The good news? Tech professionals are in high demand. But with so much talent competing for the best jobs, a standard resume won’t cut it. So what are recruiters looking for in a tech resume, and what’s the best way to highlight your skills?
A tech resume should be more than a document listing your skills and experience in bullet points. With hundreds of applications to wade through, recruiters often only have a few minutes to get a sense of your personality, creativity, and ability.
For tech-newcomers who have recently graduated from a tech bootcamp, your resume is also a chance to show off your transferable skills—and demonstrate how you’ll apply them in your new role.
If you’re staring at a blank page, unsure of where to start, you’re not alone. So we’re here with tips, tricks, and examples to help you get your foot through your dream company’s door.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Let’s get into it!
Creating a tech resume can be a nerve-racking endeavor, especially for career changers . In the absence of years of experience in the field, your resume is often your one shot to convince recruiters you’re the right fit for their company.
It can be challenging to showcase everything you have to offer in a one-page document, but a tech resume doesn’t have to be all-singing, all-dancing. It simply has to quickly and efficiently communicate what you bring to the table.
It’s also important to note your resume often won’t even be seen by a human first. With the high amount of resumes being uploaded to job application sites, many companies rely on automatic AI software to filter the resumes before they go to hiring managers or recruiters.
If your resume doesn’t include keywords, isn’t readable, or isn’t formatted correctly —the hiring managers may never see it. It’s a harsh reality, but it’s important to know what you’re up against before you start firing resumes off.
To help get your application seen by the right people, let’s go through some quick-fire dos and don’ts:
Remember: If you get through to the interview stage, the hiring manager will use your resume as a reference point for the questions they ask. It’s crucial to highlight skills and experience that you’d be comfortable expanding on in a conversation.
Now that we know what not to do, we can move on to actually compiling your resume.
To make things as clear as possible, we’ll break this section up into two parts: What to include in your tech resume, and how to format a tech resume.
Your resume should include eight key sections:
We know what you’re thinking: All that on just one page?
Not necessarily. Depending on the role you’re applying for, you can sacrifice one section to place emphasis on another. What’s most important is relevancy.
Get the format right. A tech resume is more likely to be well-received if it’s a word document or PDF, but whichever you prefer, make sure it’s presented in the document type required by the uploading tool. Be sure to double-check the job description too, as this often lists a preferred format.
Embellish elsewhere. Already noted, but it can’t be overstated: When it comes to tech resume design formats, the simpler and clearer the better. The creativity, storytelling, and design can shine through in your cover letter and portfolio.
The differences between them can help shape your approach for each:
A tech cover letter is a longer-form document than your resume (but still no longer than a few paragraphs) that introduces yourself as a candidate, expands on your relevant experience, and details your motivations for applying to a specific role.
A tech portfolio showcases your skills in action. It’s a collection of the real-world projects you’ve worked on that demonstrate your competency in your chosen field. Portfolios are usually embellished with videos, images, additional files, and so on.
Both of these should be linked to in your resume, and vice versa.
Use tools and software to spice it up. There are plenty of tools and software out there that can help you design and format a beautiful tech resume, like Canva , resume.io , and CakeResume .
But keep in mind that over-designed resumes will sometimes be automatically rejected by candidate-tracking AI software. Vibrant colors and branding are great, but don’t get carried away: a UX/UI design resume in particular needs to be simple, clear, and quickly scannable .
We know—it’s tricky to toe the line between a creative resume that showcases your unique personality, and a clear resume that cuts through the fluff to quickly communicate your value.
But once you see how it’s done, your life will be a lot simpler: you’ll find some great examples to help you further on.
Emphasizing your tech skills on your resume is vital. Ultimately, it’s these that recruiters are most interested in.
There’s definitely a right and wrong way to showcase these. More than simple bullet points suggesting you’re proficient in X skill, recruiters want the proof in the pudding. Provide evidence of how you’ve put said skills into practice.
There are also two different types of skills to highlight, hard skills and soft skills.
Hard skills refer to the technical skills you need to actually perform the role’s basic duties. For a UI designer , this might be wireframing or animation. For a web developer , this might be documentation or specific coding languages. For a digital marketer , this might be tracking and reporting campaign metrics using a CMS.
Soft skills refer to the interpersonal skills that make someone a great employee, such as effective communication, project management, leadership skills, and so on. While the word “soft” might suggest these skills are not as important to tech recruiters—many of these soft skills are actually in incredibly high demand. Your ability to be a great team player or manager could be the difference between getting an interview and being overlooked.
So you’ll want to highlight both your hard and soft skills—especially if you’re a career changer on the hunt for your first tech role. The transferable skills you’ve picked up from your previous careers will help you stand out among more experienced candidates.
Here are a few best practices for highlighting tech skills on your resume:
Now that we know the elements that form an awesome tech resume, we’ll take a look at some people who got it right.
Here are tech resume examples for five of the most popular tech jobs:
The best way to make sure your tech resume is up to scratch? Get eyes on it.
More specifically, eyes from someone well established in your field. That way, they can guide you on whether or not your resume would make the cut in their teams—and you can make the necessary changes before it lands on the desk of a prospective employer.
So there we have it: Your ultimate guide to writing a stand-out tech resume.
With so much to include, it’s all too easy to overthink it to the point of paralysis. But as long as you follow the industry-standard tech resume best practices, you’ll have an interview for your first tech role in no time. Of course, be sure to be sure to craft the best career change cover letter to accompany any application and get ready for the interview with the most common interview questions.
To learn more, we recommend giving these articles a read:
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Writer for The CareerFoundry Blog
Jaye Hannah is a freelance content writer and strategist, based between London and Lisbon. She's worked in EdTech for over five years, inspiring career changers on their journey into tech. When she's not writing, you'll find her whipping up new recipes in the kitchen.
