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Good Resumes

In the past, I have optimized my Resume pretty aggressively. Getting it reviewed by multiple folks, checking for every typo, every acronym, checking for clarity of thoughts, etc. When I was searching for a job, I also kept updating my resume based on the accepts/rejects I got. I used to A/B test the format and content etc. In short, I have spent a ton of time preparing my resumes.

On the other hand, I have possibly taken more than a couple of hundred interviews. So naturally, I have also looked at a lot of resumes too. I always thought that people have figured out how to create a good resume since there are so many resources available online. But from what I have observed, creating a bad resume is very easy. I was shocked by the quality of resumes I was seeing from people. And these were sometimes 10+ years of experience from companies like Amazon and Microsoft.

So I have taken most of my learning for building a good resume and shared it here:

  1. Have a breathable resume. If you have 4+ years of experience, chances are you have worked on a lot of projects. Don’t try to add every small project to your resume. Resumes are for getting your foot in the door. You can talk more about your smaller projects in the interview. I think trying to have a 1 pager resume forces you to select your best projects.
  2. Focus on what you owned. Spend a ton of time perfecting how you can present your most impactful projects with extreme clarity.
  3. Demonstrated expertise not keywords (taken from Chip Huyen’s blog). Write about the problem you solved and then the tech you used to solve it. That relates your skills to problem-solving. Add tech stack with the projects so that the resume screener can see that you have used certain tools/tech in a specific problem statement.
  4. Avoid unquantifiable metrics. Whenever you add metrics, they should be clear. It can’t be like: “Increased retention rate by 10%”. What was the baseline? What was the actual impact on business? It’s tough to evaluate if you just add one-liner metrics like these.
  5. Boast a little. Internal company awards, promotions, recommendations, add them
  6. A simple format that has helped me: Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y] by doing [Z]
  7. Extreme clarity, no typos. Sometimes we have a lot of context about the problem and we assume that others will share that too. So we end up writing our achievements in that way. This is fine for internal self-relfection but doesn’t always work in resumes. Try to set a small context before talking about the problem you solved.
  8. Simple. This is a personal bias, but I like simple resumes with no colors and graphs. I don’t think that the self-rating of languages or tools is helpful or that very colorful resumes are attractive in the software industry.

I hope this helps!

References for tools