Contact Information

This is the top section of your resume and it is straightforward to nail this section by following the recommendations below.

Recommendations

✅ Include important information

Make sure you have the following information listed at the top of your resume: name, email, phone number, location, LinkedIn profile URL.

✅ Use a personal email

Use email addresses you have permanent access to, avoid using school emails if there's a possibility of you losing access to it in future. Regardless, it's still better to use personal emails as it will be relevant for life. Imagine using a school email when you are in your 30s!

✅ Be explicit about location information

Be explicit about state and city information. Since USA is huge, if you are in the same state as the company you're applying for, the geographical proximity could give you an edge over other applicants.

✅ Format your phone number

Format your phone number and include the country code. Example for US phone numbers: +1 (123) 456-7890

✅ Include useful links about yourself

Add links to websites which demonstrates your professional background - personal website, blog, GitHub profile, Stack Overflow, Twitter, Medium, Substack, etc.

✅ Show the platform and username in links

Links text should include both the platform and username, e.g. "linkedin.com/in/johndoe" as opposed to "LinkedIn". This is because interviewers might print out the resume.

✅ Supercharge your LinkedIn profile

Did you know you can customize your LinkedIn URL? By default, your LinkedIn URL will look something like https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-doe-967b3072/. This is very ugly. You can change it to a cleaner version without any numbers at the back by following these instructions.

Take the free LinkedIn Skills Assessments, which is a quick and easy way to boost your LinkedIn profile's credibility and improve your profile's search ranking. Here is a list of technical skill assessments relevant to engineers:

• Front End: Angular, CSS, Front-End Development, HTML, jQuery, JavaScript, React
• Mobile: Android, Java, Kotlin, Objective-C, Swift
• Back End: C++, Java, Node.js, MySQL, Python
• Cloud: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Machine Learning

✅ Give your GitHub profile a makeover

If your GitHub profile looks pretty empty and you have some spare time, consider improving it. The improvements stay with you forever, not just for your job hunt.

• Add a README to your GitHub profile to tell other people about yourself. Here's an example and this repo contains tons of inspiration. If you don't have interesting content to add into your README, putting down language badges is fine too.
• Pin the repositories you want to showcase. By default, the repositories GitHub shows on your profile are personal projects based on chronological order. You might want to pin projects which you find the most impressive or external ones where you have made significant contributions.
• Start your own Open Source projects. If you don't have any project ideas to turn into GitHub projects, that's fine! GitHub repos don't have to contain only code, there's value in curating and summarizing knowledge as well! Here are examples of non-code repos which are popular and also valuable
  • 30-seconds-of-code
  • awesome
  • clean-code-javascript
  • front-end-checklist
• Contribute to Open Source projects and make significant contributions. You can find existing ones to contribute to or just start your own. It is a good way to learn from experienced OSS maintainers and see how projects are being maintained.

Common Mistakes

❌ Don't add unnecessary information

There's no need to include unnecessary personal details like birthday, age, photo, which should not affect the outcome.

❌ Don't include links where there is no content

You probably have GitHub, Medium, Stack Overflow accounts but if you haven't written anything there, there's no point including them. Only add links if they showcase your professional background.

❌ Don't include broken links

You should click on all your links to ensure they're leading to the right destinations.

Example

Note how the link text is kept to a minimum to contain both the service and the username.