Better Frontend Developer resume

I've been reviewing frontend resumes for my team for about 2 years, and I've reviewed at least 500 of them. There are a few things that I look forward to in the resume based on the level of experience.

Resume of a Fresher

How I would categorize Fresher is someone who is right out of college or has less than 1 year of industry experience. Even though they might've been doing some freelancing during their college days, they don't have professional experience in a company.

Build things

As a Fresher, you have to keep learning. Pick what you are interested in and be good at it. This could be CSS, React, Angular, etc.., whatever you like, learn by building projects.

I often see lot of projects such as "Netflix Clone", "Amazon Clone", "To-Do application" which are mostly taught by YouTube tutorials. Although these are fine, I'm really bored of seeing them. You don't stand out in the crowd.

But, even if you are doing these projects, do it your way. Instead of cloning them as they are, put your own twist to it, make it better or playful.

What I would suggest is, after learning the basics, build something on your own. If you ask me, here's how I might do it.

I'll go to dribbble or some other design community, find a good design, such as Dashboard or Landing Page and try to replicate it. The plus side of this is, you will challenge yourself more, start building from scratch, and build something completely different.

Build at-least 3 to 5 good projects, push the code to GitHub, and use GitHub pages to publish them.

Every time I review freshers website, I go through their GitHub profile (if they've mentioned one), I check out the live projects and the code.

1-5 years of experience

I would follow the same approach to some extent for this category as well. But the difference is, candidates who fall in to this division have more professional experience to put in their resumes.

So, if they have done projects and added them to GitHub, that'll definitely be a plus. On top of it, I'll check what have they've worked on in their company.

You can explain about the complex tasks that you have undertaken, the interesting problems you tackled, and the impact you made.

Usually, I see a few red flags in this category.

Red flags

At times, I see candidates saying "Spearheaded the development of this feature, which added $15k to the MRR," and similar things like that.

This statement is very hard for me to evaluate against a frontend developer. I'm not questioning the capabilities as a frontend developer, but the feature development probably included a lot of other folks as well. Backend developer, Product Manager, QA Engineer, Designer etc..

If such resumes are shortlisted, I ask what their role was in the above outcome and how they contributed to it. Most of the time, it's as simple as doing whatever they are told. So taking the whole credit for something doesn't sound right to me.

Another red flag I often see is, statements like,

"did so and so to improve the pagespeed by 15%"
"Changed the onboarding flow to improve the customer conversion by 70%."

Although statements like these are valid, when asked about how they came about these metrics and numbers, most of the time they don't have a clear answer.

So, my advice is, if you have done it and measured it, be ready to explain it. Be honest with what you put in your resume.

Once the interview starts, the interviewer will be able to cut through all the BS you've written there.

> 5 years of experience

All of the above points are applicable to senior folks as well. Often, I came across resumes that talked about the basics as something great.

For eg:

"I Worked with React hooks and class components to speed up the development process.""

This is such a basic React 101 you should not be boasting about. Senior resumes should talk about the complex problems they have solved and the impact they have had on the company, the team, and the product.

Conclusion

Build things, be experimental, and be adventurous. Don't play it safe if you want to stand out.
Be honest with what you put in your resume.
Be ready to explain what you've written in your resume.
Learn constantly and keep improving.