Telling Your Story on a Resume Part 1: The First Draft

This is part 1 of a multi-part series. In this series, I will give some general advice on how to tell your story through your resume. It is not a comprehensive guide to writing a resume. The audience is generally tech workers but it probably applies to other fields as well. I plan to publish 3 parts over the next 3 weeks so follow me for updates!

I’ve been meaning to write this blog series for a while and with the recent layoffs it’s never been more relevant. Since I currently have a position open I am acutely aware that, unfortunately, most resumes are just bad. And that’s a shame because putting together a decent resume is probably one the simplest things you can change to at least get you to the first round of an interview process.

Setting the stage

First, there are many schools of thought on this subject and I’m only giving you mine. One popular model for resume writing that I thoroughly disagree with is the quantity-based approach. The idea with this model is to write a very generic resume that’s plugged with as many keywords as possible and blast it out to as many places as you can find. I’ve never used this method myself but personally, I doubt it’s very effective. At best it might get you more phone screens but to me it seems likely you’ll just match with a bunch of jobs you aren’t interested in.

My strong preference is what I would call a quality-based approach: be very intentional about the kind of jobs you want and laser focus on a handful of opportunities at a time.

There are obviously a million opinions out there on what makes a good or a bad resume. There are so many tips, gimmicks, and hacks it’s enough to make your head spin. So allow me to add to the confusion by throwing one more opinion into the maelstrom. What makes for a good resume?

It tells your story of you in about 1 minute

Sounds hard? It is. But 1 minute is about all the time you’re going to get from the hiring manager on the other side of that application form. They’ve got a hundred other applicants to sort through and don’t have time to read your biography. In about a minute they need to read your story and understand 3 basic things:

• Who are you?
• What have you done?
• What do you want to be doing?

If they don’t get the answers to those questions in under a minute you’re probably going in the rubbish pile. In fact, even if you have a good resume the odds are against you. So don’t make it harder for yourself with a bad resume!

So how do we apply this idea in practice? Well, first of all, by “telling a story” I don’t mean a linear, word-by-word, and paragraph-by-paragraph story. This would probably be a very bad idea. Storytelling can take many forms. You can tell a story without using any words. Pictures can tell a story. Music can tell a story. Stories are not always linear. The point is: there are many ways to tell a story. How you tell a story should be driven by the story you want to tell and the constraints of the medium.

You should assume your resume will not be read line-by-line in order. In fact, your resume probably won’t be read in its entirety. Entire bullet points or paragraphs might be skipped. Some of those parts might even be the most important parts of your story! So this brings me to my first point…

Decide what matters

Most importantly: what matters to you? I think there is a clear hierarchy of information to include in your resume. In order the hierarchy is:

1. Measurable outcomes
2. Non-measurable outcomes
3. Work samples: Github repos, design portfolios, etc.

You may notice that some of these bullet points might be hard to come by. That’s okay. At this point, your goal is just to sketch out the most important parts of your story. These are the parts that will anchor your resume. Don’t worry about putting them into resume format yet. Just jot them down as notes.

Now let’s talk about each of these points.

Measurable Outcomes

What do I mean by a measurable outcome? Here’s a couple of examples:

• Increased conversion rate by 10% by adding a feature to save credit card information
• Improved response time by 20% by adding indexes to the database
• Refactored endpoint to reduce the error rate by 25%

Humans love that stuff. We eat it up. We like outcomes, but we really like measurable outcomes. You might not have a ton of these. That’s okay. Add what you have. Put them at the top. Bold them. Highlight them. Then move on to the non-measurables.

Non-measurable Outcomes

Not everything can or should be measured. There are plenty of non-measurable things that might be important to your story. Non-measurable outcomes might be something like:

• Implemented Login with Github to make it easier for customers to get authenticated
• Lead a project to re-architect subscription API to make it more reliable
• Add static analysis to the CI/CD pipeline to enforce quality rules

These are not as eye-catching as measurable outcomes but they’re still pretty good. The other thing to note is a lot of them could be turned into measurable outcomes. In fact, I would challenge you to always try to measure your work. It makes work more rewarding and helps keep you focused on the things that matter. But whether it wasn’t measured or it can’t be measured, non-measurable outcomes are still pretty high on the hierarchy.

Work Samples

Next are work samples. You might not have this. You should try to. Anyone can write “C#” on their resume. I want you to show me you can do something with it. Even a small project you put a few hours into can go a long way. The bar is low. Having anything at all puts you in the top 10%. Sometimes a simple link to your portfolio might suffice. If it’s really cool it might be worth telling a story about.

Other stuff

You may also notice that the list does not include many common things that are typically included in a resume like:

• Responsibilities
• Technologies
• Education
• Skills

That’s not to say you can’t include these things. It’s just these things are way less important than the others. And oftentimes they can be inferred from the more important points.

Responsibilities

For the most part, responsibilities can be assumed from the job title and a description of your actual accomplishments.

Let’s take one of the above examples: “Lead a project to re-architect subscription API to make it more reliable”. From this, I can infer that you had some degree of technical leadership responsibilities. I don’t need a separate bullet point stating “lead team on multiple projects”. It’s implied from your accomplishments.

If you had some responsibilities that were truly interesting in some way, by all means, include them. But otherwise, you can leave it behind.

Technologies

I would recommend you somehow include the technologies you know best in your resume. I just wouldn’t go out of your way to list them separately as bullet points. Incorporating them into your accomplishments is again much more effective. An example might be something like “Refactored Dotnet Core 3.1 API to support upgrade to Elasticsearch version 7.7”. This provides context for how you used it and is way more informative than a bulleted list of technologies.

If you’ve got the space for it, and you really want to call attention to specific technologies then feel free to include it. Otherwise, you can leave it behind.

Education

If you’re a few years into your career, I probably don’t care very much about what school you went to. And I certainly don’t care about your GPA. Some exceptions might be if you went to a particularly prestigious school or you got a Ph.D. level of education. There are still many companies that require this information, though. Those places are silly but so be it.

“Skills”

When I see skills like “organization” on a resume my eyes reflexively roll into the back of my head. It might be true but I’m not gonna take your word for it. You’re gonna have to show me not tell me. I probably wouldn’t include stuff like this at all.

The First Draft

At this point, you have an outline of the most important parts of your story. Now it’s time to turn this into something that looks like a resume. No need to reinvent the wheel here. Deviating too much from the norm is a risky move. The fundamentals of a resume are:

• Your name and contact information
• A summary of who you are
• Your work history in reverse-chronological order
• The rest of the stuff we talked about as-needed

Don’t overthink it at this point. Just lay out the basic structure and fill in the blanks. Start with the parts that matter most to you. Add any other projects or accomplishments that might apply to each position. Don’t worry too much about wording and design. This is just the first draft. You’ll end up with something like this:

It won’t look pretty and it’s probably too much information but that’s okay! We’ll leave it there for now. In the next part of this series, we’ll do the hard part: editing and design. Stay tuned for the next installment: Telling Your Story on a Resume Part 2: The Final Cut.