PHP hiring splits sharply. One side is modern Laravel or Symfony product work; the other is maintaining and extending large legacy codebases that earn real money. Both are proper jobs, they attract different employers, and a resume that does not signal which one you want gets read for the wrong one.
PHP developer with 9 years across Laravel product work and legacy modernisation. Took a 400K-line PHP 5.6 application to PHP 8.2 in stages with no scheduled downtime and no lost revenue days.
The example above is a working resume, not a screenshot. What follows is what changes when you write your own, and what technical reviewers in this field actually do with the page.
Every bullet should survive the question "and then what happened". Latency, throughput, error rate, build time, cost, incident count — technical work generates numbers constantly, and a resume without them reads as work you watched rather than work you did. Name the technology inside the bullet rather than leaving it to the skills list, so the achievement and the tool arrive together.
The first pass is a match check rather than an assessment. A technical reviewer holds the posting beside your resume and looks for whether the stack lines up; anything that has to be inferred from a job title usually is not. That is why the top third of the page has to carry the match instead of leaving it buried in a bullet halfway down.
PHP hiring is dominated by agencies, ecommerce operations and companies maintaining profitable older systems, which means processes are practical rather than theoretical. Expect a take-home task, a code review exercise, or questions about a legacy scenario. Algorithm-heavy interviews are less common here than in the wider software market. Contract and freelance work is a substantial share, and rates vary widely between the modern-framework and legacy-maintenance ends.
Zend and Laravel both offer genuine certifications and they carry modest weight, mostly with agencies and recruiters filtering large applicant pools. Neither substitutes for shipped work. Degrees are common but far from universal in this discipline, and self-taught developers with strong production experience are hired routinely. What is checked is code, usually a repository or a take-home.
Three lines at most: your discipline, the depth of your experience, and the single system or result you would most want to be asked about. Technical readers skim the summary looking for a reason to keep reading, and "passionate about technology" is not one. Name the stack in the summary if the posting names it, because the first keyword match happens here.
Technical postings are written by someone with a specific gap to fill. Read for the gap, not the wish list: the three or four things repeated across the responsibilities are what the role is really about. Mirror those in your own words and drop what does not apply. Our free ATS checker will show you what a parser extracts from your file before a recruiter sees it.
A summary naming your discipline and your depth, a skills block a reader can find without hunting, experience bullets that each end in something measurable, education, and links to anything public you have shipped. Certifications only where the role is explicitly tied to a platform.
The resume is the shortest part of the process in this field. It exists to earn the first call and to give a technical interviewer something concrete to open with, which is why a vague bullet is worse than no bullet — it becomes the question you answer badly.
Rarely, and never as a substitute for shipped work. They count most when a role is explicitly tied to one vendor platform; otherwise reviewers weight what you built and can discuss in detail far above what you passed an exam in.
The stack, and how fast it can be found. A technical reviewer checks your languages, frameworks and platforms against the posting before reading a single achievement, which is why they belong in the summary and the skills block rather than only inside your job history.
Terms that commonly appear in postings for this role include: PHP, Laravel, Symfony, MySQL, Composer, MVC, REST API, PHPUnit. Include a term only where you have genuinely done the work behind it, and write it the way the posting writes it rather than the way your last employer did.
One page under roughly ten years of experience, two pages beyond that. A two-page resume where every line earns its place beats a padded one-page resume, so cut duties before you cut measurable achievements.
Use the structure and the way each achievement is phrased, but write your own content. The names and employers here are fictional, and a resume describing work you did not do will not survive an interview.
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