A resume checker that reads the links, not just the document
Engineering resumes fail in their own particular ways: a stack list with no evidence, a project section that reads like a tutorial index, and a GitHub link nobody checked before sending.
It follows your links
GitHub and portfolio URLs on your resume get read as part of the check, which most resume tools never do.
Stack against evidence
Whether the technologies you list are backed anywhere, or just listed.
Recruiter search terms
The terms a technical recruiter searches the database for, and which ones you are missing.
Parse check first
The extracted text, so you can see whether a two column template ate your job titles.
A developer resume gets read twice by two readers who want different things. A recruiter skims for terms that match a requisition. An engineer reads for evidence that you have built something hard. Most resumes are written for neither.
The four ways engineering resumes go wrong
1. A stack list standing in for experience
A skills section with thirty technologies in it does two things, both bad. It tells a recruiter nothing, because everybody's list looks the same. And it invites an interviewer to ask about the one you are weakest at, because they cannot tell which of the thirty you actually know.
List what you would be comfortable being questioned on. Then make sure the important ones appear again in a bullet about real work, because that is where they become believable.
2. Projects that read like a tutorial index
Built a chat app with React, Node and Socket.io is a sentence a reviewer has read several hundred times, and it describes following a guide. What changes it is the problem and the outcome. Who used it, what broke, what you decided.
| Reads as a tutorial | Reads as engineering |
|---|---|
| Built a URL shortener with Node and Redis | Built a URL shortener handling about 40k redirects a day for a college society, with Redis caching after Postgres lookups became the bottleneck |
| E-commerce site using MERN stack | Rebuilt our checkout as a single page flow, which cut abandoned carts by roughly a fifth over two months |
| Machine learning model for image classification | Trained a classifier to sort 4,000 lab images our department kept in one folder, reaching about 90% accuracy, which was enough for them to adopt it |
3. Scale and impact left out
Engineers are oddly reluctant to write numbers down, perhaps because the ones they have feel unimpressive from the inside. Forty thousand requests a day, a team of four, a build cut from eleven minutes to three. All of those are useful and none of them need to be large. They tell a reader what kind of problem you have actually met.
4. A layout that destroys the parse
Developers reach for the elegant two column template more than most, often one generated from LaTeX or a design tool. It looks sharp and it reads badly to a parser, which goes left to right and runs your sidebar into your job titles. What breaks and what to use instead.
If you take one thing from this page: paste your resume's text into a plain editor and read what comes out. It takes a minute and it is the only way to see what the other side receives.
The part other checkers skip
You put a GitHub link on your resume. Somebody is going to click it, and what they see in thirty seconds is not what you think it is: original repositories separated from forks, whether anything has a description, when you last pushed, what you actually write in. We read that as part of the same check, and tell you what it says. What that involves.
If you link a portfolio instead, the same applies. A link on a resume is part of the application, and it is worth checking before somebody else does.
What you get
- The extracted text, so a broken layout is visible rather than invisible.
- A score across six dimensions, with the reasoning for each rather than one number.
- What a reviewer concludes from the top third of page one.
- Your weak bullets rewritten, specifically, so you can accept or argue.
- The terms a technical recruiter searches for that your resume does not contain.
- Your GitHub or portfolio read, if you linked it.
Questions people ask
- Does it work for a resume with no work experience yet?
- Yes, and the projects section does most of the work in that case. If you are applying from college, the shape of a first resume is different enough to be worth reading about separately.
- Will it tell me to remove my two column layout?
- It will show you what the parsed text looks like and let you decide. If your job titles have merged into your dates, you will see it rather than being told about it in the abstract.
- Do you check my code quality?
- No. Nothing that scans a profile in a few seconds genuinely reviews code. What gets read is the public surface of your GitHub, the way a reviewer skims it.
- Is it useful for senior engineers?
- The parsing and keyword checks are, and the recruiter read is. The project advice is aimed lower, since a senior resume should be leading with scope and outcomes rather than projects.
Have your resume and your GitHub read together
The document, the links and the terms recruiters search for. First one free.
Upload mine →First one free · one payment, never a subscription