The Google Résumé: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company

Chapter 5. Deconstructing the Résumé

In the previous chapter, we told you what makes a good résumé, and it was things like conciseness, structure, accomplishments, and so on. But seeing a bunch of A+ résumés does you only so much good.

In this chapter, I'll show you two mediocre résumés and one great one. We'll walk through what's good and bad about all three. You will develop a more trained eye to evaluate a résumé and will be better able to apply this thought process to your own résumé.

Though names and some identifying details have been changed, these are all real résumés from real candidates.

Please note: Due to limitations of page size, we will not review the length of the résumé or the formatting. Additionally, for brevity reasons, we have included only excerpts of résumé sections.

Résumé A: Bill Jobs

Objective Seeking a full-time position as a software engineer where I can contribute to the success of the company.	1. This objective doesn't add anything. All it specifies is that the candidate is looking for a software engineering position, which should be obvious.
Education University of Maryland: Aug. 2008 – Dec. 2010 Master of Science, Computer Science (GPA: 3.93/4.0) India Institute of Technology: Aug. 2002 – Jun. 2006 Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Science (GPA: 3.7/4.0)
?Technical Skills Technologies: Java, C, Visual Basic, SQL, REXX, COBOL, Shell Script IDE/Editors: Netbeans, Eclipse, VIM WEB Technology: Servlet, JSP, PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, Ajax, HTML, XML, CSS, Action ...