I was going to write a long and detailed post about how so many of these things are so very wrong from a technical standpoint, but basically, let me sum up the

I was going to write a long and detailed post about how so many of these things are so very wrong from a technical standpoint, but basically, let me sum up the recruiting industry in a single quote from this material: > Watch for spelling and grammar. [..] After conducting my own A/B tests on this matter, the data showed that candidates who had untidy resumes faired less (sic!) than those with well written ones. Edit: I was going to write a longer post about what I am more interested in seeing as an engineer who does the interviewing. But most of it was obvious stuff. Instead, here's what I don't look at: - What libraries you used. Languages, maybe -- libraries? If you're past junior level, I expect you'll be able to pick up a complex one, in a field you're familiar with, in a week or two. - Length of past tenures. I gave favourable feedback for a lot of kids who, early in their careers, left from two or three jobs in a row because they were hired by large companies who then proceeded to give them completely uninteresting work that was entirely below their programming skills, without any mentoring, any meaningful source of professional growth and any timeframe for when they'll get to do some actual programming. I'm talking kids who, fresh out of school, could write a decent kernel driver, but were asked to write automated tests for REST APIs. I was never wrong about this. - Hackatons, coding competitions and the like. The former are entirely unverifiable. I've seen plenty of people claiming they went to this hackathon and wrote this application that could potentially solve the problem of water crisis in Africa, using advanced GIS algorithms and numerical optimization and machine learning and whatnot. One of them even showed me the app on their phone. Then they don't know how to iterate through a list or find the race condition in three lines of code which contain literally nothing but a function name, an initialization, and a race condition. Copy-pasting from Stack Overflow is a useful skill to have when it sits on top of other skills. The latter tend to be completely unrelated to programming in the real world. - The length of the resume. If you have enough relevant experience to fill four pages of resume, then write four damn pages of resume. A one-page resume that drops three pages of relevant stuff will put you in the same basket as someone who can barely fill that page. It's not ballast, it's stuff I can ask you about in an interview. - Layout creativity, cleanliness, typography, visual identity and the like. Pick a CV template for Word (or, if you want me to instantly like you, LaTeX). This is Andrew S. Tanenbaum's resume: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/cv.pdf https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/cv.pdf . When you can sport one that's more impressive than his in terms of content, look into making it pretty, too.