How to Craft a Badass Resume That’ll Get You an Interview
A Comprehensive Guide to Creating an Impressive Resume
Over the past ten years I’ve interviewed, hired, and contributed to hiring countless people — both technical and non-technical. I’ve studied resumes and other resume guides like a science. I’ve proofed and edited and reviewed resumes with hiring managers in all kinds of companies.
Here’s some next-level advice to make your resume memorable.
💭Get in the Right Mindset
Before you get started, keep in mind that your resume is not for you, it’s for the hiring managers: the people who can call you up to learn more about you and the people who will interview you.
Your resume’s most important job: getting you called for an interview.
Pause for a moment and think about the hiring crew. In many companies, your resume will be looked at by a few people: an internal recruiter in HR, the primary decision maker for the role (likely your new boss), other people brought in to interview you (sometimes in other departments you’d be working with a lot), possibly some people who will provide input but won’t actually interview you (sometimes your entire future team). Put yourself in their mindset. What would THEY want?
I’ll give you some hints.
They’re busy. Hiring for your particular role isn’t their main job. They have a lot going on. They want to look at your resume and understand very quickly who you are, the gist of your background, and whether you’re worth talking to more.
📝Create Amazing Resume Content
Draft Your Interesting Accomplishments First
Resumes should not be rehashed job descriptions or a list of responsibilities. For each bullet on your resume ask “Why should they care? What made that impactful to the company? What made that impressive?” Cut out buzzwords and be conversational. Use action verbs and get cozy with a thesaurus to avoid repeating words.
Quantify Everything, Especially the Benefit
How big was the team you managed? How much did your campaign raise? How much faster was the site after your refactoring? How much content were you creating each week? Numbers are powerful, use them whenever possible. “Increased readership by 220% in first 3 months” is infinitely more impressive than “did work on content creation”. [Read this for more help.]
Add notes in Evernote along the way so they’re ready the next time you’re working on your resume.
Organize and Prioritize for Easy Reading
Put on your user experience hat and think about the hierarchy and importance of the information you’re presenting. Put the most important content on top. Have more impressive job experience or a relevant degree from a top school? Flip your experience and education accordingly. Which tells a stronger story: your past titles or past companies? Emphasize the more important one. Use short, bulleted lists. Don’t blow out your margins or shrink your font sizes down until it’s a wall-of-text too they’ll need a magnifying glass to read, that’s just silly.
Your Resume Should be One (Comfortable) Page
Hiring managers and recruiters skim resumes to decide if they want to interview you and interviewers skim to decide what to talk to you about. Your resume should be one page of your biggest accomplishments. Period. Make powerful statements and be ready to share more in your cover letter, website, portfolio, LinkedIn profile, and in interviews.
Your resume is a billboard, not a report.
Aggressively cut skills, bullets, positions and entire sections that aren’t really applicable to the role or that aren’t impressive anymore as you advance your career. For example, remove your high school once you have a college degree and remove Microsoft Powerpoint if you’re a Director of Marketing. Cut every single extra word. I like to think of each bullet as a tweet and there’s a finite number of tweets you can fit in a resume. Shorten as many bullets as possible to fit to one line. Don’t be afraid of a shorter number of bullets (or none at all) in older jobs.
I’m really emphasizing this because every time I tell people this they complain, “Oh, but I can’t. I don’t know how. I have so much experience.” And then they whine for another five minutes. However, this is the single most consistent piece of advice I’ve heard from every hiring manager ever. If your resume MUST be two pages the first should stand completely on its own and the second page should be a bonus. Your actual experience should not be continued on the second page. This is also not an excuse to blow out your margins and cram everything in way too tightly.
Content You MUST Include vs CAN Include
Your resume really only must include your name, basic contact info, important links, a few relevant and impressive work accomplishments, and some relevant and interesting skills.
Your resume can include your highest education (only), community or volunteer work, a brief summary/objective, and your interests/other things that make you special. When you’re looking for things to shorten or cut, start here.
🎨Make Your Resume Shine
Resume Design Matters
Your resume is a great opportunity to show that you have a decent sense of good, clean design. That’s helpful in ANY industry for ANY position because at some point you’ll probably create a report, presentation, or document. Having a lovely (not just functional) resume will also help you stand out from a sea of all black Word templates in Times New Roman.
Font-wise, for startup resumes, I’m partial to a clean sans serif font (mine uses the Helvetica Neue family). For more conservative companies and industries I recommend a serif font; I love Garamond for resumes. Be sure your font size(s) are large enough to read clearly.
After looking at hundreds of resumes I realized I only remembered those that used just a touch of color — and guess who got called in for an interview.
— My hiring manager friend who preferred to stay anonymous.
Use one or two subtle colors and fonts to make your resume look polished. Small caps, caps, bold, italics, or a different color can create content breaks. Don’t go crazy with too many colors, sizes and weights. Be tasteful. Use underlines exclusively for links to avoid confusion.
Export Your Resume to PDF
When you’re done creating your resume draft (they’re all always drafts, don’t get too attached) in Pages (my personal favorite), Word, InDesign, or whatever tickles your fancy, always export to PDF. You never know if the hiring manager will have the same software as you or if your lovely tables/columns/text boxes/font stylings will look the same on other people’s computers. PDFs always render consistently and they eliminate the risk of someone being annoyed at having to open your resume (which you’d never ever want). They’re also typically smaller file sizes.
Name Your Resume Carefully
Seems silly but I see people forgetting to put their first and/or last name and the word “resume” in the filename all the time. Hiring managers often get hundreds of resumes for a single position. Make their lives easy. For double bonus points save it with dashes or underscores instead of spaces. Mine is Firstname_Lastname_Resume.pdf.
Host It Yourself
Upload your resume to your domain. Wordpress and GitHub Pages make it easy if you don’t already have one. Feeling super lazy/cheap? You can also use Dropbox or CloudApp.
Sending or providing your resume as http://yourname.com/Firstname_Lastname_Resume.pdf instead of a janky Word attachment is a really nice touch. It’s also easier for us hiring folk to IM your resume and talk about how awesome it is.
⚠️The Devil’s in the Details: Proofread Like Crazy
Always print a copy of your resume and check it’s legible and easy to skim. Read it out loud to make sure sentences flow well. Also read it backwards one line at a time to check for spelling mistakes. Studies have shown that 58% of resumes have at least one spelling mistake and in some companies (like Google), that will get your resume immediately trashed.
Any TINY bit of inconsistent formatting can stick out like a sore thumb and look tacky to an attentive eye. Watch for stray bullets, mismatched line height or indentation, en dashes vs em dashes, missing periods, etc.
Most importantly, ask a couple friends to look it over and give you feedback. Ask them to tell you which things sound most impressive, which might be unclear. Remember, many people will look at your resume, not just your future boss.
Any normal human should be able to read your resume and understand your overall career accomplishments.
For Help & Inspiration
Check out Loft Resumes (pictured above) for design and Blue Sky Resumes for content.
Further Reading:
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Think I missed something or want me to give you some feedback on your resume? (I’d be happy to!) Tweet at me @redheadjessica!
