How to write a Software CV

Called a resume in the US and a CV almost everywhere else — the same document, and these are the rules it gets judged by.

The conventions below are the ones this field actually uses. They are what the builder applies when you pick Software / IT, and what the rating checks a finished CV against.

What it must contain

Leave any of these out and the CV reads as incomplete to someone who hires in this field:

Technical Skills
Work experience — Lead with what changed: latency, error rate, build time, cost, users served.

The order to put them in

Order is not cosmetic. What sits at the top is what gets read before someone decides whether to keep reading.

Professional summary
Technical Skills
Work experience
Projects
Education
Certifications
Achievements
Languages

Section by section

Professional summary — Name the stack and the kind of systems you build. Skip adjectives.
Projects — Recruiters do open these links. Only list what you would be happy to have read.

What to put numbers on

The single most common reason a CV in this field reads as weak is that nothing in it is measured. These are the figures that mean something here:

latency · p95 · uptime · throughput · build time · error rate · test coverage · requests per second · users

Verbs that carry weight

Openers like “responsible for” and “worked on” describe a job description rather than a person. In this field these do the work instead:

Built · Shipped · Migrated · Reduced · Automated · Designed · Scaled · Refactored · Instrumented · Debugged

What gets one rejected

A GitHub or portfolio link is close to mandatory for engineering roles.

Length

1 to 2 pages is normal for this field.

Build a Software CV See a worked example

Free, no account, and nothing is uploaded — the builder runs in your browser and the CV never leaves it.

Common questions

What should a software CV include?

A software CV has to carry technical skills and work experience. The order this field expects is professional summary, technical skills, work experience and projects.

What goes first on a software CV?

The professional summary. That is where this field's convention puts it, and it is what the builder applies when you pick Software.

How long should a software CV be?

1 to 2 pages is normal for this field. Going longer does not add weight; it moves the thing being looked for further down.

Is a software CV the same as a software resume?

For applying to a job, yes - the same document under two names. Resume is the usual word in North America and CV almost everywhere else. The one real exception is the academic CV, which is long-form and lists publications.

Is there a free software CV template?

Yes. ihatejob builds one to this field’s convention for free, with no account and no upload: the section order, the section names and the rating all come from the software pack described on this page. It exports to PDF, Word and plain text.