iOS Developer - preparing for a recruitment process, part 1: CV
We all know that preparing for an interview in a tech industry is not easy. There are so many things that you can be asked about, regardless if you are an Android, iOS, backend or web frontend developer.
I have decided to write a short series of articles, explaining — based on my experience and knowledge — how to prepare for a recruitment process as an iOS Developer. Even though one of the next articles will be focused on the technical iOS development related questions that you may be asked, some of the content in this series will be useful for the other developers as well.
This is the first article in this series and it’s gonna cover preparing a good CV.
Let me just set the expectations straight from the very beginning — I’m not going to provide any CV template in this article. Instead, I will try to give you some advices that will help you to prepare a successful CV.
In my opinion, there are two types of CVs, or in other words — two groups of developers that need to create their CV: 1) junior developers or people aspiring to be developers (without a professional experience yet) and 2) experienced developers (applying for regular / senior positions).
CV for inexperienced / junior developers
If you are in this group, don’t worry, all developers had to start somewhere, we all have been there. I think it might be helpful for you to consider the following suggestions while creating your CV:
- It’s ok not to have any professional experience at the beginning. Feel free to add GitHub, App Store links to your personal projects and apps. It shows that you like trying and finishing projects. It also shows that you’ve run through the whole process of releasing an app to the App Store, that means a lot.
- Contributing to open source projects counts as well, actually it’s really beneficial to mention that.
- It’s also a good idea to mention all the courses or certificates that you have completed. They don’t need to be directly related to an iOS development. For example if you are applying for a job in Sweden as a foreigner, it will be much appreciated if you have done a Swedish language course.
- Because you don’t have any professional experience yet or it’s just one company, it might be worth adding an information about being a part of some students’ organisations or some local communities. That positions you as a potential leader, passionate developer, someone doing “something more” than a minimum required daily work.
CV for experienced developers (applying for regular / senior positions)
If you are in this group, try to choose only the most relevant experience and skills to the position that you are applying for. I’m sure you could have a nice 5-page long CV with all the projects, companies that you’ve worked for, all responsibilities described in a detailed way but a sad reality is that…. the recruiters won’t have time to read all of that. Try to focus on the following suggestions:
- Recruiters like numbers while reading about your experience. Make sure you use them while shortly describing how you contributed to your teams’ successes. Bullet point lists and numbered lists work better than a plain English descriptions.
- Include only the most relevant experience, information about frameworks that you’ve used, programming languages, projects. It should be as relevant as possible to the job position you are applying for.
- You probably don’t want to use a lot of space in your CV for your hobbies or non-job related things. Recruiters are looking for as many proofs as possible that you are worth that higher rate for a more senior position.
Bonus 🥳
I mentioned at the beginning of this article that I’m not gonna include any templates for a CV but that’s not entirely true actually…. I would like to share with you a nice tool that I find really useful for creating CVs. It’s https://www.overleaf.com/. It’s a LaTeX based platform. They have some templates to create a CV as well. Check them out!
And this is the end of the first article in this series. In the next one I will write about preparing for the first stage of the recruitment process: a technical screening.
If you liked this article and would like to be updated when I post a new one, feel free to follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dammarpol. See you next time! 👋
