Ali’s Guide To Resume Writing
Please don’t make me review another 5 pages of nothing
Our team is growing rapidly and so we have to review a lot of resumes. One thing I’ve noticed is that most people skipped the class in which they were taught how to write a resume. And so please take this post, partly a rant complaining about my pains, partly a desperate attempt to have people improve their resume writing practices.
How Resumes Are Reviewed
The job of the resume is to get you an interview. So before we talk about what should be done in a resume, we should talk about how the resume is reviewed. Because we want the resume to get through each of the gates that will be placed.
The Job Is Posted
A hiring manager opens a position and talks to the recruiter about it. The recruiter likely has focus on hiring people with particular skillsets but they would not have any domain expertise. So they would ask the hiring manager how to screen candidates. Without having domain expertise if they are hiring. So they’ll ask for some skills and keywords to search for. Inevitably there will be some falling for the caveats I mentioned in my article “The Skills Gap Is A Lie — Part 3” of focusing too much on perishable skills. The good recruiters will also take additional instructions, examples of things that stand out in resumes, domain specific questions that they can either evaluate or forward the answers to.
The Search
Finally the recruiter starts looking. They’ll post the job in different places. Start searching for potential candidates on LinkedIn and other places. To get through this stage your resume does need to include the desired keywords. Other than keywords the companies you’ve worked for matter a lot especially if they have a good reputation. If you thrived at a competitor we know does a good job then we’re sure you’ll thrive with us. After that, the recruiter may have a screening call verify the information in your resume, ask behavioral questions, explain the job, the organization. And if you are interested in the position, your experience seems to match your resume they’ll forward your resume to the hiring manager. Remember, the recruiter wants to waste as little time talking to people and especially does not want to have a reputation with the hiring manager of passing bad candidates.
The Review
At that point your resume will be in a stack reviewed by the hiring manager. At this point it will be reviewed by domain experts that would interview you. So the expectations on the resume are very different. They’re looking for someone they want to work with, who can get the job done. At this point your resume will be reviewed by a fine toothed comb — if you’re lucky. Remember your resume is one in a stack. They will only read it in detail if they think it is good. Otherwise they’ll move on to the next resume. When they do read it, they’re trying to make sure their not wasting valuable time on interviews. And to a lesser extent keep the bozos out. A lesser extent because most have accepted the fact that resumes still don’t tell much of a person. On the bright side, in the stack of resumes the hiring manager reviews in general the bar is going to be very low.
The Interview
Finally you’ll start interviewing. The resume will guide the questions you’ll be asked during the interview but after this point your resume will mostly be irrelevant to whether or not you get hired. But if something is on your resume, you can be asked about it. If you say you don’t know, it will set off alarms about what else you are misrepresenting.
I Was Promised Guidance
So now we understand what the expectations on your resume are. The different people reviewing them, and what they’re trying to get. So we can now talk about how we can meet the needs at the various stages.
The One Page Resume
When I took my engineering communications class there was a lecture and an assignment to write your resume. One of the key statements in the class was your resume should be one page, at most one and a half. If you want to improve the quality of your resume this is one of the biggest things you can do. The way to understand this problem is that your resume is going to be reviewed by busy people. They don’t want to waste their time reading an essay. In fact they shouldn’t have to since they’re most likely looking for people that are clear and concise communicators (I mean who isn’t).
You should not look at your resume as something that will get read. Rather you should think of it as a few lines of your resume are going to get skimmed. So you have to make sure the lines they see showcase someone that they want to hire. The only way to do that is making sure every line in your resume shows you as brilliant.
There’s another catch. I’d like to hire someone with the mantra of “Be better today than yesterday, and be better tomorrow than today.” But someone that achieves this, by definition the only interesting work they did was their most recent. or put another way, everything except your most recent achievements are a distraction.
And if you take more than one page for your resume I can bet there are a lot of crappy lines in your resume that can be removed. Even if they’re not crappy, they have to be by definition weak. Plus what we discovered was it was only the candidates with the short resumes that got accepted. Which we think may have something to do with the next point.
Speak To The Value
I’ve talked about the question why in other places like my article “Why, Oh Why, Oh Why?” and I’ve also mentioned Simon Sinek’s video which talks about the concept of why.
When a resume stands out to me it is because they get the why. They start with the goals, and the value they delivered at work. After that, they establish credibility to their claim by describing how they achieved the goals. And this also ties in with being brief in your resume. Most of the reason the resumes I see are 5-page resumes because they include frivolous task lists. Look I don’t need you to tell me that you’ve used git. What next, are you going to tell me that you are literate and know how to walk?
A resume that speaks to the value not only helps me understand quickly what this person can do. It also establishes confidence that this person is not an order taker but rather will come in with their own vision and ideas, and make us all better. Because they are deliberate about what they do, understanding how it fits into the bigger picture.
Make It Concrete
Everyone knows you need to be a hard worker, creative problem solver, great communicator, and model team player. Whoever reads your resume will take that with a grain of salt. You need to make everything concrete. You need to provide accomplishment. The more objective the better. Don’t say you made something faster, say by how much faster. If you handled scale share the level of scale you got. Don’t waste valuable real estate my making claims. Just mention the impact your work has had. The one reading the resume will be able to take it from there.
In my mind an experience entry looks a bit like
- Express the goal achieved
- How you did it
- Some metrics showing accomplishments or awards
Oh And Don’t Forget The Keywords
I hate how we have to use the keywords. But the reality is that they work. So you should not undermine yourself by not including them. Rather when you’re describing how you achieved your goal, you should be explicit about using the keywords in describing the process. This not only will get you the necessary pass on the keywords. But it will also allow you to leverage the knowledge of the hiring manager. They’re trying to understand the work you’ve done, and when you describe it with appropriate keywords on I used W with X and Y, orchestrated by Z. You are telling the reader that you have actually done this, and here is a rough architecture. And if you are honest about what you implemented, you have the reader thinking about how what you described would work.
Be Brave
You need to remember that you are only going to be chosen for one job. So your resume needs to appeal to the people you want to work with. And it is okay to not be appealing to people you don’t want to work with. If there’s something that you want to say but are concerned it will upset people that you don’t want to work with, then say it. The people that were not right for you will just be doing you a favor by self-selecting themselves away from you. Guess what I’ve reviewed so many resumes that I can’t tell the difference between most of the resumes that I see.
I Know What You Mean By “Experienced In”
Hiring managers have also written resumes. They’re also tried to embellish them. We all know “experienced in” means you’ve run a few commands or the bare minimum of practical work, probably in just some testing. In a similar vein “knowledge of” means you were talking to a friend about this technology so you know it exists, you’ve just never tried it. Fortunately if you follow the earlier points you’ll end up including the keywords in a context that makes the reader understand the depth of your knowledge. And gets rid of the extraneous statements.
Yes this article was written entirely for selfish purposes. I just want the quality of resumes out there to improve. To be honest, I feel like most of the resumes I review are the exact same resume. And whether someone gets an interview is not a function of how well they fit for a job but rather if they were lucky because I was getting desperate for finding a hire even though I hate all the the resumes received. Hopefully you will find the advice useful. Also I’ve recently written an article on interviewing that you can check out.
