Start with the role’s evidence needs
Read the vacancy and identify the work it asks someone to do. Then choose examples that show relevant decisions and responsibilities. This is different from repeating every keyword in the description.
Harvard’s career-services resume guidance is a useful general reference for clear, relevant presentation. Our examples below are fictional teaching examples, not anonymized client resumes or claims of successful placements.
Write a bullet another engineer can question
A vague statement such as “Worked on APIs” leaves the reader guessing about scope. A more informative fictional example is: “Added input validation and regression tests to a booking endpoint; documented duplicate-request behavior.” It describes work that can be explained without inventing business impact.
| Weak fictional statement | More specific fictional statement |
|---|---|
| Used Python and SQL | Built a repeatable CSV import with schema checks and a documented rerun process |
| Improved team productivity | Wrote setup instructions and verified that a teammate could run the service |
| Expert in cloud systems | Deployed a personal demo with health checks and a tested rollback procedure |
The second column does not automatically prove expertise. The underlying work and your ability to explain it remain essential.
Organize the page around relevance
Keep contact details, experience, projects, skills and education easy to locate. Use a readable hierarchy and consistent dates. Follow the employer’s requested file format rather than assuming one format always performs best.
For each project, explain whether it was personal, academic, volunteer or paid work. If an AI tool assisted, be ready to describe the assistance and verification. Do not imply authorship of a third-party library or generated component you cannot explain.
Audit the claims before sending
Check links from a clean browser session, remove secrets from repositories and ensure a public demo does not expose personal data. Verify dates and titles against your own records. Ask someone to identify the main contribution in a quick read, then ask a technical reviewer what they would probe.
Use the downloadable resume checklist. The portfolio guide helps make supporting work reproducible, and the behavioral interview guide helps turn a bullet into a truthful conversation.