What is expected out of CS Graduates these days and what should I put on my CV/Resumé?
Thanks in advance for your help.
* Respect the time of the person reading your CV. Make it trivially easy for them to find the information they want, quickly. Use a clean structure, clear sections and sub-sections, and consistent formatting. Two pages absolute maximum.
* Tailor your CV to the specific job that you're applying for. For example, if you're applying for a web development job then put your web development experience at the top.
* Pay attention to detail. Be consistent in your use of punctuation and capitalisation. Ensure that there are no spelling errors.
* Use LaTeX (there are some great CV templates available) and send your CV in PDF. Microsoft Word documents invariably look messy when you open them in Word. It's much better to send the "final" output.
* Emphasise specific skill areas (e.g. software development, system administration, domain-specific knowledge) and list my skills in each area. This makes it easy for the reader to immediately identify what I can do, they don't have to read through descriptions of my previous jobs.
* Be concise and straight to the point. Don't use personal pronouns. Keep descriptions compact.
* In the cover letter list three specific ways in which you can contribute specifically to the company to the company you are applying to. Show, exactly, how your profile matches key points in the job description. Don't talk about how great you are or what you want from them.
The goal of the cover letter/email is to get people to read your CV. The goal of the CV is to get an interview. The goal of the interview is to check you're a good fit for the job and get the job if you are. Therefore, your CV should encourage the reader to want to interview you. Don't bore them with exhaustive descriptions of what you have done. Less is more. Instead, focus on the highlights and entice them to invite you to interview to find out more.
Finally, if you do get rejected, always politely ask why. You won't always get an answer, but the answers you do get are often enlightening, often not what you expect, and will help you immensely with future applications.
What makes your CV good ?
The biggest thing, IME, that people sending in CVs get wrong is that they have a misconception of how long someone's going to spend looking at it. A recruiter or manager is going to get hundreds of the damn things, they're only going to look at your CV for 10-15 seconds. You've got to make it easy for them to pick out the right things as fast as possible. People aren't going to fight through something that's hard to read or that uses a lot of marketing.
The way I think of it is that your resume is for concisely listing your accomplishments in a structured format. One page. Only. Chances are no-one's gonna read more than that.
Top of the page - centred, bold: Your name.
Address, mobile, email - one line, centred, not bold - may need to put it in a smaller font size, don't go beneath 10. (Make sure you've got a professional voicemail message.)
Underneath that, what you've done. Stick things in reverse chronological order. Give each role the title of the job, the date it started with, a prose paragraph of responsibilities, bullet-pointed accomplishments. Keep your bullet points on one line. Treat your education like a job. If it's the most recent thing you've done, list your university stuff first.
Company I'd do it like this: Oct 2007 - Present, Job Role, Company Name.
Uni I'd do it like this: BSC Computer Science, University of Whatever, Oct 2007 - Present
Underline and bold the roles so that people can see just from casting their eye over it what you've done. Only underline and bold the roles like this - gives people something consistent. If you've got unpaid work, list it the same as any other role.
For the responsibilities paragraph, for example for uni, you'd be saying what you studied, that sort of thing.
(If you've been working for a couple of years, then your university should just be a line at the base of the CV. Remember to track your metrics as move on out into the working world by the way - if you can hang a number off of something that's often good. If you worked in a bar how many customers did you do a night? Numbers make things more concrete.)
For achievement bullet-points you want what you achieved (numbers again - preferably) and how you did it. Concisely. Don't worry if your accomplishments or achievements are small - list them anyway. You're not being compared to people who are working for five years. Don't be afraid to say something like you've worked in a bar, some work is better than no work at all. If you've been given more responsibilities, mention them! No matter how small. It shows good character.
Try to stay away from just listing responsibilities here - just don't, please don't, put them as bullet-points - that makes you look like you've just done what you had to. If you've done a job poorly, you won't have achievements to list and that's what it looks like - like you're trying to pass off responsibilities as achievements because you've not done anything.
Don't include your interests. The odds of connecting with a recruiter are low, or it's something that everyone's done and thus doesn't yield an advantage. Space is limited, just don't do it.
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I wouldn't worry too much about just losing one or two of your first applications, by the way. The nature of this game is that you can get a lot of rejections before someone bites.
Thanks for your answer and effort, really appreciate that you'd take your time to do something like that. :)