After last week’s article I gave a few people a courtesy review of their resume.
I am always happy to look at someone’s resume and give them some feedback. That is just as true this week as it was last week as it will be every week. Do not be shy. If you are reading this post, you are two to three clicks away from figuring out how to reach me via email or socials.
Unfortunately, most people do not like to click two or three times. That is why I am really crappy as a paid Amazon Affiliate—even when I pimp delicious unsweetened cherries. To make your lives easier, I am going to give a quick review of what I look for in a resume.
Is the resume reasonably sized?
I am not a fan of a ten page resume. There are times when it does make sense, if you are including speaking engagements, publications, patents, or significant experiences. I think of a resume like an Executive Summary—I want it to be short and concise. The ability to distill your professional experience down to a few pages is important to me. I expect one to two page resumes for people who are relatively early in their careers, three pages for most of their career, and maybe four pages if they have over fifteen years of experience.
Does the resume feel consistent?
The next thing I look for is the verb tenses for job descriptions and consistency across job descriptions.
I appreciate reading sentences that start in the past tense to describe accomplishments:
- Increased Revenue 15% through deployment of a new feature
- Developed a hiring pipeline to scale the engineering team
- Coordinated GDPR requirements with legal and platform team
I struggle when someone starts with this kind of formatting and in the next section of their work experience they swap to a different format:
- I built a new framework for cross platform mobile development
- I was responsible for three key releases for new titles.
I deliberately added a period to the second sentence as another form of inconsistency.
If possible, try to make sure your various job descriptions remain on the same page. I have seen far too many resumes that are three pages where the third page of the resume is just one line of text.
Does the resume include a mission statement or career goal?
This is not as important as other parts of the resume but I do love it when someone has a strategic career goal and can explain it to me.
You run the risk of someone reading your long term career goals and deciding that the role is not aligned with them. That is probably for the best, because that will become evident to everyone soon enough after you start the job anyway.
Are there specific successes or metrics included?
I like to see specific outcomes included in people’s career accomplishments. Did revenue increase by a percentage? Was there a decrease in site outages? Did the product ship on time or under budget? The more senior you are in your career, the more important this becomes.
Are there too many errors in the resume?
If you have too many typos or grammatical errors in your resume, I get nervous about the quality of work you will leave behind for someone else to maintain. I have a three-strikes policy with peoples’ resumes. If you have one error in your resume or possibly two, you might be sending out your resume under duress. If there are three or more things wrong with your resume, I become nervous about how to keep accurate documentation and accounting for your work output.
Is this person just a bad resume writer?
After I have finished going through a resume with my blowtorch and pliers, I take a step back and ask myself one last question: “Is this a solid employee who is just bad at writing resumes?”
If I believe this is true, I get pretty excited about interviewing this candidate. If they are a good worker who is bad at writing a resume, then they will get fewer interviews and I have a better shot at hiring them.
It is also something I can help fix. I am really happy when I can teach something really valuable to a potential employee.
How can you tell if someone is just a bad resume writer? That is really the million dollar question here. Unfortunately, I have yet to be able to articulate it well to other people. I am still working on describing patterns I see in a resume that indicate a really compelling candidate who simply needs to work on their resume writing skills. “I know it when I see it.” I would love to be able to explain it better.
You should take some time to give your resume a once-over. If you have a friend who has experience interviewing and hiring people, It would make sense to ask them to give your resume a once-over too.
If you have no friends, or none of your friends have experience interviewing and hiring people, then shoot me a note. I am happy to give it a once-over and ask the questions I have outlined above.
Thank you for reading along as usual. This post is not brought to you by the shameless profiteering of my Amazon Affiliate Link nor is it sponsored by my tool to help TTRPG DM’s improve the quality of their stories (derfdice.com). Raid: Shadow Legends has not driven a truck full of nickels over to my house and I am not getting an endorsement from the calorie-free smooth delicious taste of Diet Coke: Enjoy Coke!
Maybe I should put half of my random ranting behind a paywall over at Substack? Information wants to be free, but John’s minivan also wants to be paid off.
See you all next week.
