A developer’s resume has top-left gravity.
Your resume’s audience is the recruiter.
The recruiter is the first person who will probably see your resume. They:
- Usually aren’t coders, and are only scanning for certain buzzwords.
- Usually work with 100 to 1,000 resumes per week (or more!).
- Will spend only up to 60 seconds taking a look at your resume.
- Rejecting resumes fast makes their lives easier — so they will if they can.
If the recruiter has to look for your most impressive credentials, your credentials might as well not even exist on your resume. To successfully get past the resume review stage, you need to present the most relevant and most valuable information immediately. In order to appeal to this very low attention span, you need to follow the law of gravity.
The law of gravity.
Since English is read from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, a reader’s attention will naturally be captured by the left-most and top-most pieces of information. This is something that advertisers have known for hundreds of years.
Therefore, the source of gravity in an English-language resume is top-left. Information on your resume should be organized in a way such that the most important, most relevant, most useful information in your resume resides at the top and at the left of every section, paragraph, and line.
In a nutshell:
- The most valuable section needs to be at the top of your resume.
- The most valuable paragraph in any given section needs to be at the top of that section.
- The most valuable sentence in every paragraph needs to be at the beginning of that paragraph.
- The most important words in every paragraph need to be at the beginning of that paragraph.
3 ways to use the law of gravity.
Here are a few different ways you can use the law of gravity to structure your resume in a more powerful way.
1. Your first section needs to be the technical toolkit.
Recruiters are scanning your resume for certain buzzwords. Therefore, you should put your most important and relevant technologies at the top of your resume as the first section.
Put your technical toolkit at the top of your resume. Put your most impressive skills at the top-left. Divide the technical toolkit into logical sections to make it even more scannable. For example, a web developer might have a technical toolkit that looks like the following.
Technical Toolkit
Frontend: React, Redux, Vue, Styled Components, SASS, HTML, CSS
Backend: Express, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Node.js, RabbitMQ, Knex
Other: Git, Figma, Adobe Design Suite.
(Notice how the most important and valuable skills (as of June 2021) are at the top-left of this section. As you go to the right, the skills become less and less “hot” in the job market)
2. Lead with your job title and years of experience.
Unless you’ve worked in an extremely well-known and respected brand, lead each entry in your Experience section with your job title and years of experience rather than the company’s name or the start/end date. For example:
Full-stack Software Engineer, 3y 8mo
Acme Corporation, Jan ’17 to Aug ‘20
- Built performant web applications using Express and React.
- Specialized in full-stack eCommerce sites.
- Created Figma designs as part of the workflow.
Including your duration of experience, and not just the start and end dates, helps recruiters quickly know that you have the appropriate level of experience to do the job.
3. Include a one-line technical toolkit with each piece of experience.
Because you want to present the most important and relevant skills at the top-left of your Experience entries, you will want to include a technical toolkit, too. For example, building on the above example:
Software Developer, 3y 8mo
Acme Corporation, Sept ’20 to Jun ‘21
React, Redux, SCSS, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Knex, Node.js, HTML, CSS
- Built performant web applications using Express and React.
- Specialized in full-stack eCommerce sites.
- Created Figma designs as part of the workflow.
See how this lends importance, weight and structure to this entry?
If this was helpful to you, pay it forward.
I’m a senior developer. But I don’t charge for my knowledge, time and mentorship. Crazy, right? But this system doesn’t work if you don’t pay it forward! Paying it forward ensures we all grow stronger as a community, and helps others elevate their own careers. Not to mention it helps me grow my business.
Don’t be a deadbeat, there are more than enough jobs out there for every software developer in the world. Share this article with your friends and help them grow their skills!
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