Resume writing is hard and it’s even harder when you’re just starting out as a computer science student. Everyone tells you that you need a resume, but they lack explicit how-tos or provide vague, hand-wavy LinkedIn-esque levels of advice.
“Talk about your achievements at your current roles” – says everyone. When I first started, questions immediately spiraled into my brain: what counts as an achievement? Is this good enough to talk about on my resume? How do I talk about my internship project? How do I even find opportunities to contribute to society as a functioning human being?
The Job SearchTM was one of the most confusing and daunting things I did in college. I can’t confidently say it’s only uphill from here, but rather you get better at navigating the required skills, understanding your knowledge gaps, and finding answers. Similar to learning a new skill or taking a difficult class, writing a resume is just another skill that anyone can work on and improve.
I’ve given my fair share of resume workshops, so this is my attempt at compiling my current advice on writing good resume bullet points.
Disclaimer: I do not have explicit experience as a recruiter at a tech company.
My resume advice purely stems from my experience reviewing a few hundred resumes, consulting with recruiters and hiring engineers, and what I personally look for on resumes when I hire technologists for both technical and non-technical positions.
All opinions and advice in this post and my blog are based on my personal experiences. They are not meant to act as blanket advice for everyone; everyone’s situation is different.
What’s the goal of a resume?
As a person who’s reviewed hundreds of resumes and talked to recruiters/hiring engineers, resumes exist to quickly identify if the candidate is a good match for the vacant position. To explain each key component:
- Quickly – I need to understand your skill set/background within 15 – 30 seconds of reviewing the resume. If your resume takes me longer than 30 seconds to read because it’s hard to find information or it’s difficult to read, I will skip it and move onto the next candidate.
- Good match – I also need to understand if your specific skill sets and experience match what the team is looking for or needs from a potential hire. If I’m hiring a Python developer, I need to see evidence of Python proficiency.
🎂 Expand for an analogy to choose a yummy cake to eat 🎂
To help explain the above points, I’ll use the analogy of walking into a bakery and selecting a cake to eat (because I love food). When entering a bakery, you’re bombarded with options (aka resumes) to choose: from strawberry shortcake to chocolate to matcha. Sponge or sliced or a whole cake? (Yes, I’ve considered eating a whole cake myself). Which cake should I choose:
- Quickly:
- I need to quickly evaluate if this cake will hit my cravings (aka my needs): does it have a lot of fruit on top? Is it a flavor I like?
- If the cake is hidden away, distracting, or difficult to confirm my cravings (aka the key details of your resume that I’m looking for), I will likely move onto considering another cake.
- Good match:
- In addition to the physical appearances of the cake, I want to know if I will like the cake’s finer details (or the deeper, technical details): will I like the cake’s filling? Can it fit a “Congratulations” sign reasonably well?
- Reading the little card displaying the cake’s name “Matcha Blueberry Chiffon” and paying closer attention to the cake’s surface tells me all the details I need to know to make my decision to buy it (or move your resume onwards).
Now that I’ve read through your resume both quickly and determined it’s a good match for my hiring needs, I’ll begin reading your bullet points in greater detail. Let’s review a good versus bad bullet point.
Responsibility vs Achievement
A common pitfall I see in student resumes is simply listing the things they’ve done on the job (aka their responsibilities) under a job role. Imagine the following bullet point listed under my job as a Teaching Assistant:
Example bullet point 1:
- Graded exams, assignments, and held weekly office hours helping students by breaking down Data Structures concepts. At a glance, Example 1 seems like a completely valid or normal bullet point on a resume. However, consider the typical list of responsibility of a Teaching Assistant: academic support (office hours & explaining topics) and course support (exams and assignment grading). If you place yourself in a hiring manager’s shoes, this bullet point has told me nothing new about the candidate other than they can do what they’re told to do.
So what exactly is the difference between a “Responsibility” versus an “Achievement”?
Responsibility
- A list of tasks/responsibilities, typically found on the role description or job posting
- Provides the reader little to no additional insight on what the student did at the role, aside from doing what was already expected
Achievement (or Impact)
- Describes things YOU contributed during your time at the role
- Ex: new projects, improvements, changes, etc.
- Provides the reader with extra insight into how you perform at your various roles
In Example 1, the bullet point is a responsibility because it contains information you’d likely expect from a job posting. Besides contextualizing the number of students helped, it provides little additional insight into what the candidate did as a TA.
Example bullet point 2:
- Created new lesson plans to further break down difficult topics, such as hands-on exercises with flash cards to review recursion.Example 2 is an example of an achievement (albeit a bit weak) that this candidate had done as their Teaching Assistant role. They likely went above-and-beyond their list of responsibilities by recognizing the difficulty with learning recursion, then doing something about it via flash cards.
The key differentiating factor is the “doing something about it.” As a hiring manager, this tells me that this candidate is 1) aware enough to identify a problem and 2) proactive enough to create solutions to an existing problem. These are both positive qualities I personally look for in a candidate that I’m considering hiring for a role.
💡Expand for a 3rd example💡
Example bullet point 3:
- Proctored exams and taught recitation to 100 students, including reviewing efficiency analysis of various operations for various data structures. This bullet point has numbers to quantify scale of involvement and details specifics of what was done in a Teaching Assistant role: exams and teaching efficiency topics in recitation. It seems like a pretty good, detailed bullet point.
However, this bullet still qualifies as a responsibility bullet because it still tells me nothing new about what the student did as part of their Teaching Assistant, other than quantifying teaching 100 students.
The core point of this bullet is “proctoring exams and teaching recitations.” The other details are just fluff to make the bullet point seem more substantial. As a person reading your resume, I can instantly identify this bullet as superficial.
Conclusion
Differentiating between a responsibility and achievement is not an easy task- I didn’t fully grasp it until a few after I graduated from my undergrad. I’ll have a whole series of Resumes 101 blog posts breaking down key components of your resume.
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My goal is to break down technical concepts through the lens of educational psychology. If you’ve found my explanation or breakdown helpful, please let me know in the comments!
If you’d like to hear more about a specific topic, comment any topics below too.
Jamie Liao 
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