jobs unless you’re looking for your first internship. Put the company name, job title, the dates you worked there, and the city. Later on I’ll go into how to best describe your job experience.

After that should be your side projects, which are especially important if you don’t have a lot of internships under your belt. For your projects, mention what technologies you used, what it does, when you built it, and any difficult challenges you had.

Then should be your education, and this is low in your resume since the recruiter will know you are from Waterloo, and will know what program you’re in from the application package. This should also include your cumulative average if it’s above 85%.

Last should be any awards you have from university or high school, particularly, waterloo CS/math contests.

Do not write about miscellaneous skills, do not list your hobbies, and do not put an objective. No one makes an employment decision based on hobbies, and if they do, they will ask you about it in the interview.

Writing about Work Experience

Describing your technologies, languages, projects, education, and awards is pretty straightforward, they are just a list. The content writing comes in when you’re describing your job experience. I see the same mistakes over and over.

Don’t talk about what you worked on, talk about the impact you had. The first line (or two) should describe your general job, and every line after that should be phrased like the following: <Impact> by building <x feature> using <y technology>. For example, you could say Reduced Messenger background data usage by 1-2% by building Invertible Bloom Filters for set reconciliation. Having a numerical metric is awesome, but impact of any kind is great. When talking about your general job, you can also emphasize how important your team is by talking about the impact of the team (number of users of product for example). What I don’t like to see is a long list of Developed x, Implemented y, etc. Phrase it so the impact is first in the line, because you should keep your most important information to the left, and if the reader is still interested, they will continue reading the line.

TL;DR

Keep it to one page, talk about impact instead of a list of everything you built, include numerical metrics where possible, include keywords (languages, technologies) as much as possible, and keep the best info to the top-left of the resume.

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