Junior Dev CV Review: 5 Improvements I Suggest

Today I'm reviewing a CV from a person who emailed me and asked for such help. I hope it will benefit not only the author but other junior developers as well.

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[Sdirimohamedsalah]

Education in my opinion is very important. When you start a project for specific things sometimes only developers that have strong scientific foundations can continue.

[tetleyk]

Be quite careful when sending out a CV with a photo of yourself, check the regulations in your country first. It is not permissible in Germany, for example, to include a photo and any CV that features one will be discarded. Or this was the case when I lived in Germany 20 years ago. So, check the regulations in the country in which you are applying for a job.

Also do not include any information that contravenes any laws and other regulations. In Britain, age, gender, religious and political affiliation are all things that are discriminatory topics and should be avoided.

Also, employers are not looking for reasons to include your CV, they are looking for reasons to reject it. If they have 100 applicants for a position, the person who first goes through the CVs will reject a CV at the first thing that doesn't fit. It doesn't matter that the rest of the CV is perfect, one mis-match and out it goes. They do not have time to waste fully reading 100 CVs so the first pass is always a rejection pass. As Povilas says in the video, make sure your CV fits the job description and make sure that is it consistent, easy to read with the important points standing out from the rest of the blah, blah, blah.

If your CV makes it through the rejection phase then it stands a chance of being fully read in the next phase when the reviewer only has 10 CVs left to work through. Personally, with over 40 years in the industry my brief CV is nearly 10 pages long. Far too long, so the top sheet is a summary sheet that contains all the information the reviewer need to know in order not to reject the CV. Then I can tailor this summary page to fit the job, the remainder of the CV remains the same.

[renwar]

Besides your review, when I review lots of CVs during developers recruiting my eyes usually go for these:
1- Location of the person (in case of in-office employment)
2- Experience/Knowledge in my requirements (which usually is Fullstack (Laravel + VueJs) web developer)

I don't care about education, degree, age, gender, summary, hobbies, etc.

[JimOHalloran]

I agree with most of these points. I would say as far as things like date of birth, etc, don't give the employer any more information than they absolutely need. In most cases making a decision based on these factors would be considered discrimination, but I've also heard that if you volunteer the information, it's ok to make that discriminatory decision (in some jurisdictions). So just don't include it. Some things like Date Of Birth, etc the employer will ask you as part of the employee onboarding paperwork, but that's fine you've already got the job at that point.

One of the things I'm always looking for is "can I communicate with this person". You've flagged that English isn't your native language, so I'm going to be looking at any slabs of text (like the Summary at the top) to judge your language skills. Which is a) yet another reason to make them as good as they can possibly be, and b) Maybe a good reason to delete the languages section entirely. Because without that cue, the fact that the resume is in good English would be enough and I wouldn't be trying to judge language skills.

The big red flag to me is the "1 year of experience" in the summary, but then nothing to back that up. This CV probably needs an "Employment" section to substantiate that 1 year. Did you do freelance gigs while studying... Then maybe group them a "job" that looks like "2021-2022 Self Employed Freelance Web Developer" and list the types of things you worked on, skills you gained during that time as you would a "normal" job. If it was a voluntary position somewhere, then list the name of the org and call the position "Volunteer Web Developer" or something like that. But claiming to have some experience and skills and doing nothing to substantiate that is a concern.

Also, 1 year + technical skills + project management + creative design sounds like you've done a little bit of a lot of things. You're creating the impression of a super broad, but potentially very shallow skill set. If you're applying for a full stack developer position, consider tailoring the CV to exclude project management, design, etc unless they're specifically requested in the ad. Without misrepresenting yourself, do what you can to create the impression of some depth of skills in the specific technologies that the employer is seeking.

[Ibrahim_usman]

I make my CV job specific but also have a website with more information if I pass the initial screening and the company is willing to look into my skillset further and I add the link in the CV

[swanyee]

I have question

- Should I add my own project Description at CV or redirecting to my web portfolio.
- One Page CV or more
- Is ok to use CV builder to create my CV

Thank you

[mickowidi]

what do you think about ATS CV Format?

[LunarCosmic]

CV should ATS friendly, big companies with more than thousand applicant won't sorting CV manually, but using AI instead

[ailtondevesse]

Are CV’s like this one any good ?
Don’t companies like more formal old school cv ?
What if you have a lot to put on your cv like experience, online courses etc
How to do with a layout like that, it would look weird to just duplicate the page and replace information

[Bright-Great]

Please I'm on my knees looking for who can review my CV

[gamer]

I heard its common in the us to have picture. a dedicated career channel (joshua fluke) says (and his HR girlfriend agreed) you should not give them more information than needed. People have biases. should also not give year of birth or list when you went to school. age is suppose to be irrelevant. she also said they do indeed only look at cv for a few seconds.

good luck, and dont get taken advantage of.
i hear its common to promise the world ""down the road", and then they use anything to not deliver their end, and just hire new

[jimishukurow]

I dont want to say it, but want to whisper, write some fake projects in your CV, get job and earn experience ... and dont tell anybody about me ...