IT Specialist Resume (CV)

How to Sell Yourself at Twice the Price: CV Writing Guidelines for IT Professionals

Is selling yourself profitably an invaluable talent, a useful skill, or just pure speculation? Whatever your opinion, the fact remains: the people who manage to sell themselves for the highest price get the best jobs and earn the biggest salaries. So why don’t we take note of a few of these tricks?

Down with mistakes!

Before you begin polishing your resume and bringing it to perfection, you need to first address common mistakes. Otherwise, it can be funny: you might have some sales-worthy wording, but the next section contains obvious errors.

• Lack of specifics

The first and perhaps most devastating mistake is a lack of specificity. Employers are looking for real professionals with a clear and concise set of skills and experience. General and vague résumés are useless—these resumes end up in the trash.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you’re a data scientist working with Python. In your experience section, you want to mention that you developed a customer clustering model to improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Compare these two statements:

Conducting client clustering;

Conducted client clustering, which increased the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by 15%.

Obviously, the second is more informative and carries more value for the employer. They understand that you didn’t just do something, but that you completed it and even achieved tangible results.

• Excessive pathos

The second common mistake is an overabundance of professional jargon and high-flown expressions. While you shouldn’t avoid professionalisms entirely, using them every other word is overkill. Just look at this phrase:

Trained a convolutional network to extract embeddings for solving a downstream face verification problem.

Did it evoke positive feelings in you? Or do you feel more like the author isn’t particularly good at communicating with people or is just showing off?

• Unnecessary information

We’ve already discussed the problem of excessive brevity above. But the opposite situation also exists: when a candidate writes too much unnecessary information, such as unclear personal details.

Such information might include a description of your hobbies, how you spend your free time, your grades in elementary school, and so on. Employers aren’t particularly interested in all of this—they’re more interested in your achievements, skills, and experience.

Of course, your hobbies and personal life define you as a person. But this only becomes a concern for employers later on—you can discuss this during a face-to-face interview with HR or your future manager. We recommend our clients avoid cluttering their resumes with this information and reserve it for a personal conversation.

How to improve your resume, with examples

There are other mistakes you can make, but these are the most obvious, so let’s move on to the next step: selling your professionalism.

As Shakespeare said (almost):

All life is a labor market, and the people in it are traders.

But seriously, our goal is to grab the attention of recruiters and potential colleagues on just one A4 sheet of paper, using a minimum number of words, to stand out from the crowd and highlight our professionalism. As you can imagine, there’s no room for poor wording or ambiguous words in a resume. Everything must be clear, to the point, and compelling.

To ensure this is the case, you need to follow a few simple rules:

• Use perfective verbs. For example, not “developed,” but “developed.” Not “creating a program,” but “created a program.” No one cares what you did. Everyone wants to know what you did.
• Provide specific results where possible. If you “conducted a marketing campaign,” then state that it “led to an 8% increase in revenue.” If you “implemented new technology on the website,” explain how it impacted speed/performance/bugs.
• Include the names of the tools and technologies you use. Of course, you should have a separate section on your resume listing all your skills. However, if you change “created a dashboard” to “created a dashboard in Power BI,” the employer will immediately see that you’re not just vaguely familiar with Power BI, but have actually used it. This means you’ll be able to use it in your new job.

Overall, by following these three simple tips, you can improve your resume and increase its conversion rate.

Note: Resume conversion is the number of responses from employers divided by the number of responses you receive. If you send out 30 applications and only three respond, there’s clearly something wrong with your resume.

Let’s look at an example and combine all three rules.

Option “Before”:

Creation of an analytical system for the marketing department.

Option “After”:

Developed interactive dashboards for the marketing department in Power BI, which reduced costs by 27% and increased ROI by 13%.

When we review our clients’ resumes, we stumble upon the same mistakes time and time again. A little effort in wording can significantly improve the quality of your resume. This leads to increased employer demand for you. And, of course, to successful employment—that’s what we’re here for.

Why you shouldn’t be modest

Okay, we’re all clear about achievements and skills. Let’s move on.

There are several sections on your resume where you provide additional information, such as “Information About You” or “Additional Qualifications.” These are often filled with generalities or even unnecessary information. But remember, we only have one A4 sheet of paper! Let’s make the most of the available space.

Here are some options for what can be described in these sections:

• Victories in competitions/nominations (naturally, work-related);
• Participation in exhibitions, conferences, and master classes;
• Information about your pet projects;
• Publications, scientific activity, sphere of scientific interests;
• List your hobbies if they’re related to your work. For example, if you work as an analyst and are interested in machine learning models.

You’ll agree, it’s much better to see “Winner of the Newcomer of the Year at Company X” or “Author of an article on recurrent neural networks in Journal Y” than “I love planting flowers on weekends.” Although flowers have something special about them, too. 🙂

There’s no need to be modest here. You’re not bragging about yourself or flaunting your accomplishments. You’re simply showing what you can do, what you know, and what you’ve accomplished. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s wonderful!

Where to submit a resume (CV) online

Today, there are a large number of online resume-building services that offer convenient tools for quickly organizing your experience into a structured document.

Conclusion

Naturally, these aren’t the only areas for improvement for your resume. We’ve listed just a few common mistakes and provided basic recommendations to help you turn your resume into a sales presentation. Of course, a huge number of other factors also influence impressions—design, text readability, word count, grammatical errors, and so on.

Generally, creating a resume is an iterative process. You edit, evaluate with a critical eye, edit again, and so on endlessly. Over time, you grow as a professional, adding some information and removing others. Your resume grows with you. But it’s always important to remember the things we described above; otherwise, you’re likely to lose out to your competitors:

• Be specific, don’t use vague language;
• Avoid too many professionalisms.
• Avoid including unnecessary information – save precious space.
• Use perfective verbs in your statements.
• Provide tangible results in numbers where possible;
• Add the names of tools and technologies to demonstrate your expertise.
• Use additional sections of your resume to your advantage – convince the recruiter that you’re even cooler than you seem at first glance!

As the saying goes, “clothes make you feel good, but you’re sent off by your wits.” Your resume is your clothes. So make sure they’re clean, neat, and inviting, and you’ll be guaranteed offers from top companies. After all, it’s all down to your professionalism. After all, it’s the wits that make you feel good…