Last week a coworker asked me to review a resume for a friend of theirs because they weren’t getting any call backs. When I looked at the resume, it was obvious to me what was wrong. I wouldn’t have given this person a call back either, even though they might be great.
Obviously, I don’t speak for every hiring manager, but I can show you what I look for in a resume.
About twice a month, I’ll get someone coming to me to ask for career advice. I’m starting to collect the more common questions and my thoughts on them. I’m putting these together as a series of blog posts under the tag CareerPlusPlus.
What’s the point?
Don’t my merits stand on their own?
Why do I have to jump through hoops to prove to you, hiring manager, that I deserve to be here?
These are good questions. Back at my first job after grad school, we were hiring an intern to work under me. This was a part time position and we received over 140 applications that passed the first round of screening from the recruiting team.
If I spent 30 seconds on each resume, that is over an hour of person after person after person. There is zero chance that person #137 is getting the same level of attention and consideration as person #21. The person on the other end of the hiring is a human being, and I’ve yet to meet one who can be so impartial after such a process.
The fact of the matter is that hiring for that role on our end was relatively unimportant. Even if we didn’t hire anyone to fill the intern role, the company would have been fine. So how many hours should I cut out of my productivity to search through that pile of 140 potentially qualified people to pick the handful to interview?
If you’re on the applicant side of this, it may sound unfair. Parts of it are unfair, as are many parts of life in general. I’m not here to argue about how things should be, but rather how the are.
What am I trying to do?
The #1 question I want to answer as a hiring manager is: Can this person perform the job I have open?
Things I am not trying to answer:
- Will I like them?
- What is the most impressive thing they’ve done?
- What kind of cool hobbies do they have?
Why does this matter? Because in my opinion every aspect of your resume should point to answering the top question: Can you perform the job I have open?
One Page!
Keep your resume to one printed page, single sided. This forces you to focus on the things that matter.
Every single job I’ve gotten has been from a one page resume. When reviewing resumes, I generally will never look at the second page if it’s there.
Address the Requirements
Make sure you address how you have met the requirements for the position (or come close).
It’s rare these days to find applicants who line up perfectly with all of the requirements people put down for positions. If you’re close on one of them but don’t exactly meet it, show how close you are. Do not forgo applying to a position because you don’t meet one or two of the bullets they have listed.
This is a change in my advice. In earlier years I would tell people to only apply if they met all requirements. Times change, and so must we.
Focus on Achievements
Talk about your achievements and not your responsibilities.
I frequently see things like “Was responsible for producing xyz.” That doesn’t tell me if you did it well or not. You could be responsible for something and do a bad job. Tell me what you achieved.
It’s better to write specifics that demonstrate you’ve not only done something but can show how much of an improvement it was. For example, I used to include a bullet point that I “Improved D* path planning algorithm implementation by two orders of magnitude, leading to new use cases in behavior planning.” This showed two things: 1) that I measured the impact of my code changes and 2) that I can demonstrate how it made an impact in the project.
When you look at the job requirements, ask yourself how you can wrap the work you’ve done to match one of those requirements.
Customize for each Application
Generally the resumes that get passed over the most are those that are generic. Someone writes their resume one time and fires it off to two dozen companies to “see what sticks”. This is a terrible approach.
Again, I’m most looking to answer the question “Can this person do the job I’m hiring for?” I have in mind a set of skills I’m looking for. I put them in the job description. When I get a generic resume, the person might fit really well but it isn’t obvious because they haven’t made it obvious they have the right skills.
If I only give a resume 30 seconds it must jump out that they are worth further investigation. 30 seconds is a reasonable time to look at a resume, from my experience.
When I was applying, I kept a master resume that had way more bullet points than was necessary for each position I had. Then I would take the job description and choose which bullet points were relevant, and which were not. I’d cut the latter. Then I would look again and see if I needed to change the language of the bullets I left in to better fit the job description.
Appearance matters
I’ve gotten feedback that “It should not matter how it looks, just what I’ve done.”
Ok, sure. They key word there is “should.”
The person reading your resume is a human and they will have bias. Resumes that look good and are easy to read will get more attention than those that are not. Save those fancy fonts for your Halloween party invitations. Choose a clean font. You can go off the beaten path a little, but not a lot. Ask yourself: Is the thing you want your reviewer to be thinking about is your choice of font and layout or is it the content? Don’t distract.
Well, if you’re applying for a front end position it may be that layout and font selection IS relevant. Then go forth and put your best font forward.
Avoid lots of whitespace.
Don’t make it too dense to read.
You’re looking for the middle ground. It should be a mostly full page that has a decent amount of whitespace in it so that you aren’t straining to read it but it also doesn’t look empty.
My cheat is that I keep my volunteering work section as a bonus. If it looks like my resume is too busy, I cut it and adjust spacing to fill out the page nicely.
Don’t broadcast your failures
Be honest. Be open. But don’t make a headline out of things that didn’t pan out.
In the resume that someone asked me to review last week, they listed in their Education section their GPA. The GPA was… uninspiring, to say the least. Nobody said you have to include your GPA in the first place. So just taking that off the resume would improve their chance of getting a call back.
It’s marathon, not a sprint
<brag>I’ve run one marathon, and I’m happy to never ever do that again.</brag>
How I made it to the finish line of the marathon was not achieved on the day of the race. It happened on those Tuesday mornings when I laced up at 5:30am and pounded pavement. Similarly, you will find that perfect job by a working steadily on it. Applying for jobs takes time. Some places get back to you immediately. Some take weeks. That part has nothing to do with you – it’s all on them.
Do not be discouraged if you don’t immediately hear back. Send in your resume and move along. Get your next ready.
Don’t try to do too much all at once. Just like the person reviewing resumes will lose interest and focus, so will you during the writing and application. Pace yourself. When I finished grad school, my goal was to put in one good application every day. It took time, but it worked out.
Closing Thoughts
Resume writing is work. Sometimes you’ll have a perfect resume and never hear back from the company. There are many, many reasons this happens. Please, don’t take it personally.
The resumes that get my attention are those where the person writing it made it extremely clear that they understood what the position entailed and they demonstrated how they had the experience to meet those requirements. Focus on that.
Good luck!