1 - Write the Curriculum

Authors: Remo, Stefano Ivancich

🎞️ Watch the presentation on youtube: link

This section is a step-by-step guide on how to write a successful CV.

Once you have written your CV, don’t hesitate to post it on our Discord group (channel #cv-review) to get suggestions and advices on how to improve it.

Don’t lie!

• After passing the interviews, companies will rely on an external background check agency (e.g. Hireright, Accurate, etc.) to verify the authenticity of the content.
• You will have to insert information from former employers on a portal, and you will have to provide official documentation on everything written in the CV (preferably in English): degree certificate, old employment contracts, old pay stubs, citizenship (residence permit), etc.
• It may also happen that they send an e-mail or call your former employers; they won’t ask anything in depth, usually it is something along the lines of “Is it true that NAME worked as a ROLE from mm/yyyy to mm/yyyy for you?”.
• If something is true but it cannot be proved quickly and easily, do not put it on your CV. There will also be a criminal check in which you will have to provide criminal records and pending charges, so keep in mind to have these documents at hand. Some of these, such as the confirmation that you are a university student, or your English grade average may take weeks to retrieve. Even if you get away with it, in the future (e.g. layoff times), they may do a background check on current employees to find grounds for dismissal. Usually investment banks do annual background check on all employees.

File name: firstName_lastName_Resume.pdf (e.g. John_Doe_Resume.pdf).

Use a readable template: is going to be read from both the recruiter and the software that is analyzing the cv. SUggested templates

• Awesome CV
• Serador
• techResume - Based on AltaCV by Alex Calabrese
• YAAC: Another Awesome CV

To open them, click on “Open As Template” to start editing in Overleaf.

Avoid using exotic templates in an attempt to be noticed. Just 1 page

Your CV content should follow this general order:

1. Relevant personal information
2. Work Experience
3. Education
4. Personal projects
5. Achievements
6. (optional) Current hard and soft skills
7. (optional) Hobbies

Add only:

• email
• phone number
• website
• github
• linkedin

Due to discriminations do NOT include:

• Age, date of birth, or any other references to your age
• Marital status
• Nationality
• Photo: apart from discriminations, many ATS cannot read images, so they will get confused and discard your CV; 88% of CVs are rejected if they include a photo [source]
• Address: companies generally tend to reject people based on their location; they usually tend to prefer applicants who already live in the same city/country as the company. So if you want to apply for companies in a specific city (egs London) it might be useful add your address to London (even a fake one).
• Current location unless you need a Visa
• Social Media: except for carreer like LinkedIn and GitHub)
• Signature

Not include a full history of every role you’ve ever had. Include only the relevant positions-the ones that make you a more impressive candidate.

Job title: the job you were actually doing. If the title was “full-stack” but you were actually doing back-end, put Back-End. If the company ask for clarification tell the truth, they will understand.

• (borderline) If you were an Intern at FAANG leave the title “intern” otherwise take it off.
• Don’t put that you are self-employed or CEO of your company, because if you are looking for a job that means that you are a bad CEO (you are a crappy worker, boss, you don’t understand business…), so leave the name of the company and that you were an employee.
  Self-employment doesn’t signal you know how to work as part of a team or follow directions other people give. You need to re-do your resume and interview talking points to counter this potential narrative.
• Don’t put career progression unless it’s very fast, just put your last job title.
• If you have a job gap: change the end date to “current”, then when you are at the interview explain why there is a gap, otherwise they don’t even invite you in the interview.

For each role, insert 3-4 bullet points about your accomplishments with the following format: “Accomplished X by implementing Y which led to Z” Show what you did, how you did it, and what the results were (in numbers, %, …).

• “Developed and deployed an machine learning model to mitigate first-party fraud by $2.7M in Q4’ 19.”
• “Increased test coverage of the Android app by 80%, which reduced bug tickets from users by 50%”
• “Built a Node.js API and microservice from scratch with 70% + unit test coverage to serve 100,000+ Users”
• “improved performance to 10,000 req/s with this technique”
• “I’ve been the engineer working for 6 months on feature X for project Y, that was launched in December 2018. Gross revenues for our company increased by Y% within 1 year from its launch”

Types of impact:

• People impact:
  • NO: “Coached the team on how to use Jira and how to check a burndown chart.”
  • YES: “Helped the team achieve a X% increase in velocity through the use of the burndown chart and Jira.”
• Engineering Impact:
  • NO: “Reduced app size by 4.2 MBs”
  • YES: “Reduced app size by 4.2 MBs, that is correlated to a 0.4% increase in signups.”
• Business Impact:
  • NO: “Reduced the number of support tickets”
  • YES: “Reduced the number of support tickets by 10% for users in the experiment, resulting in $2M annualized cost savings.”

Info to include: Tools used, Industry worked in, of users supported (Artists? Accountants? Executives?), Geographic area worked, Size of company, Size of department, Size of team.

If possible put links that prove those metrics and statements.

Use ChatGPT to help you with this. But Be careful! ChatGPT uses a lot of qualitative adjectives to make the sentence look cool, this is bad. Your accomplishment must be MEASURABLE not qualitative.

• Give me 5 alternative to the following CV bullet point without adjectives, it should follow the pattern “Accomplished X by implementing Y which led to Z”: <your sentence>

Action verbs:

• Management/Leadership Skills: administered, analyzed, appointed, approved, assigned, attained, authorized, chaired, considered, consolidated, contracted, controlled, converted, coordinated, decided, delegated, developed, directed, eliminated, emphasized, enforced enhanced established, executed, generated, handled, headed, hired, hosted, improved, incorporated, increased, initiated, inspected, instituted, led, managed, merged, motivated, organized, originated, overhauled, oversaw, planned, presided, prioritized, produced, recommended, reorganized, replaced, restored, reviewed, scheduled streamlined, strengthened, supervised, terminated
• Communication/People Skills: addressed, advertised, arbitrated, arranged, articulated, authored, clarified, collaborated, communicated, composed, condensed, conferred, consulted, contacted, conveyed, convinced, corresponded, debated, defined, described, developed, directed, discussed, drafted, edited, elicited, enlisted, explained, expressed, formulated, furnished, incorporated, influenced, interacted, interpreted, interviewed, involved, joined, judged, lectured, listened, marketed, mediated, moderated, negotiated, observed, outlined, participated, persuaded, presented, promoted, proposed, publicized, reconciled, recruited, referred, reinforced, reported, resolved, responded, solicited, specified, spoke, suggested, summarized, synthesized, translated, wrote
• Research Skills: analyzed, clarified, collected, compared, conducted, critiqued, detected, determined, diagnosed, evaluated, examined, experimented, explored, extracted, formulated, gathered, identified, inspected, interpreted, interviewed, invented, investigated, located, measured, organized, researched, searched, solved, summarized, surveyed, systematized, tested
• Technical Skills: adapted, assembled, built, calculated, Conceptualized, Coded, computed, conserved, constructed, converted, debugged, designed, determined, developed, engineered, fabricated, fortified, installed, maintained, operated, overhauled, printed, programmed, rectified, regulated, remodeled, repaired, replaced, restored, solved, specialized, standardized, studied, upgraded, utilized
• Teaching Skills: adapted, advised, clarified, coached, communicated, conducted, coordinated, critiqued, developed, enabled, encouraged, evaluated, explained, facilitated, focused, guided, individualized, informed, instilled, instructed, motivated, persuaded, set goals, simulated, stimulated, taught, tested, trained, transmitted, tutored
• Financial/Data Skills: administered, adjusted, allocated, analyzed, appraised, assessed, audited, balanced, calculated, computed, conserved, corrected, determined, developed, estimated, forecasted, managed, marketed, measured, planned, programmed, projected, reconciled, reduced, researched, retrieved
• Creative skills: acted, adapted, began, combined, conceptualized, condensed, created, customized, designed, developed, directed, displayed, drew, entertained, established, fashioned, formulated, founded, illustrated, initiated, instituted, integrated, introduced, invented, modeled, modified, originated, performed, photographed, planned, revised, revitalized, shaped, solved
• Helping skills: adapted, advocated, aided, answered, arranged, assessed, assisted, cared for, clarified, coached, collaborated, contributed, cooperated, counseled, demonstrated, diagnosed, educated, encouraged, ensured, expedited, facilitated, familiarize, furthered, guided, helped, insured, intervened, motivated, provided, referred, rehabilitated, presented, resolved, simplified, supplied, supported, volunteered
• Organization/Detail Skills: approved, arranged, cataloged, categorized, charted, classified, coded, collected, compiled, corresponded, distributed, executed, filed, generated, implemented, incorporated, inspected, logged, maintained, monitored, obtained, operated, ordered, organized, prepared, processed, provided, purchased, recorded, registered, reserved, responded, reviewed, routed, scheduled, screened, set up, submitted, supplied, standardized, systematized, updated, validated, verified
• More verbs for Accomplishments: achieved, completed, expanded, exceeded, improved, pioneered, reduced (losses), resolved (issues), restored, spearheaded, succeeded, surpassed, transformed, won

No beginning dates:: as they can be used to infer your age. If they need this information they can obtain it during the background check.

End date: next year, beacuse some companies only wants interns at the last year of university.

GPA: no if too low.

If top student: indicate the percentage, for example: “in the 5% of top best students.”

Leadership: indicate if you chaired any club or initiated something significant (volunteering, charity, etc.)

Scholarships: indicate how much and what was the competition to get it. “Won the Mario Rossi scholarchip, selected among 500 students”

Do not put elementary, middle, and high school.

Include your 2 - 4 most significant projects. State what the project was and which languages or technologies it employed. Including details such as whether the project was an individual or a team project, and whether it was completed for a course or independently. These details are not required, so only include them if they make you look better. Independent projects are generally preferred over course projects, as it shows initiative. Include the link to:

• GitHub repository
• Live demo
• Article / Publication
• Video demo (30 sec)

Put a link on the github repo and on the live demo or video presentation, in interviews they can ask you in depth about the code, make you run it and debug it. Most recruiters don’t know any code make sure to include screenshots in the repo or have your application hosted somewhere like heroku in case they do decide to take a look.

It’s important to also put them on GitHub so that people reading your CV can view them.

Name of the project: should imply what it does, e.g. “e-commerce for a wine store”. No strange names or acronims.

Links to the project should be in the following format: [code | article | paper | demo | video | presentation].

If you have publications, list them naming all authors but remember to highlight your name.

Hackatons, math olimpiads, or you got a scholarship.
As many recruiters have very little time to dedicate to your CV and they are also busy with other tasks, they mainly look for successfull, competitive, actionable and measurable achievements.

If possible add links that prove those metrics and statements.

Example:

• NO: Volunteering into the Cancer charity organziation
  • YES: Lead a team of 5 people for a Cancer charity fundraiser, by leading a campain on social media, raised 150K.
• NO: Playing chess during free time
  • YES: Chess player ranked among top 1% in 2024 FIDE ratings.
• NO: Passionated about running and marathons
  • YES: Competed in 41 half-marathons, European U23 Championships Silver medallist

Software: Be conservative about what software you list, and understand what’s appropriate for the company

Programming Languages: Don’t put the percentage or your level of knowledge, because:

• is not really required
• they are searching for key-word
• let them grade you at the interview (some companies require very basic knowledge other very deep)
• don’t tell them you are bad in something before you even get there.
• ATS software get confused with infographics

This is not good: “Languages: Java (expert), C++ (beginner), JavaScript (prior experience)”

Soft skills: Put them only if you have space left. The problem with soft skills is that they are very important, but you can’t prove them. And everybody is putting the same ones: team working, leadership, …

ATS collect and store CVs in a database. Sometimes they may also be stored long after the original job you applied for is filled.

Corporate recruiters or hiring managers can then search and sort through the resumes in a number of ways, depending on the system they’re using.

ATS automatically compare your CV to the job description, and then rank each applicant based on how well it scores based on the job description.

Usually recruiters filter resumes by searching for key skills and titles.

You can use ResumeWorded or EnhanCV to get a score on how compatible your CV is.

Keep your CV long enough to tell your story, under 10 years of experience one page is usually enough.

Don’t put anything older than 3/4 years, unless they are valid and relevant experiences.

Writing your CV in LaTeX allows you to add comments to hide parts of the CV that are not interesting and/or relevant to the position.

Carefully write your CV to match the job description every time you apply, search for matching keywords and requirements and put them in when applicable.

Use both the long and short version of acronyms (e.g. “Master of Business Administration (MBA)”) for maximum searchability.

Use Bitly so you can see who clicked your links and when.

In this section we post the resumes of our community participants who have succeeded in obtaining an internship or full-time position at a Big Tech. If you would like to contribute and post your resume here, please send it via our discord or open a pull request.

• Stefano I.

• Work at Google — Resume Tips
• Google Students Virtual Series: Building your technical career & CV workshop