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Tips for filling LD Resumé Form

Read this if you want to make sure you’re presented in the best way possible to clients. Also, if you are concerned that you are not getting client hires, it could be because your resumé form is not reflecting how good you are as a talent. We encourage you to:

Search for "software engineer resumé tips", "ux designer resumé tips", "data scientist resumé tips", etc. whatever is relevant to you, and follow those tips to improve your resumé form.
Run grammar checkers like the google docs grammar checker and Grammarly on your resumé text. Ask a few English experts you know to read through it.
1. Fix punctuation, capitalization, and spelling as well. Do not duplicate sentences or bullets.
Simply listing skills and what they mean is not sufficient. You want to state how you personally used specific technologies to create specific features (for example: "I used React and Redux to create a car search feature.")
1. If you have a skill that is not in the typeahead you should still mention it in the experiences for clients who are reading your profile. Also, you can recommend that we add it to our skills database.
Use "I" and say what you did. We don't care about what the team did. We care about what you did.
Don't say you have N number of years of experience - that gets auto-calculated by the system and presented on your public profile. And that way it will stay up to date over time.
Some clients ignore talent whose profile has less than 4 to 8 experiences / projects.
1. 4 to 8 detailed experiences / projects (preferably across 3 - 5+ years) are what will get you client matches.
2. All while respecting point #4 which is very important.
3. Clients don’t want to read a list of skills in each experience -- they want to know what features you built with specific technologies.
4. Include multiple projects / experiences from the same employer as separate experiences.
5. Describe and use skill tags for every single thing you pride yourself in.
Don’t talk about popular sample “to do” or test applications - clients want to see real-world projects.
Make sure to keep your work schedule on your profile up to date and your status.
1. You need to be honest about your status and availability but in general, clients have a preference for talent who are available for more than 40 hours per week and who are full-time professionals as opposed to part-time freelancers, and who have good PST / EST overlap.
2. Clients do not like it when they invite you to an interview and they find that your availability is less than what they saw when they invited you. Don’t put 168 hours as your availability.
Look at other profiles on Find Talent page and make sure your rate is competitive, given your experience.
Here is a histogram of talent hires on LD by client-facing profile rate and location:
- $15/hr - $20/hr: 173 talent hires at these rates, from all locations
- $21/hr - $25/hr: 66 talent hires at these rates, from all locations
- $26/hr - $30/hr: 7 talent hires at these rates, from all locations
- $31/hr - $35/hr: 17 talent hires at these rates, from all locations
- $36/hr - $40/hr: 7 talent hires at these rates, from all locations
- $41/hr - $49/hr: 5 talent hires at these rates, from all locations
- $50/hr+: 2 talent hires, from Silicon Valley, USA
Full Time Yearly Salaries have generally been between $10K - 30K / year.
Please note companies sometimes skip profiles outside of their range. This is useful information for you to strategically position your profile for getting client matches.
It is our mission at LD Talent to make sure great talent from all locations have equal opportunity to build wealth. In order to achieve this goal, we aim to grow fast as a community and get more and more clients to hire!
On LD, talent are free to set whatever rate they would like. When we each consider what the market is willing to pay for our individual services, then we will build trust with more clients, get more hours of work for ourselves, and grow our wonderful community.
Histogram Last Updated: 4/10/23
Also, if you have more experience, projects, courses, or degrees you should add them to your resumé profile pinned and bookmarked as clients are always looking for experience.
1. We hear clients rejecting perfectly good candidates because of “too little experience” all the time! You need to write down all of your experience.
Check that you have added all relevant skills for each experience, that clients might be searching for (i.e. double check the skills typeahead for each experience).
The github / bitbucket links in each experience should point to the repository of the project, not your personal profile. We strongly recommend adding sample code as clients look for that!
1. Linked repositories should include code written by you.
2. For designers, please add Dribbble, Behance, Figma, etc. links too.
The links in each experience should point to the project, not the company website of the company (unless you built the company website).
The experiences should not mention freelancing platforms like Upwork, Freelancer, Fiverr, Guru, etc. They should mention the names of specific projects and experiences that you are proud of.
[for people already in the LD network only] Ask in #skill-resumé-tips to get feedback from your peers on how to make your resumé better. Say "Please provide me feedback in the thread on this post, so it doesn't clog the channel."
[for people already in the LD network only] DO NOT SHARE YOUR RESUME FORM WITH ANYONE - IT IS YOUR PERSONAL SECURE URL, instead share your publicly viewable resumé which is pinned and bookmarked in your lde channel. Update your resumé form accordingly.
[for people already in the LD network only] Mark yourself as interested using the browse projects link pinned and bookmarked in your lde channel.
[for people already in the LD network only] Make sure you are upholding all the platform rules, pinned and bookmarked in your lde channel, generally, the system stops showing talent for future clients if it detects that a talent has:
1. communicated with clients outside the project and ldi Slack channels
2. discussed budget/money with clients instead of consulting LD staff in their lde channel
3. has become unresponsive in Slack
4. if you feel you may have been incorrectly flagged for this, let us know
[for people already in the LD network only] Do a paid github + blog project -- the instructions are pinned and bookmarked in your lde channel
1. Remember, look at your “Browse Projects” link pinned and bookmarked in your lde channel to see what skills clients are requesting (high demand) that are rare, that other talent don’t have (low supply). Learn and do github + blog projects in those high-demand, low-supply skills so that you can speed up the process of getting a client match.
  1. Examples: Blockchain, Kubernetes, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Neo4j, SEO for Shopify, Flutter, Native iOS app development, D3, Bioinformatics, etc. but don’t just go with these examples -- look at what clients are actually asking for in the browse projects link pinned and bookmarked in your lde channel.
[for people already in the LD network only] Do a Q&A post as described at the bottom of the github + blog project instruction.
Also, the long-term mission of LD is not just to match you with clients but also to help you start your own software ideas. If you’d like to build out your own project ideas with LD’s help, please see the note about LD Ventures in ld-engineers Slack channel.

Note: Once you have started filling the LD resumé form, you no longer need to update your PDF resumé. We do not use PDF resumés. Please be patient with the resumé form. Remember when the client's first impression of you is through your public resumé view so you want it to look good. Excellent examples: Collins, Harshit.

Save your answers in a google doc or sticky and paste them into the resumé form, so you don’t lose work! Please pay attention to the resumé form validation messages carefully - it checks that all skills are justified and that all required fields are filled out.

Once you are in the network, pretend to be a client. Select a skill in the Find Talent page. Do you show up in the search? How do you look? Then, try another skill, and so on.

If you are unhappy with your interview score or your overall star rating and feel that it’s affecting your ability to get clients, we recommend you do a few lifelong learning projects (blog and screencast) and then retake your interview. Note that you do need to gain more experience through lifelong learning projects before requesting an interview retake or star rating update.