Make Your First Impression

There is so much content available online for first-time resume writers but not so much for the intermediate and advanced stages of your career. Folks with a few years of experience are usually refining their resume and may benefit from considering these points:

1. Remember your value

2. Tailoring

3. Quantitative Results

4. Maximizing your real estate

5. Don't forget the basics

Remember Your Value And Be Yourself

As your career develops, you will naturally gain more "bullet points" for your resume. However, it's easy to get too wrapped up in the technologies used instead of your peronsal strengths. You may be an exceptional speaker, a superstar teammate, or a dedicated leader and you should absolutely highlight those traits in addition to the technical skills. 

Some of the points I make here may seem too modern or not modern enough. If you feel that a certain convention is out of date or incentives poorer hiring practices, please let me know!

Tailoring

To tailer your resume means to make a few last minute changes before you apply. Highlighting the most relevant pieces of your experience for that job to maximize your resume's impact. Move points of experience to the "outside" of the page where hiring managers will see them even while scanning quickly through many applications.

Tailoring your resume dozens of times is not a great use of your time. Instead, I strongly recommend using "resume profiles". Try to categorize the types of jobs to which you are applying into 3 to 5 "profiles" (e.g. "software engineer", "data engineer", "machine learning engineer"). Then, create a copy of your resume for each one and rearrange the experience to highlight the skills most relevant to those job profiles. 

Profiles are just a starting point. You can still tailor your resume for jobs that are especially interesting or relevant for you. Profiles can also be a nice way to reduce difficult decisions about which points of experience to highlight or which ones to cut. If you are very proud of some work you did on a project but you are struggling to keep your resume concise, you can move it to another profile and leverage it on specific applications where it is useful.

Quantitative Results

This is especially pertinent to those with experience. More senior employees are expected to have real business impact. This is easiest to convey with numbers. Be careful not to use confidential figures though, especially those that constitute insider knowledge as it is illegal and is a red flag to future employers. Consider less sensitive numbers like how many people you trained, the length of a project, or a percentage change instead.

Maximizing Your Real Estate

This topic is subject to debate. Some schools of thought say you want to have a lengthy CV because it signals that you have lots of experience and allows you to paint a very detailed picture of yourself. Others might be concerned with ensuring that recruiters and hiring managers won't make the time and want to maximize the impact in just 1, maybe 2 pages. There's more debate about including sections like personal statements and keyword lists. Some people will maximize their relevant keywords along a "Z" shape over the page based on human tendencies for skimming that may be invalidated these days by digital zooming/scrolling.

What is undeniable is which points you include or exclude entirely and how close they are to the top of the resume, followed by the perimeter of the page. 

Formatting

Formatting applies both for human reviewers and ATS (Applicant Tracking System) scans.

• ATS can sometimes have trouble parsing uncommon fonts. Stick to the standards like Arial, Times, Helvetica, Garamond, and Verdana

  • Choosing between serifed fonts and sans fonts can make your resume seem more mature or modern to humans, respectively. You may use this to highlight yourself or market to a specific company.

• Certain features like Headers, Tables, and Columns can negatively impact ATS match scores. You can simply use center alignment for headers and avoid tables altogether.

Don't Forget the Basics

Of course, you don't want to forget:

• Include your full name and make it big!

• Include contact information

• Start sentences with action verbs (see Action Verbs)

• Start every bullet point with the same tense (e.g. Designed, Trained, Researched)

  • Be careful that you don't unintentionally switch to a passive tense (e.g. Designed a product leading to more sales)

• Demonstrate impact (e.g. Built a feature that increased revenue by 1%)

• People tend to read in a "Z" pattern across a page or that we naturally look to the outside of the page. This is not the most important principle for writing a resume but it can be a useful way to simplify small decisions.

Online Tools

• http://resumegenius.com

• https://www.jobscan.co

• https://cultivatedculture.com