August 19, 2022
A resume is more than just a list of job roles, qualifications, and skills. It’s a sales document, highlighting your achievements in a way that recruiters, hiring managers, and future mentors can appreciate. It’s also a tool for getting past the applicant tracking systems, the software programs that 99% of the biggest companies use to evaluate resumes.
Whether you’re writing your first resume or polishing your mid-career one, these tips will help you create a document that persuades employers to get to know you better.
Note: I'm sharing a list of tips for this post. A "Step-by-step" or "Structure of the Resume" post would be too lengthy.
Many candidates make lengthy resumes, thinking that they need this space to sell their experience. It’s quite the opposite. In fact, many of the longest resumes are by candidates with less experience.
Generally, the rule of thumb is to keep your resume to one page if you have less than 10 years of experience. If you have more than that and multiple jobs, then you might be able to justify more than one page.
However, longer resumes often make you look worse. Imagine a candidate creates a one-page resume and a two-page resume. Typically, the stuff on the two-pager that isn’t the one-pager is the worst content. Thus, if a recruiter just glances through each resume, the average item he reads from the two-pager will be less interesting than the items on the one page. You’ve added more content, but it’s worse content. It brings down the average.
Additionally, if something really cool—like a great project—is on the second page, the reader won’t see it as first. There goes your first impression.
You should also avoid large blocks of text on your resume; people hate reading, and will generally skip right over paragraphs. Your resume should be a collection of bullets of around one to two lines.
Keep your resume short and sweet.
If your resume reads too much like a job description, then there’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong. Resumes should highlight what you did, not what you were supposed to do.
Example:
- Responsibility oriented: “Analyzed new markets and explored potential entrance strategies for China division.”
- Accomplishment oriented: “Led entrance strategy for Foobar product in China, and successfully persuaded CEO to refocus division on the enterprise market, resulting in a 7 percent increase in profits.”
The accomplishment-oriented resume packs a much stronger punch. Everyone wants an employee who gets things done.
Watch out for words like contributed to, participated in, or helped out with. These are good signs that you have focused more on responsibilities than accomplishments.
Ever seen an advertising campaign that says, “A portion of our profits is donated to charity”? The convenient thing about that statement is that the portion could be 0.0001 percent, and it’s still technically true.
This is what a resume reader thinks when she sees a resume that says “reduced server latency” or “increased customer satisfaction.” If you really did this (and it had a remotely meaningful impact), why can’t you say how much?
Quantifying your results makes them meaningful by showing employers the impact that you had. If you’ve implemented a change that reduced company costs or increased profits, employers want to hire you.
For technical positions, it may be more impactful to quantify some results in more technical terms: seconds of latency, number of bugs, or even an algorithmic improvement in big-O time. However, be careful to strike a balance here: while your accomplishments may be impressive to a fellow engineer, a less technical HR individual might be the one reviewing your resume. You want to make sure that your resume impresses everyone.
Example:
Original: “Implemented crash reporter and used results to fix three biggest causes of crashes.”
Newly quantified: “Implemented crash reporter and used results to fix three biggest causes of crashes, leading to a 45 percent reduction in customer support calls.”
Your resume should be tailored to the position, and potentially the company as well. What does the company value? Does it want developers to wear many hats? Talk about the different roles you played. Are they very data focused? Talk about how your analyzed website metrics to drive decisions.
Observe that the targeting is in potentially three ways:
1. Targeted to the company’s product. If the company makes maps, you could talk about your map-related experience.
2. Targeted to the job description. If the job description wanted people with particular skills or experience, tweak your bullets to bring out these aspects.
3. Targeted to the company’s values. If you know the company puts the user first, discuss how you went above and beyond for the user.
Whenever I help someone with their resume, there’s one question I always ask: What did you not include?
About half of the time, the applicant mentions something that is, arguably, the selling point of his resume—or it would be, if it were on his resume.
These might be things like:
- I volunteer for an NGO initiative and built them an e-commerce website
- I teach design on the weekends.
- I organized a music festival for my college.
- On the side, I built a first-person-shooter game by leading a team of developers and designers
Invariably, the candidate describes that he didn’t list it because he thought it either wasn’t relevant or wasn’t appropriate (because, for example, the game never launched).
Think again. The NGO website shows technical skills. Teaching design shows communication skills. The music festival and the game show leadership skills. And all show initiative makes you special.
Don’t be too quick to ignore stuff that isn’t relevant. Fluff doesn’t belong on your resume, but the things that show a different side of you just might.
It’s okay to be a little unique. In fact, the further you get away from the stuffy business roles, the truer this is.
All the resume rules that you must have read/heard are really just rules of thumb. It’s okay to break them, if you know what you’re doing.
Your goal ultimately is to show that you would be a great employee. This usually means you want to stay within the rules of what a great resume should be. The rules were created because they’re generally effective.
However, the rules were also created for the typical candidate. Breaking the rules can be, on rare occasions, valuable. For example, one candidate provided a picture of each app he built next to the project’s listing on his resume. Another candidate wrote entirely in the first person—and wrote blocks of text rather than bullets—but it was so beautifully written and effused such passion that people read it.
