I have been spending too much time on LinkedIn recently, so you shouldn’t be surprised to read that I came across a post on a stranger’s profile that called out three key points that they use for filtering job applicants. I’ve lost track of the page now, so this is going to be my paraphrased interpretation and reflection on how I might adjust the wording of my CV for future job applications.
Ownership
When describing what I have worked on I should emphasize the direct personal contributions, avoiding passive and ambiguous terms such as “contributed to”, “my team…”, and “helped to”.
Historically I have tried to emphasize teamwork and included a bit about agile methodologies, but now that AI is revolutionising the approach to software development I can see that my independent work may be more relevant.
Quantifying
When it comes to working on SaaS products and enterprise systems, size matters.
I can tell how I saved my employer $US50,000 per year. It may have only taken a day or so of design and development effort but the number stands out.
That race condition that I solved that only showed up for our largest customers, 10,000+ accounts, now I’m seeing how the shape of numbers stands out. I don’t need a lot of detailed wording, these quantities express the scale involved.
Impact
This aspect will generally tie in with quantifying, but will express the business value of the work. I would use this as an opportunity to show the big picture – how any lessons learned along the way got fed into improvements in other areas.
Next steps
This isn’t one of the three points, it just a little bit more of my “thinking aloud”.
I’m going to have to be quite disciplined to keep my CV concise, treating it as a placeholder for a conversation rather than trying to get across, “I’ve done this, and that, and this other thing, and that other thing…”
The CV is the appetiser, the blogs and the interviews can be the main course.