Resume Tips

Just like how an ad describes a product to the consumers, resume is a tool to present yourself to a potential employer. A product ad highlights the features of a product which are important to the consumer, hides any shortcomings and you should do the same with your resume.

There is a statistic which says, recruiters spend only 6-7 secs reviewing at a resume. I feel it’s half truth. A good recruiter can usually decide if the person meets minimum requirements for the role in few secs i.e they take about 7secs to know that a resume isn’t a match. So, you have 7 secs to catch the attention of the recruiter. Once you cross that barrier they spend more time reviewing qualified candidates.

So, it’s important to catch their attention in the initial few seconds.
This is why it is important to be concise and focus on core responsibilities, achievements, and impact.

Here are some of the tips to achieve that:

Highlight your achievements

• Don’t make your resume as a comprehensive list of all your past career history.
• List down the skills you want to highlight in your resume and add content which reflects that
• Remember, a candidate with one exceptional achievement will be preferred over a candidate with multiple average performances. Thats one of the reason why FAANG engineers are preferred over normal candidates.
• Arrange the content such that major achievements are listed first i.e attention-capturing items should be listed earlier to deliver higher impact.
• Cite data/numbers that convey the scale of the project,task
• Give examples that demonstrate personality traits such as leadership, confidence, and independence
• Add title wherever necessary for giving clarity
• Don’t lie on your resume
• You should be able to speak at length about any point in your resume. Be prepared with examples to validate your claims

Vocabulary

• Keep it simple and be consistent
• Avoid using first person ‘I’ or any pronouns
• Don’t use paragraphs. Write short sentences and multiple bullet points
• Avoid repetition
• Use action words like Implemented, Executed, Achieved, Conceptualized etc

Styling

• Font size and type should be consistent
• Use bold/italic to highlight
• Justify content
• Use appropriate spacing and margins
• Recruiters usually take a black&white print out of the resume. So, make sure your resume is readable on a A4 sized printout