The Craft of Data-Driven Resume Writing

By Rohil Kanwar

“Tell me something that’s not on your resume.”

I bet we’ve all come across this question in an interview or heard it mentioned in peer’s interview stories. And you think about all that hard work that went into crafting a perfect resume, and yet the recruiter wants to listen to you talk about something not on there. I understand the frustration, but there’s a very interesting reflection to be made about why recruiters continue to ask that question. This is because your resume isn’t supposed to cover everything you’ve ever done! It is not supposed to mention every work experience, project, certification, volunteer experience you’ve ever been a part of.

Observational Data

What the heck is a resume supposed to be then, you ask? Well, let’s dive in.

• “I’m great at fixing light bulbs.”
• “I’ve worked over 100 hours on my resume from the first time I made one.”

Which of these two statements do you care more about? My guess is the latter one, because it’s more relevant to why you’re here. Sure the first one tells you something about me, but it doesn’t necessarily solve your purpose of visiting this blog (...also the first one isn’t true).

Data Analysis

A similar logic can be applied towards resumes and recruiters. In our fast-paced lives, we all prefer fast and easy solutions, which is why you can find tons of articles on ‘Quick tips to brush up your resume’ and ‘10 Expert Tips for How to Improve Your Resume’. But in this case, it is incredibly important to understand the purpose of a resume—why we write what we write in it, and how is it different from, say, a Linkedin profile or a personal website? In a classical sense, a resume is a marketing tool, a way for you to convince the recruiter that you would be a great fit to the job you applied to. On average, a recruiter only looks at a resume for 7 seconds. In case you haven’t realized, that is a very short amount of time for them to be able to get an idea of your skills and experiences, and decide whether or not to offer you an interview. So, don’t waste 2 out of those 7 seconds telling them you’re great at fixing light bulbs—unless you’re applying to be an electrician, of course. Focus on the more relevant experiences. Hopefully, you’ve gained some perspective on what a resume is actually supposed to do. However, at this point, you may be wondering how to craft that single perfect resume that’ll get you every job you apply to.

You can’t. Recall how I said that your resume is supposed to convince the recruiter to move forward with your candidacy. Now do you think that all recruiters will look for the same things on your resume? The answer is no. Your resume should be very customized to the exact job you’re applying to. However, you may think that entails creating a different resume for every job you apply to. Don’t worry, there’s a way around that.

Prediction for your future resume

I recommend creating an ‘Anti-Resume’ — a document that lists every experience you’ve ever had, with detailed bullets on what you learned, accomplished, and made an impact on, along with all your projects and volunteer work. Now, this document is one that you should regularly keep updating with any new skill that you learned, any new project you’ve started to work on and the like. And when it is time for you to apply to a job, you take that document, the job description, and then start filling in your actual resume that you will send in. Your anti-resume should be a very comprehensive document, and it should look a lot like your actual resume in terms of formatting. It should have as many sections as you can possibly segregate your experiences into, which would make the process of creating the specialized resume for a particular job a lot easier.

Below, you will find detailed intuitive analysis behind several nitty gritties of a resume. Let’s proceed!

Boring is Better

Observational Data

Imagine you’re in a contest: you’re blindfolded and your objective is to cover the most distance walking in a limited amount of time, without bumping into anything. You have two choices for where you could try this :

• Your home
• A fancy villa you’ve never seen before

Which one would you pick? Call me a mentalist because I know you’d be tempted to pick the second option because it could be fun, but when you’re reminded of the objective, you will stick to your home. Why? Because you’re familiar with it. You’ve seen it before a thousand times, and you know where most of the furniture is, so you can avoid bumping into objects, and focus entirely on covering the most distance.

Data Analysis

This is the contest that a recruiter takes part in with every single resume they examine. Thus, your job as an applicant, is to hit home for them, i.e. format your resume in the boring traditional way, because they’ve probably seen the format a thousand times, and would not have to waste any time scrambling for where they should look for your skills, educational background, and so on. Your larger goal, again, is to do everything in your control, to make the recruiter make the best use of these 7 seconds that they’re going to devote to your resume. Now, I realize that this advice might seem to work counterproductively for applicants applying to a job with heavy emphasis on design skills, or another creative field for that matter, where you may think that your resume is also an opportunity to showcase your experience in design. In this case, I cannot tell you which way to go. I am a huge proponent of trying something new, something exciting in order to stand out. But it is also incredibly important for you to understand the industry, the company, the culture, and the background of the recruiter who is most likely going to be reviewing your resume, in order to make the right decision. However, there is a safe spot to be in, if you have the time and resources. I would recommend sending in both, a regular boringly formatted resume, as well as your unique project based on your resume (check out an incredible example here).

Prediction for your future resume

Now, here are some classic formatting tips for your resume:

1. One Page: Remember, you only get 7 seconds. There is a chance a recruiter may miss looking at the back side.
2. 12 point font: This allows for decent readability as well as maximum utilization of space on your resume.
3. Name: This should be at the top and larger in size than the rest of the text.
4. Chronological: Your most recent experiences should be seen first.
5. Consistency: Your formatting with regard to spacing between text, periods at the ends of sentences, capitalization, number of bullets per experience (3 to 5 recommended), etc should be the same throughout your resume.

Now that we’ve discussed the content and formatting of your resume, you must be wondering how to phrase the content in your resume.

This is what a happy recruiter looks like!

The Art of Sounding Legit

Observational Data

• “Bob and Billy went to a grocery store around midnight. As they were picking up milk, they heard the cashier scream. They quickly rushed to the billing counter and worked as a team to knock over the robber and protect the cashier.”
• “Bob and Billy are brave, great team players and work well under pressure.”

Which of these two sentences sounds more believable or gives you more information about Bob and Billy? Would I be on the same team as 95% of you if I said the first one? I think so. You’ve probably guessed that this is another analogy applicable to the world of resumes, and you wouldn’t be wrong.

Data Analysis

In this instance, I’m trying to explain to you how to craft the perfect bullet. However, this is very tricky business. What the above example illustrates is that there is value in telling the story by explaining the struggle behind skills acquired. I do not claim to know much about human psychology, but I do know that a point comes across as more impactful if the recruiter makes that conclusion themself (i.e. in the first bullet, it wasn’t explicitly stated that Bob and Billy acted bravely) -- most would be able to infer after reading that sentence. So, let the recruiters make those conclusions, and you just need to pick the right words to make it easy for the recruiter to arrive at that specific conclusion. However, it is also important to be concise and to-the-point in your resume to ensure maximum utilization of that one page.

Fortunately, the aforementioned two points may not necessarily conflict. It is significant to understand that you can tell a story and still be succinct, as long as you rule out the details that are not relevant to one to make that conclusion. For instance, I would argue that “picking up milk” or “midnight” weren’t exactly relevant details for us to be able to see that Bob and Billy were brave, but one could still say that they added to the legitimacy of the story. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, it is your call to make. If you think you can benefit from saving that space by omitting a couple words in each bullet, and maybe squeezing in a one-line description of a side project, then go for it. On the other hand, if it seems like details could make your bullet sound less mundane, then that’s fine too.

Prediction for your future resume

So, how should you start this process of phrasing the content on your resume? By now, hopefully you’ve examined the job description and picked out particular experiences that would be relevant. At this point, ask yourself which 3 to 5 skills you have gained so far that would also be applicable to the job you’re applying to. Now, once you’ve come up with that list, reverse engineer the process of phrasing it. As mentioned earlier, you want the recruiter to arrive at the conclusion that you have gained some experience with these skills. So recall and pick out specific tasks, accomplishments, deliverables etc. on the job which would demonstrate your experience with these skills. Once you have a good idea of what you’re going to talk about in each bullet, apply the X-Y-Z formula to it (read more about it here, advice by Google’s Senior VP of Personnel). In a jist, it refers to each bullet containing the task accomplished (X), which can be quantitatively measured by [Y], by doing [Z]. This format works well to convey a very short story of what you did, how you did it and how much it impacted your employer.

In order to perfect your bullet points, here is an infographic that might help:

Some quick tips on crafting the ideal bullet:

• Always start your bullet with a powerful action word. Find a list here.
• Numbers in every bullet is ideal, so try to include as many as you can.
• Shuffling up the order of X-Y-Z to make your resume sound less monotonous is a great strategy. For instance, your bullet could resemble this structure — used Z to make a change in Y and accomplished X.

As you’re going through the process of crafting bullets, you may realize that some of your experiences were star experiences — very relevant to the job you’re applying for and you have much to say about them. In that case, you may find yourself in the dilemma of trying to limit your experiences to three bullets. Before you try to do that, let me offer some insight.

Quality over Quantity

Observational Data

• “The Extravaganza was an amazing film. It won the Oscar for the best indigenious film in 2016, along with an exquisite mention in the speech of Dr. Wizawee, the Oscar awardee for the Best Director in 2016. It was also adjudged as the Film of the Decade in the Cannes Film Festival, due to the social message in the film that would serve to transform society over the coming years.”
• “The Extravaganza is an amazing film. It won an Oscar, Film of the Decade in Cannes Film Festival, Best Film in UK Cinema awards, and Best Story in Indian international Filmfare awards and many more.”

The top bullet doesn’t mention the other small regional awards that the film (entirely made-up) received. However, it uses that space to talk about the two of the most important, arguably, awards that a film can get. It provides detail about how much impact it made on these two significant platforms.

Data Analysis

As an applicant, when you have a problem like this, which in my opinion is an amazing problem to have, I would recommend you go with quality over quantity. Don’t compromise on all the points that you wanted to talk about, because you felt that they were super relevant to the job concerned. As shown in the above example, you can see that simply mentioning the other two experiences leads you to have to sacrifice an abundant amount of details given for each experience. Furthermore, if you’re thinking about giving more bullets to the more relevant jobs or projects, but still including the other less important ones, refer back to our formatting principle of consistency.

Prediction for your future resume

One interesting observation to be made here, though, is that cherry-picking the best experiences might make it appear as though you have a gap in employment when you actually don’t. Some recruiters might be able to pick that up. So, to err on the side of caution, I would recommend using the “Additional Information” field in most applications to simply state that this resume was handcrafted specifically for this job, and that it doesn’t represent your employment experience exhaustively, rather only the most relevant parts.

After the exhausting iterative process of crafting the bullets and ensuring they fit the X-Y-Z format and largely obey the recommended anatomy, you will need to take another quick scan of the content on your resume, and as soon as you’re done, write down the top 5–7 words that popped out. The purpose behind this exercise is to try to “think” like the ATS.

Buzzwords and ATS

The ATS, the infamous Applicant Tracking System, is the virtual barrier that stands between your resume and a human recruiter. It is safe to assume that almost any medium to large corporation that you apply to will likely be using an ATS in their talent acquisition system. The main purpose of the ATS is to filter out applicants that don’t seem to have the right skills/experience required for the job. However, as applicants, the only thing we know about the ATS is that it is a piece of software, and it’s not efficient (time-wise) for us to try to figure out how it screens resumes in an effort to game the system. After all, the large number of companies in the recruiting space are continuously competing amongst each other to make smarter ATSs every day. Rather, we can work from the generalized idea of the function of an ATS. We know that any piece of software can only be programmed to examine the words in the resume, and try to make sense of them. Thus, the best strategy here is to reverse engineer the process again, just like when we crafted bullets while keeping in mind a human recruiter’s perspective. However, in this case, it would be fair to assume that technology, at least as of now, hasn’t completely adapted an EQ. Thus, it is a reasonable assumption that the ATS will try to look for buzzwords, terminology that is ideally common between your resume and the job description.

Observational Data

Let me demonstrate with an example :

• “Machine Learning is an ever-expanding technology. At the base level, we train ML models to solve classification, regression, anomaly detection etc. problems given the nature of the dataset. However, due to the complexity of the math involved behind picking the right ML model among Neural Networks, Random Forests, Logistic Regression, Principal Component Analysis and so on, Google has been putting efforts towards developing an ML model which should be able to select the appropriate model to use given the context of the problem to be solved.”
• “Machine Learning is an ever-expanding technology. At the root level, ML models can be used to solve various prediction problems given a dataset. However, due to the knowledge required for picking the right ML model, Google is attempting to train another model that picks the right model to be used.”

If the job concerned here is related to ML Research, then a human recruiter should be able to identify using both statements that the candidate stays up-to-date on whatever is happening in the ML world. However, the ATS would assign the first statement a significantly higher score than the second statement, simply because of the amount of technical jargon used that is likely to be found in a job description relating to ML research.

Data Analysis

In my opinion, this is somewhat of a shortcoming of using software to screen candidates. But I wouldn’t imagine that the ATS is going to be eliminated anytime soon. For context, Google receives nearly 50,000 resumes each week. It would not be humanly possible to scan through each one and then expect the recruiter to give the consideration it deserves. Hence, ATS.

Prediction for your future resume

As you may realize, the existence of an ATS also warrants a few additional formatting ideologies to keep in mind. For instance, do not use a multi-column resume because it will almost always make it difficult for the ATS to accurately parse out the text in both columns in correct order, and therefore mess with the text analysis that the ATS performs on the content of your resume.

Internship Alternatives

First of all, I want to congratulate you all for making it through this guide thus far. Times are unprecedented, and the world is currently ‘interning’ at dealing with global health crises. My heart goes out to you if your internship offer was rescinded, or you simply weren’t in the mental capacity to put that energy into recruiting for this summer. Know that it is okay. Evaluate your current conditions, and then ask yourself if advancing professionally is something you’re still interested in doing this summer. If the answer is yes, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s try to break down why you, the applicant, wanted to get an internship in the first place. I’m going to try and bucket those ideas into four major categories:

1. To learn (i.e. to develop a technical skill, to try your hand at managing people, to apply a programming concept you learned in a CS class and so on)
2. To make an impact (i.e. to see your work making a difference, either in consumers’ testimonials or in company’s figures)
3. To network (i.e. build genuine relationships with the people that you work with and make connections in the industry)
4. To observe (i.e. understand the ways and methods of the company culture, and corporate workstyles in general)

What if I argued that an internship is nothing but a convenient structured one-stop shop experience that helps you fulfill all these motives? What if I told you that there is nothing that could stop you from fulfilling these motives anyway?

Projects! Yes, projects are the way to go. Essentially, that means creating that internship experience for yourself, with a little bit of extra effort since you’re defining the structure as well. However, if anything, that extra effort only corresponds to more experience. Until this point, we’ve talked all about how exactly to craft a resume conveying your experience in the best way possible. What if I told you that a similar reverse engineering perspective also works in actually creating that experience? Essentially, for your resume, from having work experience to crafting a bullet point, almost everything is in your power!

Here you go!

Dedication before Certification

If your primary reason for pursuing an internship was to learn a new technology, or a soft skill, or practically anything that can be learned, allow me the pleasure to introduce you to a wonderful resource — the internet! Learning is not something that’s exclusive to formal education. Yes, formal education indeed does a good job at it, as they’re in the business of learning; however, that does not imply that you should restrict your learning to formal education. In fact, I believe that the most significant value that formal institutions add to learning is providing structure to it, in terms of classes to be taken, homeworks, exams, presentations, discussion worksheets etc., much like how I would associate a resume to your experience. However, you could not have a resume (although I don’t recommend that :p), and still have tons of experience.

So, when delving into something you’re curious about, think about how learning material on that topic was created. Somebody must have thought of it, and presented it somewhere for it to be approved as learning material in a textbook or website or online course. The closest resource you can get to that presentation is research papers. There are millions of them on the internet. You can use Google Scholar to filter for only research papers. When searching for research papers, I recommend reading the abstracts and going for the ones that you feel most familiar with, and simply dive in. Basically, you will use that research paper as the structure your learning needs, because you’re likely to come across a lot of terms and concepts you’re not aware about. So, whenever you do, perform another google search for that concept and this time, pick a friendlier easy-to-read article on it. And by the time you’re done reading that one paper, you’ve amassed more depth of knowledge than you would’ve if you were to simply dive in a chaotic wealth of information on the internet.

Now that you have some basic idea of terminology in the field, I recommend picking an online course, on websites such as Udemy, Coursera, Edx and so on, with some of these having deals and offering free courses currently, courtesy COVID-19. It is significant to pick an online course that delves deep into one of the many subtopics that you’ve recently learned about. Furthermore, since you already know the basics of the field by now, you also know a little bit of what you don’t know i.e. the known unknown and the potential of what you can do once you learn that idea or skill. So, right before you begin the online course, you should think of a project that you want to work on once you learn the material of the online course. Spend some time getting excited about working on it, and a few ideas of how you could apply the known unknowns in your project. This will really help you obtain a specific lens on viewing the material for every time you’re learning something in this course. For each topic, think about its application to your project, and that way, you will get a lot more out of this course. After completing the course, schedule some time that you can dedicate solely to the project.

Finally, at this point, you’ve had some idea about various terminology used in this field, you’ve completed a structured course and gained application experience by working on a project. Thus, the only final step to inculcate in your routine is to occasionally go to Twitter and search for ‘#’ followed by a keyword in your field, and update yourself on the latest findings about this concept or technology.

Realize that you may not get a certification recognizing all your hard work, but what’s more important is you actually learning something in depth. And that, I guarantee, is enough to put it on your resume!

Data Data Everywhere

Now, if you really wanted to make an impact on consumers’ lives on the basis of work, ask yourself why you need to work for them to do something positive for their consumers? Once you’ve found the answer, let’s proceed on how you can actually make that happen.

Over 90% of all data that has ever been created since the existence of mankind has come up in the last two years! Yes, an exponential growth in the staggering growth of data produced would be an understatement. Data is essentially recording and creating a digital profile of the world. You, a budding data scientist, can add so much value to that. You can make an incredible impact if you give some meaning to that data. And if you don’t have prior experience in data science, now is the time to learn!

Kaggle, Google’s free 25 million datasets, Awesome Public Datasets on Github are all amazing resources to explore a tiny drop in the sea of data. While working on a project in producing meaningful insights to this data, being the ambitious person that you are, I’m willing to bet that you will think about creating a venture out of the information you’ve just gained out of this data. And if you don’t, that’s completely fine as well. But I wanted to walk you all through a quick exercise in real-life data science using the medium of Entrepreneurship.

As aspiring entrepreneurs, bright sparks of ideas and not being able to decide what to build is common practice. The reason behind that — insufficient data. You know you want to create something impactful. You know that the experience of using a product could be bettered. But how? Here’s what you need to do. Instead of relying on random sparks of inspiration, your best bet is to be a lot more aware of aspects of your daily life. Note down details of what you like about what you’re using, and for how long you’re using it, as well as the shortcomings or what you think could be made better about any products or services you’re consuming. Do this for at least a week. At the end of the observation period, you’ve collected a lot of data about your likes and dislikes of an eclectic array of products. So, compile that information, take a seat, and allow your mind’s built-in machine learning models to analyze and come up with insights on this data, by simply staring and re-reading these notes. In a while, you’re bound to be struck with something that you’ve a justified reason to start working on. Moreover, since your idea emerged from analyzing data about daily life consumerism, you’re on the path to create something that will create a huge impact on consumers’ lives. Goal #2 established!

Record your Thoughts

Had you been working alongside a lot of driven people in a corporate setting, wouldn’t you have loved to be part of conversations about anything and everything, expressing your opinions, listening to theirs and ultimately developing your initial thoughts? But who says you can’t do that irrespectively?

LinkedIn is a wonderful platform to connect and engage with professionals at a certain company, in a certain role, at a certain seniority level etc. When you’re starting out, I would recommend networking with multiple individuals within the same organization, which could very well be your dream company (if you have one). After identifying who you want to connect with, use the “Add a Note” feature to personalize each connection request, because remember, you’re here for making genuine connections, and that tad bit of extra effort in reading through their profile and sending a personalized message goes a long way. Then, from the people who accept your request, ask to hop on a short 30-minute call to learn more about their experiences. After the initial small talk, try to divert the conversation to something you’ve had a chance to recently think about, and develop an opinion on. At the end of those 30 minutes, you’re likely to have found yourself exploring an alternate perspective on that idea. Then, give yourself some more time to reflect on that conversation, and finally post about it (don’t forget to ask them if they would be okay with you sharing details about your phone conversation, and whether they would like to have their name be mentioned or not). By doing this for everyone you talk to at this organization, you’re building real connections with potential future colleagues and creating value for outsiders by offering insight.. And that, as I’ve said before, is enough to put it on your resume.

The “medium” on which you post this is entirely up to you. A blog post on Medium, a Linkedin post, an article on your Wordpress website are some ideas. Having regularly posted about this, you would not only have gotten to know a few people in one specific organization, but also would have engaged in thoughtful conversations about important topics and heard from a lot of different perspectives.

Too Much Work

If you believe that the reason you weren’t able to have a successful internship this summer was because companies didn’t have enough work, you’re likely mistaken. Trust me, there is never a shortage of work. In a corporate world of overworked and underpaid employees, heroes like you make the situation a win-win, because you probably value the experience more than the pay. In that case, all you have to do is find that contractual work project that you’ll be paid for, and hence, have lots of meetings and get the opportunity to observe the corporate lifestyle. Where do you find such work you ask?

Check out Upwork and Parker Dewey, websites that help you get hired for micro-internships which are usually flexible and might very well lead to a full-time position in an organization. Granted, most of these organizations won’t be too well established, or may have founders that started off working from their garages, but the sheer act of working for someone and not being the boss of you will lead to a lot of learning opportunities in regards to responsibilities, deadlines, and teamwork.

TL;DR

Resumes are, put in simple terms, communication tools with the objective of the applicant being to convey to the recruiter why they would be a great fit to the position they’re applying for. Recruiters get 1000s of resumes every week, so make their job easier by putting in only the relevant experience.

For pretty much all of my other advice, keep in mind that the underlying goal is to make the recruiters’ lives easier.

How should a resume be formatted? Use a traditional template. Single column, one page, 12 point font, chronological, and consistent bullets. Recruiters have probably seen several similar-formatted resumes, and thus, know where to look for particular content.

How to write great bullets? Use Google-recommended X-Y-Z formula. Choose skills that you want to convey, and tell stories from your experience that highlight those skills. Include numbers and action words.

Quantity of experiences, or quality? Almost always quality. If you’ve worked as a Product Manager before at two jobs, and you’re applying for a PM position at a different company, just mentioning these two experiences with 4–6 bullets each will do the job. Don’t stress too much about missing out on mentioning that you also worked as a UX Design person, which is also a relevant title for a PM position but still less relevant, in most cases, than a PM title itself.

What is the ATS? How to optimize for it? Many large corporations get way more resumes than human recruiters can process in time. So, a piece of software, the ATS, helps them out by shortlisting to a competitive list of candidates. Thus, you want to use lots of buzzwords i.e. words picked up directly from or ones that very closely match the language in the job description, because that is most likely what the ATS would be looking for.

Don’t have an internship? Don’t worry. Capitalize on this spare time by picking up a project and try to imitate the structure that internships tend to have.

To substitute the learning aspect of an internship, read a research paper, think of a project idea, take an online course, and simultaneously develop your project. Keep yourself updated on this material through Twitter.

To be able to make a difference, find a dataset online, and spend some time understanding the nuances and features of the data. Think of what meaningful insights you can deliver. Think of whether you can build a business model around it. In either case, your analysis will definitely help someone understand something about that data better.

For the networking aspect, use Linkedin and cold-emailing to reach out to people whose work you genuinely find interesting. Schedule calls with them and make value by sharing your learnings on a public platform, or to a concerned community online, with the permission of your connection.

Even still, if you really want the industry work experience and be paid for it, try your hand at one-time contractual tasks that you could find on platforms such as Upwork.

Recruiting is exhausting. Rejections are heartbreaking. No second thoughts about that. But view them as a learning window into the actual factory of ideas, money, and experiences (i.e. the corporate industry), and you will find yourself a lot more prepared to deal with the real world once you step into it!

Hopefully my insights on creating and filling resumes were helpful, and I would love to hear from you — comments, feedback or anything that I may have missed. Recruiting season for Summer 2021 is just around the corner, so prepare your resumarmors and I hope you emerge victorious!

I’d like to sincerely thank Ismail Azam, whose class on Networking (at UC Berkeley) introduced me to the roots of a lot of material presented here. Also, I’d like to give a huge shoutout to my amazing team members Kendall Kikkawa, Melissa Wong, Trisha Sanghal, and Smita Sikaria for providing their invaluable inputs and helping me write this article.