How to Prepare a Strong Tech Resume: Tips and Step-By-Step Guide from a Recruiter

Step-by-step guide on how to focus your resume on what recruiters actually notice first: clarity, structure, and relevance.

If you’re trying to land a tech job (abroad), your resume is likely the first impression a recruiter will have of you. In most cases, they’ll only spend a few seconds on it before deciding whether to read more closely. That’s not a lot of time, so you want those first few seconds to count.

This is what I also heard from Giovanni Di Felice, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Statista. He and his teams review hundreds of resumes from software engineers every month, and many of them run into the same issue: they apply to dozens of roles but don’t make it through. Sometimes, it is because not all of them are open to relocation. But other times, it’s the resume that gets in the way.

While exchanging a couple of words with him, I’ve noticed we tend to give exactly the same advice over and over again. It’s usually pretty simple and consistent: a strong tech resume relies more on clarity, structure, and focus than on design or clever wording.

Your LinkedIn profile is just as valuable as your resume, but it’s a different game you need to play for each

I recently published, along with Eli Gündüz, Principal Tech Recruiter at Atlassian and a freelance tech career coach, a set of recommendations for readers of The Global Move who want to optimize their LinkedIn profile. The primary point of that article is that you need to prepare your LinkedIn so that recruiters can find you. This comes after Anna, a friend and hiring executive, told me that the recruiting team she works with actively looks for about 80% of tech jobs.

But the guide I’m writing here is about your resume, not your LinkedIn. These two job-seeking assets exist in different formats and places. But, in any case, you should definitely read Eli's suggestions and stock up on both of them.

As a recruiter myself, I frequently host resume review sessions for The Global Move community. In this guide, I’ll go over what I usually suggest to candidates when we review their resumes alongside each other. These are tips that can help your resume come across more clearly, especially if you’re applying from abroad.