If you’re a really great coder, do you need a resume at all? Relying on your reputation, your circle of friends, and your prodigious output seems like it’s enough. And at Leet Resumes, where we write experienced engineers’ resumes for free, it’s a frequently asked question.
In fact, the better you are, the more you want a great resume. There are five reasons why it makes sense. A well-written resume attracts better interest, increases your pay offers, plays well in our data-driven world, doesn’t leave hard-earned money on the table, and forces your current employer to pay you what you’re worth. Let’s walk through these reasons one by one.
The goal of a technical resume is to attract interview requests. And the goal of a great technical resume is to attract better interview requests from better companies that are more interesting to you. A great resume helps you attract better attention by making it more obvious what your contribution to your current and past teams has been. And it does this by detailing your key accomplishments and numbers.
A better resume helps to increase your pay offers. If you’ve ever sold a house or a car or a domain name, you know that the more buyers you have at an auction, the higher the final price of the item will be. Well, it’s the same idea when you’re selling the most valuable thing you own — your own time. Getting multiple companies interested in you at the same time creates a competitive bidding dynamic, so that when one hiring manager tells you she’ll pay you $x and a 34-inch monitor, the next hiring manager has to offer you $x + 10^4 dollars and a 49-inch curved monitor. Plus, it makes negotiating easier on you when all you’re doing is repeating what the other company said — it doesn’t take much skill or sales ability to get a better deal this way.
The world is getting much more data-driven. One of the better outcomes of the internet revolution has been the rise in importance of data, and the reduction of hand-wavey logic from the marketing department or upper management. With data so readily available, people won’t rely on someone’s title or past company name to decide if what they say is true — they want to see the data themselves.
But that same skepticism that applies to claims from others also applies to claims from you, including your resume. Simply copy-pasta-ing your job description isn’t good enough anymore. Hiring managers and companies want to know the details of what you’ve done and why you think you’ve been successful. A great resume helps to tell your great story.
A great resume also helps to make sure you’re not leaving money on the table. Sure, it’s great when your friend from college asks you to join the startup he signed up for, or it’s flattering when an old boss slides into your DMs to recruit you for his new gig. But in a lot of these cases, your old boss or your old friend might want to pay you your old value — and not what you’re worth today. And that can mean missing out on cash, vacation time, and equity. Having a great resume means that you can make sure that old friends are paying the right money for your work at your new employer.
And finally, a great resume ensures that your current employer is paying you what you’re worth. One of the reasons we started Leet Resumes to write experienced engineers’ resumes for free, was this ridiculous practice of companies trying to short-change talented engineers on annual pay raises. It’s silly that companies such as Google won’t increase pay, or offer higher equity packages, to loyal, dedicated employee engineers just for their excellent work. No, they’ll offer the minimum they can get away with. Unless you bring a job offer to them. Only then will they match it or beat it. So even for engineers who want to stay at their current job, having a great resume is important for getting paid what you’re worth.
At Leet Resumes, we’re resume experts who have seen the power of a great resume to help engineers tell their story and get better job offers and better pay as a result. We write experienced engineers’ resumes for free, (with additional paid services coming later this year.) If you’d like us to write your technical resume for you, please sign up!
