Make Your Resume Stand Out with Highlights

Want to make your resume stand out and memorable?

When listing out job/project experience do two things:

  1. Be detailed in your bullet points
  2. Call out one interesting story, with details. Call it a "Highlight".

Bullets are succinct, stories are memorable.

Example

Frontend Engineer - Foo Company

2018-2020

  • Key member of 5-person dev team
  • Areas of ownership: client-side caching, logging/instrumentation
  • As SME (subject matter expert) for logging, I designed and documented our logging infrastructure.
  • I ran multiple brown-bag learning sessions to teach other engineers best practices for our logging feature.
  • We shipped site updates every 4 weeks, fixing bugs and delivering customer features
Highlight

We started seeing customer cases around the checkout experience of the website, saved carts were expiring sooner than they should. I took ownership of the issue and added some additional verbose logging to our shopping cart component. Shortly after deploying the updated component with logging I was able to read the logs and narrow down the issue, only customers in eastern time zones hit the issue. I was able to add a test to reproduce the issue. Once a test was in place I was able to step through the debugger on the test and figure out the bug. Javascript dates assign months with a zero-based index (so January is month 0, not 1) but our code was setting January to month 1. I made the code fix, validating it with both the test and on our staging environment.

The bullets plus the highlight tell me a few things about you, the candidate:

While that example "highlight" is made up, the part about months in Javascript is true, be careful out there. 😄

Hopefully you found this post helpful, if you have any questions you can find me on Twitter.

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