Resume

Resume 101

Where to start and how to start

If you’ve never written a resume before, a good starting point would be to watch the Google Resume creator video. The video breaks down the resume into specific sections, has actionable tips and examples. This is a great starting point and is a CS resume-specific resource.

💡Video resource: Google Applied Digital Skills also has a lesson series on creating a resume in Google docs. It walks you through brainstorming and writing a draft.

❗Keep in mind: this is a general resume-building resource and not tailored to CS resumes.

UofT also has resources to help you write a resume. The Career Exploration and Education Centre has a create your resume and cover letter guide. You can also book an appointment with a career advisor or peer career advisor for a resume review through CLNx!

Writing a resume

A common template for SWE resumes is Jake’s resume. It’s clean, straightforward and easily converts to a pdf. This template is also very easy to read and is one of the most popular resume formatting recommendations for a CS student. However, if you don’t know Latex or prefer not to use it, my recommendation would be to recreate this resume format in Word or Google Docs.

In Latex, you can comment out older experiences and have all your experiences in one document. If you prefer to use Word/Google Docs/any other tool, create a secondary document that has all your work experiences and possibly in more detail. This way, you’ll be able to modify your resume quickly as all your experiences are documented and you can select the relevant ones for the job experience.

When you’re just starting this out, there won’t be much difference between your resume and your secondary experience document, but as you build out projects, adding them into your secondary experience document will help in the long run when you’re applying in a rush and cannot remember all your experiences.

Maintaining a resume

The best way to maintain your resume is constantly updating it at the start, mid and end of internships/work-studies/any other job. This is however the ideal situation and not always feasible.

A more realistic update would be at the start of every recruiting season you plan to participate in. You can also use this time to move job experiences into your secondary experience document.

If you are applying to different types of roles, I would recommend keeping two different versions and naming them “FirstName_LastName_Resume_Role”, i.e., “Jane_Smith_Resume_SWE” and “Jane_Smith_Resume_PM”. Be careful with the version you submit!

Resume examples

A lot of students post their resumes on the UofT CS Discord. You can browse through these to see what other resumes look like, what projects your peers are making and what experiences they have!

Another great resource for this is LinkedIn. For more information on how to use this, please refer to the Networking section. Once you have your resume ready, create a LinkedIn profile for yourself and paste your resume bullet points into your LinkedIn. You can also use it to see how others have formatted their experience.

Action words

One of the best websites to use for finding action words is the ResumeWorded website. All the action verbs are split into 12 categories: accomplishment-driven, communication, entrepreneurial, management, leadership, research & analysis, problem-solving, process improvement, financial, design, clerical and technical. The website also offers examples for each category.

How to use action verbs

Action verbs are help quantify the impact of your work, especially any soft skills you gained in the role. Suppose you worked in an extracurricular club that organizes conferences. In the role, you gained leadership by handling all the logistics of the conference and had a team of 2 people helping you. A good way to write this in your resume would be “Spearheaded team of 2 in planning logistics for X conference over 10 months”. Let me break down this sentence for you: there are two metrics - the size of the team and the amount of time invested, there is the leadership aspect with the word “spearheaded” and it shows the amount of responsibility you can handle.

When you use action verbs in your resume, you’re employing the popular English writing technique of “show, don’t tell”. In simpler terms, instead of listing (or telling) leadership as a skill, you are showing leadership as a skill in the bullet point.

Action verbs also help communicate the importance of work you did. Let’s say you helped handle social media communications for a club. You came up with the idea of setting a schedule for people to monitor the account. If you had to advocate/fight for an idea and it was accepted, leading to an increase in efficiency, i.e., any comment gets a reply within 2 days instead of a week. You can say “Recommended and implemented strategy X leading to a 28% increase in response efficiency”, the % comes from calculating the change in response time - 2/7 = 28%. The word ‘recommended’ helps explain your communication impact easily, especially when compared to “Implemented strategy X leading to a 28% increase in response efficiency”.

Metrics

Now that you know the power of action verbs, let’s move on to metrics. Metrics help quantify your impact and give the recruiters (or any readers of your resume) more context into the work you did. Initially, you might struggle with coming up with metrics and that’s okay. The more you think and reflect on your experiences, the easier it gets. I’ve compiled a list of possible metrics to get you started. It is not exhaustive but is a good starting point.

A good rule of thumb to follow with metrics is counting the amount of change that your work brings about. This change could be a reduction in time (eg: from days to weeks), an increase in user engagement (eg: how many new users followed the social media accounts) or the number of things, i.e., meetings, features, tickets, data, etc., you worked with.

Possible technical metrics:

• # of bugs solved/ # of issue tickets resolved
• # of features implemented
• # of lines refactored
• # of data points analyzed(/mined/compiled)
• # of designs (eg: system designs)
• # of queries (could either be a database query search or mined queries for research)
• # of scripts engineered and executed
• test and training accuracy (specifically when working with ML models)
• # of lines of code (this helps quantify your impact in a group code base)

Possible product metrics:

• # of users (could be specifically an increase in users since the release of a feature)
• # of steps in a process (eg: implementing a 6-step user onboarding workflow)
• # of features
• # of meetings (eg: Spearheaded 6 meetings with key stakeholders to discuss new feature)
• # of (user) pain points
• # of design/accessibility/user considerations
• # of sections in documentation (eg: Co-authored 6 sections of help documentation to guide user experience)
• # of time/efficiency increased or reduced/decreased

Possible social media metrics:

• # of followers
• # of post/reel reach
• # of posts

Possible event metrics:

• # of event attendees
• # of organizers and volunteers
• # of sponsors

Again, this is not an exhaustive list but a starting point to help you see what is quantifiable in your resume. If you’re ever unsure of how to quantify something, try to quantify it and have others review your resume to see if they understand it.