Resume Optimization for Tech Roles: What Recruiters Actually Look For

Tech resumes play by different rules. In most industries, your job titles and years of experience do most of the talking. In tech, people want to know what you've actually built, what tools you used to build it, and whether it worked at any meaningful scale. If your resume doesn't answer those questions quickly, it gets skipped.

The tricky part is that your resume gets read by two very different people. First, a recruiter who may not be technical - they're scanning for stack alignment and recognizable keywords. Then an engineering manager who wants to see depth, complexity, and evidence that you've solved real problems. Your resume has to work for both of them at the same time.

Your Skills Section Gets Read First

In most resumes, the skills section is an afterthought. In tech, it's often the first thing anyone looks at. A recruiter scanning for "React, Node, PostgreSQL, AWS" will check your skills section before reading a single bullet point.

Organize it by category. Don't dump everything into one line.

• Languages: Python, TypeScript, Go, SQL
• Frontend: React, Next.js, Tailwind CSS
• Backend: Node.js, FastAPI, GraphQL
• Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB
• Cloud/DevOps: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions

Keep it to fifteen or twenty technologies. Enough to show range, tight enough to suggest you actually know them. And skip the proficiency bars - nobody knows what "75% Python" means, and it invites questions you don't want to answer.

We see a lot of tech resumes come through our builder where people list forty-plus technologies. It backfires. When everything is listed, nothing stands out. Worse, an interviewer might drill into anything on that list. If you can't explain how Kubernetes networking works, don't put Kubernetes on your resume.

Write About What You Built, Not What You Used

This is the biggest gap between mediocre and strong tech resumes. Mediocre bullets describe the technology. Strong bullets describe the outcome.

Here's one that actually works:

"Migrated a monolithic payment service to three independent microservices in Go, cutting deploy times from 2 hours to 8 minutes and eliminating a class of cascading failures that had caused 4 outages in the previous quarter."

That tells an engineering manager exactly what you did, why it mattered, and what scale it operated at. Compare that to "worked on backend microservices," which says almost nothing.

For every bullet, try to include what you built or changed, the tech involved, and a number that shows scale or impact. It doesn't always have to be users or revenue. Deploy frequency, response times, error reduction, test coverage - all of these count. The point is to show that your work had measurable consequences.

Here's the thing about tech resumes specifically - vague language is more damaging here than in almost any other field. "Developed features for the platform" could mean you built a login page or you designed the entire authentication architecture. An engineering manager can't tell which one, so they'll assume the less impressive version. Be specific.

One pattern I notice from our users is that engineers tend to undersell their impact. You reduced page load time by 40%? That probably affected thousands of users and conversion rates. You built the CI pipeline? That's something every developer on the team touches daily. Frame it that way.

If You Have Side Projects, Use Them

For junior and mid-level engineers especially, a projects section can carry a lot of weight. Side projects and open-source contributions show initiative and genuine interest - things that are hard to prove through work experience alone.

Keep entries brief. Project name, tech stack, what it does, and a line or two about impact or adoption. If it's on GitHub, link to it. Clean code and a decent README matter more than you'd think - some hiring managers will actually click through and look.

If you don't have side projects and you're early in your career, it's worth building one or two before your next job search. A small, focused tool that solves a real problem is more useful on a resume than another to-do app tutorial project.

One page if you're under five years of experience. Two pages max for senior roles. Never more than two regardless.

Single column. Clean sans-serif font. PDF unless the application says otherwise. Put your GitHub and LinkedIn links at the top of your contact info - in tech, not having a GitHub link is a missed opportunity.

For ATS, list technologies in both your skills section and your experience bullets. Include common abbreviations alongside full names - "Amazon Web Services (AWS)," "JavaScript/JS." Match the exact phrasing from the job posting when you can. If they write "React.js," put "React.js" on your resume, not just "React."

Use standard section headings: Experience, Skills, Projects, Education. Creative headings like "My Journey" or "Tech Arsenal" don't parse well in screening software and look out of place on a tech resume anyway.

If you want a clean tech resume that handles all of this formatting, the NoBs Resume builder has templates built for it.