You Don't Need A Two-Page Resume

Over the years, I've had many resume iterations. As I moved into my new role last month, I went to update my resume — That's when I realized it was terrible.

This is going to be a sort of resume retrospective. Basically, I'm just going to roast myself. Laugh at my mistakes and learn from my failures.

2016 Resume#

This was my resume out of college which helped me land my first full-time engineering job. There were more resume iterations before this, obviously, but they were terrible. Let me save some dignity.

Okay, I'll start with the good.

• It's one page. The layout is clean and comfortable to read. Good job, Lee.
• The job title is more prominent than the employer.
• Most bullet points are useful (not too much content).
• Projects and GPA are still relevant because I'm fresh out of college.

What about the bad?

• This thing is written with LaTeX. Why? Because that's what everyone on Reddit did. Talk about over-engineering.
• My middle name is not relevant. My name isn't that generic.
• My phone number is not needed. This trend persisted for a while.
• Some of the bullet points talk about what I did instead of the impact I made.
• "Videographer" is not relevant to the position I'm interviewing for.

2017 Resume#

In 2017, I got the bright idea to re-design my resume. The content didn't change much.

There's some good:

• At a glance, you can quickly parse the content.
• Easy to read font.
• Education moved down now that I have a full-time job.

There are some issues, though:

• This custom Photoshop design did not work well with Applicant Tracking Systems, or ATS for short. Which is, ya know, the whole point 🤦🏻‍♂️
• The location of the companies is not relevant.

2018 Resume#

In 2018, I switched jobs. Time to dust off the ol' resume. But, just when you thought it couldn't get worse...

I made this thing with InDesign.

It had an embedded font. Well, it turns out the embedded font didn't work in Firefox. So the resume was basically unreadable in some cases.

I don't have much good to say here, so let's just go straight to the bad:

• The about section is a complete waste of space. Save it for LinkedIn.
• References are not needed on the resume.
• I'm not sure why I decided to drop the start and end dates from my work positions. "3 years" isn't very descriptive.
• The GitHub link is unnecessary. You can find it on my website.

2019 Resume#

Brace yourself. We've now reached peak monstrosity.

I finally gave up on custom designs and opted to use a service called Standard Resume. It was easy, required little maintenance, and worked much better with ATS.

Plus, I thought, let's add every single thing I've ever accomplished. I committed the ultimate sin. I made a two-page resume.

Some things are good:

• The skills section made a comeback. ATS love those buzzwords.
• Some of the newer bullet points have excellent metrics.
• It's a wonderful design. Easy to read.

But others are bad. Really bad:

• I've been out of college long enough that I can drop the internships.
• Instead of putting freelance dev work, I put a project (dsmtech).
• GPA is not relevant anymore. Then again... was it ever relevant?
• Did I mention it's 2 pages? No one has time for that.

2020 Resume#

That brings us to now. Behold, this single sheet of (digital) paper.

I made this with Pages on Mac. No custom fonts. No crazy design. I'd like to think it's the culmination of all the points made above.

• It's easy to update and maintain.
• The font is readable, and there's a good use of bold and italic.
• Unnecessary information is omitted (GPA, projects, internships, phone number).
• More relevant information is included (skills, freelance work).
• Industry normalized job title (Software Engineer III -> Senior Software Engineer).
• There are clear start/end dates with the same format throughout.
• Proper use of whitespace.

You don't need a two-page resume.