The formula to writing a great resume

August 18, 2020

For years, I struggled to come up with a way to write good resumes. They were long, unstructured, and not very descriptive of the work I did, nor its impact. As a result, they were essentially a waste of paper.

It wasn't until I started applying for internships when I realized that there's a few tricks of the trade to writing resumes. Once you get the hang of it, writing great resumes can become second nature. To make things easy, here's a few steps you can take to making your resume great.

(These tips are specifically written for college students.)

1. Use a good template. I personally like using the template provided by the McCombs School of Business. You can download it by clicking here. You can use another one for sure, but make sure it is readable. Another common format is the Deedy resume format (LaTeX), which is also very readable and organizes information quite well. These two formats are about as good as you're going to get. Please don't ignore my advice and go off and find some odd resume template because it "looks cool", and also be wary of making your resume too fancy and colorful. Often, finding a good-looking template means you might be overdoing it. By placing emphasis on appearance, layout of information is sacrificed and ultimately this will lead to an ineffective resume. An argument to be made against colorful resumes: think about how that would look if your resume was printed out on a grayscale printer by a company. My resume is based off of the McCombs format, and while it looks "boring", it has nonetheless been able to get me great job offers. I'll explain readability in a bit—it's more important than beauty. TL;DR: don't get too fancy. Just use either the McCombs format or the Deedy format (if you know LaTeX).
2. Remove anything that is high school specific. NHS president? Congratulations. Unfortunately, that doesn't make Goldman Sachs want to hire you any more than if you weren't NHS president. Take out what high school you went to, your rank, your GPA, etc. — these are all relevant to high school and college applications, but not to your future career. From here on out, it's what you do in college that matters.
3. Keep your resume under one page with a reasonable font size. Right at one page is perfect. A resume should take up at least 3/4 of a page—any less and it looks very awkward. A resume that's more than one page is not okay unless you have worked in industry for more than 5 years and/or you have a PhD and have published a crap ton of papers. Some recruiters will simply not read past your one page if you have more than a page. Don't make your font size under 9, as that will make your resume too small and unreadable. Keep it between 10-12 ideally, but 9 is permissible if you have too many accomplishments that need to be all listed out.
4. For each work experience, keep it between 3-5 bullet points, and each bullet point should be one line only. Some say 5 bullet points on a single work experience is too many, but I think it is fine if you achieved a lot. Each bullet point should describe a different aspect of your work experience. No bullet point should exceed a line. You can definitely cut out something and refactor it into a new line if your font size is 10 or 9.
5. For each bullet point, not only talk about what you did, but also how you did it and the impact it caused. Google calls this the XYZ format: "Accomplished X as measured by Y by doing Z". As the next bullet point alludes to, don't copy paste this verbatim. Instead, make sure each bullet point contains the X, Y, and Z; in other words, make sure it says what you did, how you did it, and what metrics you can put behind it to establish its impressiveness. Here are two samples from my resume, before and after improvement:

Before:

Put in metrics tracking to my custom task

After:

Added metrics tracking by creating custom REST client to send data to Azure Application Insights API, speeding up task execution by 600%

Not only do you know what I did (added metrics tracking to send data to Azure App Insights), you also know how I did it (by creating a custom REST client) and what impact it had (sped up task execution by 600% — and by the way, that is not a lie).

6. Use a plethora of exciting verbs rather than boring ones like "used", "did", "made". Words like "established", "introduced", and "implemented" provide variety and infuses energy into your resume.

Instead of:

Used Python to make a script that refreshes the dashboard

Try saying:

Wrote a Python script to refresh team productivity dashboard

7. Be sure you're collecting metrics to put on your resume. Whenever you work on something, make sure you have tangible numbers to use that are impressive. Saying something like "my task will be used by hundreds of teams within Microsoft" sounds really impressive, and I guessed that by asking my team and my manager what the purpose of my project was, as well as what the scope of it would be. Then I made a reasonable estimation based on the scope. Other times, your team might be collecting metrics on their Kibana dashboard or whatever, and from there, you might be able to see how much time you've shaved off of something or how much more efficient you've made something work. As long as you use relevant numbers, you'll go far.
8. Don't share any secrets. Your resume should be as specific as possible, but keep your resume vague enough so that you don't violate your NDA by accident.
9. Make your resume as readable as possible. The layout should be good, as previously discussed. Each bullet point should be readable. While the XYZ format needs to be followed for each bullet point, that doesn't mean make the bullet point too difficult to read. A personal tip I have for technical resumes: I like to bold and underline each programming language so that it stands out, is easy to read, and is easily picked up subconsciously by readers of your resume. Bolding, italicizing, and underlining (within reason) is your friend when it comes to making your text stand out on your resume. Don't all caps anything to emphasize something, because yelling is scary, even on paper. Remember that a recruiter only takes between 5-15 seconds to scan your resume with their eyes.
10. Order matters. First impressions count, so put most impressive things first while preserving the order prescribed by the resume templates. Education first, then work experience, then personal projects, then honors and awards, and finally additional information.
11. Indicate your work eligibility. Employers need to see whether you are able to work in the United States with or without sponsorship. If you are a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident (i.e. Green Card holder) then you can put "eligible to work in the U.S. with no restrictions" so the recruiter won't have to worry about sponsoring you to work. Otherwise, indicate your visa status (i.e. F-1, J-1, H-1B, L-1, etc.) and explain what kind of sponsorship you need (i.e. CPT or OPT for F-1 visa holders, H-1B sponsorship for full time jobs after OPT runs out).
12. Put some relatable hobbies. Play sports? Knit? Fly a drone? Love history? Put down a select few hobbies that define who you are, yet are relatable and are professional. Netflix bingeing is tragically not a hobby (at least, not professional enough to be put on a resume). This will allow you to potentially strike up a conversation with whomever you're interviewed by.
13. Last, not really a content tip, but make sure you know what you put on your resume and don't lie. You'll be asked about your resume. Be sure to remember what you put on there, and I don't mean just the content, but rather do you actually know what you claimed you did? For instance, if you put down Docker or Kubernetes, these are two technologies that people often claim to know but really don't. You don't want to sound like you are talking out of your ass. If you put down Kubernetes on your resume, then when someone asks you "what does Kubernetes do?", you need to be able to say that it is an orchestration platform that coordinates deployments of server images and containers. Oh, and lying will obviously backfire if you aren't able to justify or back up your claims. Be sure to know your resume by heart. Don't forget what you worked on.

These tips should be enough to get you started on writing a great, impressionable resume. Reach out to me if you have any questions.

Example resumes:

• Technical resume, 2020 - this sort of resume is ideal for technical jobs like software engineering and product management
• McCombs BBA resume, 2020 - this sort of resume is ideal for general business jobs like analysts and consultants, and is McCombs School of Business approved (BA 101)

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