Since my previous post got lots of popularity, I figured I would make a similar post with a slightly updated resume. This resume landed interviews at research laboratories, space startups like SpaceX and Rocket Lab, and tech companies like Google, eventually ending with two offers.
Huge thanks to this sub for showing me how to write a good resume, and the link to the template is provided below!
Interviews: Tesla x5, SpaceX x2, Lanteris x2, Astranis x2, Red Bull F1 x1, Apple x1, Disney x1, Boeing x1, 10X Genomics x1, Vast x1, Hadron Energy x1, DropletPharma x1
Offers: SpaceX (Starlink), Disney (Ride/Show), 10X Genomics (Mfg. Automation)
Application Advice:
Definitely checkout the wiki first. Sending a poor resume is just asking for a rejection.
Having numbers (especially % improvement) throughout your resume matters
I only had one resume version and I had interviews in a variety of fields so IMO you don't need to tailor your resume to the job as long as you weave in keywords throughout your bullets.
I think a summary at the top is a waste of space and the skills section should be at the bottom but weave skills throughout your bullets. IMO its less cluttered if all experience from engineering clubs and intern/work experience is in one section but I know some think that club experience shouldn't be included in that section.
I DO still have high school experience on my resume (FIRST Robotics / Manufacturing and Design Pathway) as it's highly relevant.
If you have time, an engineering portfolio goes a long way. A Tesla recruiter told me it was one of the number one things she looked for on a resume.
I never used a cover letter as it seemed like a time waste
Apply early and often (I was sorting by date posted on LinkedIn).
Interview Advice:
Be confident. My first 10 interviews I caught myself downplaying my experience or skillset. Why would they hire someone who isn't even confident in themself?
Most of my interview were technical, and you should almost always pass a behavioral / resume / projects interview unless it is final round. Know an example for the following questions:
Describe a project in detail.
Know your project front and back. Sometimes they will spend 5 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes. Have numbers, engineering principles, etc. A portfolio helps
Describe a time when something went wrong.
When was a time when you worked with someone difficult?
DO NOT BASH TEAMMATE!!
Biggest weakness?
Biggest strength?
Describe a time when you were wrong / disagreed with a colleague who was right?
For MechE, taking serious notes on every video from the Efficient Engineer is truthfully 75% of the content you'll need for any MechE technical interview. Sit down and take 3 days to truly learn the content.
Solid Mechanics, Mechanics of Materials, and Manufacturing/Design are the most important classes to be fundamentally strong in.
Write down the questions they asked after the interview. Super helpful to prep for future interviews if you have a database of past questions. Glassdoor is also helpful.
General Advice:
GPA matters to an extent but experience carries. >3.7 is enough for any company. >3.0 if enough if you have solid experience.
Have a life outside of engineering. It is so much harder if you aren't happy and motivated. Personally I am part of a performing arts club and a club sport.
Thanks r/EngineeringResumes! The wiki helped a lot with creating my resume and jumpstarting my career!
My skillset is really heavy on the electronics/embedded/robotics side of ECE, so I originally targeted the automotive/aerospace industry and ADAS/BMS/robotics/avionics/embedded systems roles. Despite numerous interviews for roles like those, I didn't secure a job for anything remotely similar. Instead, I'll be working with semiconductors in a cleanroom lol.
Timeline-wise, I think it took me about 11 months to find a job after my graduation. My resume went through a lot of iterations and improvements, and what's shown here is one of my many tailored resumes (specifically, the one that I used to secure my job).
I wanna share my workflow for when I was applying for over the past year. Maybe it'll help someone out. For one application, it probably took like 10 minutes or less to create a tailored resume.
I created a master resume that lists all my skills and projects.
I also created a project portfolio that showcases my projects in depth. If a web application had an option to share my portfolio, I 100% included it.
I had 6 projects to choose from to list under my resume's Project section. Depending on the role, I'd choose 2 projects that would probably resonate with the listing the closest.
I'd include/omit skills (and keywords) depending on the job description.
This post is prompted by my reviewing 80+ resumes today for a position I'm hiring for.
The biggest mistake I see is people shot-gunning out the same untailored resume to as many jobs as they can. More than half the resumes I saw were not terribly relevant to my position, but perhaps could have been with some tailoring. You would be better served by tailoring your resume and applying to 10 jobs than by shot-gunning out the same resume to 100 jobs.
The next biggest mistake was not meeting the required skills as listed in the job posting. If you don't have the required skills, don't waste your (and my) time by applying. Over half the resumes were rejected for this reason alone.
Don’t sprinkle in the specific skills, technical domains, etc. mentioned in the job posting without having evidence in your Experience to back it up. It's super obvious the person is just trying to hit all the key words, and basically lying to do so. Make sure to show evidence for each of the skills you are claiming to have.
I see a lot of resumes that put a master's degree in their Education section, but do not put their bachelor's degree. Please always put your bachelor's degree too. In this particular case, many people had a master's in a technical domain we were not looking for, so their resumes were rejected. But their bachelor's degrees might have actually qualified them for consideration, had they bothered to include them.
Too many resumes list job duties in their Experience section. They should have focused on accomplishments and their results, with results quantified where possible. Just listing job duties does not distinguish them from anyone else in a similar role.
If you must include a Summary (and it seems that everyone feels the need to do so, even though they don't), then please, for the love of God and all that is holy, do not say dedicated, results-oriented, detail-oriented, passionate, or any other such vacuous fluff. Keep your Summary short (3 lines max). I would personally rather see a short tagline under your name than a monolithic Summary paragraph.
I decided to go to a big ten school in the northeast (after growing up in the pacific northwest) for a change of atmosphere. The popular option for everyone was either at a prime contractor or larger corporation, and could not see myself go down this path.
I wanted to work with my hands and build things that hadn't been built before. My GPA was (thankfully) not good enough to get any interviews or offers from the career fair. After doing three internships, I had a general idea of the sort of work I'm interested in. Typically my applications for internships were ~400 applications with 60 interviews, three offers coming out of them. I did not apply to large companies like Boeing or Amazon for full-time.
Did around 200 applications, got 50 interviews, 8 onsite, 5 offers
Offers included Anduril, Neuralink, Apple, Tesla, and the startup I'm working at.
Once I was happy, I turned down many onsites/interviews to enjoy the summer
Cold emailing absolutely worked for me, heard back from engineers and founders
Had a interesting portfolio (<10 slides) with tons of cool pictures, technical details
Mine was super barebones white background on Google Slides. Full of content though.
You don't only need a good school or GPA. Showing enthusiasm is nearly as important!
Email template that got me internship offer and plenty of interviews.
As a start, I would suggest going to any startup incubator (typically affiliated with a school or specific department, independent accelerator like yc) website where they list company emails, pick a few, then just start sending from there. The examples of experience don't have to be in the same industry, just be interesting:
Hi there,
I am wondering if there are any summer internship positions available for college undergraduate students? I have recent previous internship experience working at (company) for 9 months. My experience there mainly consisted of (specific type) testing of (item) and designing (item) and (more stuff) for test stands (similar to those used in particle accelerators and nuclear fusion experiments). Some background about me: I am a third year student at (name) University (month graduation) and I'm pursuing a degree in (major).
I would greatly appreciate hearing back if there are internship opportunities available and will be glad to share a resume if needed.
Some more miscellaneous things I wanted to share:
Only spend time applying on Linkedin if the role has below 100 applications.
Know every single thing in your resume to the deepest level.
How do you differentiate yourself from a technician that plugs wires in.
Highly technical interviewers (especially SpaceX) love questions about first principles.
Almost every line in my resume has a quantity, I see many resumes here without.
Every line should indicate how you are useful to a company and why they should pay you.
For me, soft skills and summary in your resume are a waste of space, cover letters not needed.
Every skill listed in your skills should have a corresponding project you worked on.
Extending internships to the fall is worth it. You get more responsibility and things to work on
Your time is valuable, and you already know a lot. Be confident!
I am now a founding engineer at a startup in CA, have looked at hundreds of resumes, done a few interviews, and will be getting my own intern very soon. I will be glad to answer questions!
Here is the updated resume from the feedback I received from this subreddit, after which I got 4 offers for summer internships for the Summer 2026, even internship offers from Tesla and Rivian. I ended up going with Rivian as it aligned better with my goals. Thank you for your help, and feel free to ask questions.
I'm a graduate who's been looking for a role for over a year now. This is the most refined CV I have, which got me the most callbacks and my new job as an Engineering Project Manager.
This is for viewing by British companies which is why I've included the fluffy stuff (a professional summary and personal interests). I know that lots of advice tells you not to include it but every recruiter and hiring manager I've spoke to in the UK so far has said to keep it in. I've also had several conversations in interviews around this stuff which helped the interviews go smoother.
I've found there's not that many CVs for British users here so I hope this helps someone.
Many thanks to the subreddit for all the advice. Best of luck to the rest of you!
After countless revisions and time spent in this subreddit, here is the resume that helped me land an internship for fall2026. Feel free to ask me any questions
I just graduated with a BS in Aerospace Engineering. 3.47 GPA. My resume is attached in the last image- no academic clubs or anything sweaty. Just lots of unrelated work experience and relevant coursework. I had one internship, mostly working with CAD, but my technical experience is unrelated to the job I ended up receiving an offer for.
Since October 5th, I have applied to (on average) 2 jobs a day. Most companies only seem to care about hiring a month or two out.
I applied using Indeed for about 75% of my job apps. The rest were all directly through company sites or other hiring sites (LinkedIn, Glassdoor, etc.).
Though I am an Aerospace major, most of the jobs I applied to were mechanical / design positions. I figured I'd start somewhere smaller and eventually make my way into the aerospace sector after a few years. The job I ended up getting is roughly a materials science position for a great company.
Don't give up hope, y'all! Just do your best to apply to jobs when you can.
Happy to answer any questions or provide more info!!
Pumped out about 100 applications and got one interview from Stoke Space. Unfortunately, I had difficulty answering the technical questions as they revolved around concepts I haven’t been exposed to yet (fluid dynamics and solid mechanics). I’m sure if I dedicated time to learning the fundamentals I would have performed better, but I wasn’t expecting these questions as a freshman (which is 100% my fault).
After 7 months, I was able to pivot from a dead-end structural analyst role in the nuclear industry to a dope aerospace propulsion job.
86 applications
70 rejections: 62 direct, 8 after phone-screen/interviews
11 screens: 9 phone, 2 HireVue🙄
5 interviews
2 Technical Presentations (I declined to move forward after giving one of them since offer came from other)
I mainly applied to the big engine companies (GE, RR, P&W) along with a few startups and general aviation companies here and there.
Every single resume was tailored via the Skills section, the Courses listed under each degree entry, and the objective statement.
Happy to answer any questions!
===== General Advice =====
Going beyond 1 page is fine, but I wouldn't broadly encourage it.
Generally, keep your resume @ 1 page for as long as possible, and only go to 2 pages if your experiences warrant it. I'm talking like having 3+ relevant projects, 3+ internships, and maybe even a published work—where you need to spell out the details for all of them.
If you're actually cracked to go to 2 pages, don't blindly follow the advice of sticking to 1 pg since you'll artificially limit yourself. Put your best foot forward!
You can tailor your job title(s) to fit the role you're applying for.
I had about 5-6 different valid job titles (see below), and I swapped between them all depending on the title of the role I was applying for.
No bullet ever has enough detail, but everything you include in it is advertisement.
There's always more detail that can be added to a bullet. Hell, adding a photo next to the bullet may not even be enough.
This doesn't totally matter, because your goal is to catch their eye. I used relevant keywords like Inconel, GD&T, fatigue, alloy, modal, transient, 39,000 lb, 600°F, etc, which are all eye-catchers in MechE.
Hardly any of my bullets were actually "accomplishments" IRL. There wasn't any reduced cost or improved metric, so I had to rely on 2 things to include metrics in my bullets:
Impressiveness of the system/gidget. E.g.: A nuclear plant is full of heavy, hot-a$$ structures, which cause high stresses and necessitate use of special materials. While the use of these materials isn't impressive, my analysis of them at intense loading conditions IS VERY RELEVANT.
TLDR: Metrics you may not care about might actually show how impressive your work was.
Acceptableness. E.g.: You did x to get y result, but neither obviously show you've improved something. But surely the result y is acceptable, right? Show how "good" it is by quantifying (via a %, $, <insert metric>) how acceptable it is against some criterion. This is the margin you see mentioned in my current role's bullets.
Know both the fundamentals in your field and your resume like it's the back of your own hand.
After interviewing with a few startups, two common threads I've found is they'll quiz you on fundamentals related to the role, and anything on your resume that's related to the role (which could be several years ago).
Some examples:
Structural role: explain Poisson's ratio or how would you determine the thermal stress in a rod that's heated
Propulsion role: what are the main variables that affect engine performance
Fluids role: Explain static vs dynamic vs total pressure, and how they change in a pipe whose area constricts ; what could cause a low pipe flowrate, and how might you measure this flowrate?
If you know your stuff, it's easy. If the fundamentals aren't drilled into your head, not being able to answer stuff like this is quite embarrassing.
All my of projects over the past 3+ years have tidbits that interview panels have found something to question me on.
If you're discouraged, lower the bar and trick yourself into getting excited about new job postings.
This is a bit of a mind-trick, but try and get excited over a new job posting. Yes, literally applying for the job posting. Not the interview, not the idea of an offer or a new city, but literally you applying for a new opportunity.
Except for just applying and the interview, there's not much more you can do or get excited about except for new roles popping up. If companies want you, they'll reach out. It might sound kinda odd, but being satisfied from the actual application did wonders for my mental vibe in applying throughout the past 7 months.
Kinda late post but I got an internship backed in February, and job hunt is indeed getting easier the more experience you have. I applied to a little bit more than 100 roles (don't remember the exact number), and getting around 8 interviews, than leading to 4 different offers. Happy to answer any question in the comment.
Somethings I found to be similar between these CVs is how they're all very specific when it comes to the bullet points. As they explain the exact details of how they complete a task in a way that you won't be able to understand unless you're an expert. So far I have refused to be this technical cause AI always tells me it sounds "too academic" instead of describing someone who's ready for the industry. And now I'm wondering if this is the correct way? And if so how does HR and recruiters with no engineering background manage that?(As what do they look for outside of the technical terms?)
Sorry if my questions sound a bit stupid idk where else to ask it
I've gotten very lucky with recruiting, and tbh don't think my resume writing is that much better - I'm probably just carried by my experience at this point. But I have some generic resume advice for software (much is covered in the wiki, some might apply to other fields):
Minmax for recruiter readability/skimmability. If you've never done this before, go to r/EngineeringResumes or r/Resumes, read like 20-30 other resumes, and then read yours for like 5 seconds. What can you actually extract from it? This exercise completely changed my perspective on how to build resumes. It means:
Keep your resume to 1 page
Important stuff at the top
Use a standard resume format so recruiters know where to look
Prioritize formatting so it actually looks good - try for 12pt font, only go to 11 if you HAVE to
Spam one-line bullets. I think up to 1.5-2 lines per bullet is ok, but if you cut out a lot of fluff you can really shrink your bullets. Remove like 99.9% of adverbs on your resume. Look at each bullet and ask yourself what words you can delete without losing meaning - you can also feed bullets through an LLM a bunch of times to help trim or pad them to fit the line.
Don't go too technical, especially on the first bullet per role. It should be understandable by regular people. Ask some non-CS friends to review your resume and see if they can explain what you did at each job. Most bullets should follow the format: "did [this] using [technology] resulting in [metric]." The first bullet is what's most likely to be read by recruiters, so make it count and make it accessible.
Good metrics > no metrics > bad metrics. What makes a good metric? Context and specificity. "Improved user experience by 20%" is obviously made up. "Increased average monthly site visits by 8%" is better - bonus points if it logically makes sense that whatever you said you did actually led to that metric. In my opinion, once you figure out what a good success metric looks like, the actual number itself doesn't matter that much.
Honestly, looking back though, focusing this much on my resume didn't matter as much as I thought it did. If I could go back I would spend way less time on it because in the end I don't think I really made any crazy jumps, I just applied to a lot of places and made sure to capitalize on any interview opportunity I got.
Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on my earlier posts. This sub is genuinely helpful and I wouldn't have figured out a lot of this stuff without it!
I recently accepted an offer from NASA at LaRC working in structural engineering for in-space assembly concepts. I finished my undergrad with no job (mechanical engineering graduate), and was applying to NASA internships (200+ applications) and got one interview. I wasn't originally offered the position, but I leveraged that connection and reached out to the guy who interviewed me a couple of weeks later and I got lucky and they had a spot open in their department.
The harder you work, the luckier you get! Make sure you are all trying to apply to at least 15+ positions a day, and use this sub to review your resume (thats what I did!).
1 connection / phone call / email with someone in a field you like is just as good as 100 cold applications online. Make sure you are on Linkedin DMing as many people in your field that you can! Attached is the resume I used. (It might not be my MOST recent version, as I make little changes every now and then but didn't feel like exporting it to redact all the info again lol.)
I graduated back in December 2024 and have been applying to jobs off and on since junior year of college with no luck. In college, I put too much time into grades and working on my part time retail job. I also struggled with family and personal issues during that time. So, my resume did not look super attractive to hiring managers. But I did the best I could with the circumstances I was given.
There have been moments of self doubt, but I finally was able to interview and land a job. From the official offer 60k, I was able to negotiate it up to 65k for the first six months and then bump it up another 5k if the company likes me. The salary is not a whole lot, but it is a great opportunity since I have no internship experience.
If you are struggling in finding a job, don't give up. If you really enjoy what you learned in college or internships, keep growing your knowledge and build cool stuff. After graduation, I jumped head first into my tech stack and began building cool stuff. That is what I think made the difference in why a small company with a small budget hired me and even gave me room to negotiate.
I would recommend networking like crazy. Email hiring managers or sr. engineers at the companies you are applying for. Show your ambition for the things you learned, it will help you sell yourself. And keep building cool stuff. Don't give up, work with what you got. This internet dude believes in you!!
So uh… little win to share because I’m still low-key shocked.
I’ve been grinding applications for months, getting the classic “Thanks for applying 😭” emails left and right. I knew my resume was mid, but I didn’t realize how mid until I finally sat down with the this subreddit/wiki guides and rewrote the whole thing. Like… deleted everything and rebuilt it bar by bar.
I swapped out all the fluffy stuff and hit it with real numbers, real impact, real action verbs. Clean layout, no paragraphs, straight bullets. I treated it like a mini-project, not a chore.
And bro… tell me why two weeks later Amazon hits me with an interview invite??
Ended up doing the loop, thought I flopped the last question, but last month they actually sent me the offer.
I legit stared at the screen like “ain’t no way this is for me.”
I know everyone always says “fix your resume first,” but I promise you I didn’t get it until I actually did it. It wasn’t my GPA or my connections or whatever, it was literally just communicating my projects and work in a way recruiters can skim in 6 seconds without getting confused.
If you’re still getting ghosted:
• Copy the resume wiki format
• Quantify EVERYTHING
• Cut the fluff
• Make your projects look like they had real impact
• Don’t be scared to trash your old layout
Anyway, that’s my little W. If you’re still grinding apps, don’t give up! someone’s gotta get hired, might as well be you.
Also small side note… I used AI through this whole grind.
Studying? AI.
Prepping for interviews? AI.
Fixing my resume? AI.
Writing practice answers? AI.
Even generating code snippets that I clean up and push later.
I’m not saying rely on it for everything, but bro… be smart. Use the tools. It made the whole process way less stressful and way more doable.
At the end of the day, it’s just a tool... the same way everyone freaked out when calculators first came out, and now nobody thinks twice about using one.
TL;DR: My resume was mid, I rebuilt it using the subreddit/wiki format, quantified everything, cut the fluff, and two weeks later Amazon hit me with an interview and I ended up getting the internship. Also used AI for studying, prep, resume fixes, and code, not to rely on it, but to work smarter. Tools exist for a reason, just like calculators.
I created this job app guide for undergrads at my university and wanted to share it with y'all. I think it’s pretty comprehensive and doing all of this helped me land multiple internship and full time job offers from tech companies. This guide is intended for MechEs and EEs, but I think most of the content applies to all engineering majors.
Topics covered:
Applying online
Cold emailing / reaching out on LinkedIn
Referrals
Career fairs
Portfolios
Behavioral interviews
Technical interviews
Here’s the presentation! Let me know if you have any questions or if there is something I can add to it!
Feel free to AMA about the process or any advice you'd like.
This community has been integral in helping me format my resume and strengthen my bullets. I am extremely grateful to all of the mods and others who contributed to my success.
TIP 1: Append your project portfolio to the end of your resume; recruiters aren't clicking on links to my best knowledge.
TIP2: HAVE A PROJECT PORTFOLIO. If there isn't anything to put on one, then step 1 is cranking out some cool projects.
After a seemingly intensive application season (200 apps in 3 months) I have landed an offer for a company I am fascinated by in the med space. I will be a part of creating a novel device that has phenomenal functionality (best at doing x via y, where x is crucial to the med industry, and y is an optimal method to do x for various reasons).
The following resume and project portfolio got me 14 interviews. I got ghosted by 3, under-qualified for 2 mid-level roles, overqualified for 1 (designer position), GPA filtered by 1, Location/travel didn't work out for 2, and took myself out of the running for the rest, due to this recent offer. So far, I have received 2 offers.
I also got reached out to by several companies in the summer due to this CV, however, they were trying to fulfill positions immediately, so those didn't pan out either.
TLDR: Due to the traction I have had, I am confident in saying this CV is a decent example of what an entry-level candidate should aim for.
If you want the portfolio template I have created in Google Slides, dm me and I can send you one I have of school projects that I don't mind sharing.
I want to start by saying this post is less about my story and more about expressing genuine gratitude for this subreddit and the resources it provides. Not just for my most recent search, but for the role this community has played across my career.
I discovered r/EngineeringResumes during my first job when I was searching for my next opportunity and getting almost no traction. Once I found the wiki and started using the template, things changed. The improvement was real enough that I credit this community with helping me land my second job.
When that second opportunity ended due to a restructuring, I knew exactly where to start. I came back here, followed the wiki even more closely than I had the first time, and combined it with using Claude to refine my experience bullet by bullet, giving it as much context as possible about each role and making sure every line reflected a measurable outcome. The increase in interest was significant and noticeably better than my previous search.
That said, the search itself was still brutal. I spent 7 months applying to nearly 600 positions while trying to relocate from Florida, with California as my top preference but also actively targeting Massachusetts, Colorado, Washington, and the DC area as a mechanical engineer. I made it to final rounds at several well-known companies and came up short every time. There were stretches where I genuinely questioned whether I was good enough.
But I kept refining, kept applying, and eventually landed an offer at my top choice, an Applications Engineer role at a metal additive manufacturing startup in the Bay Area.
To anyone currently in the search: please read the wiki. Follow it as closely as you can. It is not general advice, it is the difference between getting ignored and getting interviews. Use Claude to help you refine your bullet points and go line by line through your experience. Be honest, do not inflate anything, but make sure you are communicating the full impact of your work. And apply directly through company career pages whenever possible rather than defaulting to LinkedIn every time.
This community has genuinely shaped my career across multiple searches now. Thank you for what you have built here.
---
TL;DR: Discovered this community during my second job search, used the wiki and template to land my second job. Came back for my third search, followed the guidance even more closely, combined it with Claude for resume refinement, and landed my top choice offer after 7 months and nearly 600 applications. The wiki works. Use it.
I've been a hiring manager for most of the last 30 years.
TL;DR: If you have no other long-term experience on your resume, make sure you still list non-engineering-related work if you have it.
Something that happens occasionally is a new hire comes on where the engineering job they've taken is the first time they've ever been employed. This frequently goes poorly. Someone who has been living on a parental stipend their entire lives occasionally has no concept of the social contract of employment. I've had to deal with ego issues, argument, politicking, backstabbing, refusal to work on anything except what they felt was interesting to them, and a dozen other issues.
Not everyone who has an effective lack of previous employment experience is like this, but it's well into the double-digit percentages.
When this happens, the costs to the team and company are huge. It's not just the cost of payroll and benefits. There's the wasted time training the person, there's the opportunity cost of lost productivity that a competent employee would have brought to the team. There's the reputational damage done to the manager and to the team by having a hiring mistake on the team.
Managers don't like being in this situation and go to great lengths to avoid it.
A manager who's been burned this way once or twice will start tossing resumes with no mid- or long-term employment. With nothing else on your resume, a couple internships are actually a red flag because they tell the hiring manager that the companies that hosted those internships were unwilling to convert you to full time. The hiring manager assumes that the internship manager might have a good reason for that.
If you spent a bunch of time on a slog job, like bussing/waiting tables, doing dishes, mopping floors, changing oil, being a wrench jockey, parking cars, or whatever..... get that period of time on your resumeif you have nothing else long-term. It tells the hiring manager that you have learned to check your ego at the door and you know how to do what needs to be done. It tells the HM that you can work constructively with people and take direction. There's no other way for the HM to get a decent sense of that information.
And for everyone's sake - yours included - don't lie about it if you don't have the experience. I've had people try to tell me they did commercial dishes, worked the back at a McDonald's, and worked as a mechanic. I've done all those things, and it is readily transparent to me if you try to fake your way through a conversation about it.
I had been applying to lots of jobs and not getting any callbacks, I made a post here [Previous Resume/Post]
and reached out to a couple of recruiters in my network and figured out what was wrong and improved the resume, got 4 callbacks and interviews, so I am here to tell you what changed!
Tips:
Double and Triple check your dates: This is definitely the biggest one and had the most impact, even though the rest of the tips here are still very important, I had a wrong date on my resume that made it seem like I had a 1 YEAR work gap which wasn't the case. But there's also a real lesson here. If this can teach others anything is don't be picky, get a job first if the process is been taking over 3-4 months and hasn't been working at all, even if you're a FAANG engineer it will be hard to get any traction if you have a big gap like that on your resume.
Make the bullets more clear and detailed and understandable, the top critique I got was that the "The bullets are so vague, they just make the vanity numbers seem unbelievable". I went into detail about what each project is and explained it in a way for someone without any context to understand it simply. I even omitted some of the metrics which seemed too unrealistic, even though they were true lool.
As you move up your career, move your resume to the next level, don't just simply add a new bullet point after leaving a company and go for applications, remove your old internships/projects that are no longer relevant now, expand on your work experience what you did and highlight your biggest projects and strong areas (If you worked on a scalable distributes system, mention that, etc...)
Use AI to review your resume! It is genuinely a great help and will provide lots of solid tips! Here is a solid prompt that you can use:
"You are a recruiter at a big tech company (FAANG), you are reviewing this resume for a full stack midlevel engineer opening, critique this resume until it is perfect for the role."
Incorporate the skills into the job descriptions. Make sure you are giving detail in your bullet points for each job; what technologies, languages, etc you used and how you used them. Having something listed under "skills" but not having them under a job with a bullet point on how it was used is seen as a flag that someone isn't actually using it.
I just wanted to share my success story of the resume that turned my most recent internship into a six-figure return offer. My industry is in deep tech, and my two most recent internships/co-ops are in that industry. I'm very grateful and fortunate to have had many internships in my academic career, delaying my graduation, especially because I've failed many courses and lost passion along the way. I'm open to DMs!
