Software and IT resume examples

What tech hiring managers read first

A recruiter screening for a software role spends most of their first look on three things: your most recent title and employer, the stack you used there, and whether your bullet points describe outcomes or chores. “Built REST APIs” says you were present. “Cut p95 latency of the payments API from 900 ms to 180 ms by adding a read-through cache” says you can be trusted with a hard problem.

Put the technologies inside the bullets where you used them, not only in a skills list. A skills section with 40 keywords and no evidence reads as padding; Go mentioned in three bullets about systems you shipped reads as experience.

Projects, GitHub and certifications

Early in your career, projects carry the weight that experience will later: link to the repository or the live app, say what it does in one line, and give a real number (users, stars, requests a day, test coverage). Later on, projects matter only if they are notable, such as a maintained open-source library.

Certifications help most in IT operations, cloud and security, where employers and government contracts often require them (CompTIA Security+, AWS, Azure, CISSP). For software engineering roles they are a minor plus; shipped work counts far more.

One page or two?

One page until you have about ten years of experience or a staff-level scope to describe. Senior and staff engineers can use two pages, but the first half of page one has to stand on its own: a reader who stops there should know your level, your stack and your best two results.