# What we look for in a resume
source: https://ift.tt/JEGWtSa tags: #literature #resume #recruiting uid: —
The resume evaluation process is pretty much a black box for most candidates. And it is so because few hiring managers have publicly discussed this. I thought I should start the conversation.
Initially, I was confused about the purpose of this list, because:
It’s unconvincing. There’s a big gap between “saying that you know something” and “being good at it.” It can weaken your resume. For example, if you consider common skills like Jupyter notebook and git your competitive advantage (the only reason to include them in your resume), I would automatically assume that you have no other competitive advantage. Expertise takes time to acquire. I’m skeptical of people who claim to be experts in too many things.
This is talking about the list of random skills. I need to get rid of this from my resume.
Show how you acquired and use that skill in your job
Consider these two candidates who both mention Flink on their resumes. Which one would you want to talk to?
Candidate A has Flink as one of the 30 items on their Technical skills box. Candidate B explained how they used Flink in their last job: “worked on a feature computation platform built on top of Apache Flink which processes 100,000 events per second and serves 10 different ML models.”
Share your expertise on public channels such as: StackOverflow answers, open source contributions, papers, blog posts
Here are some examples that convinced me of a candidate’s expertise in certain technology:
MK - I need to do more about this! I have expertise in several areas, but my writing isn’t out there. This is yet another reason why I should be writing. 202302202137
- We look for people who get things done
There are two traits we look for to evaluate whether a candidate can get things done: initiatives and persistence. If you have experience that demonstrates these, please do include them in your resume.
Initiatives To get anything done, you need to start it. There are a lot of people who can see a problem, but few who would do something about it. We want people who, when seeing a problem, proactively do something about it without waiting to be told. We look for initiatives a candidate has started before, such as:
A student club, an event, a team, a project at work. A project that you initiate doesn’t have to be about something new. Projects like writing documents or improving existing CI/CD are also extremely valuable. A startup. A founder told me that his best hires are people who have previously founded a company, even if that company didn’t work out. They know the drill.
Persistence Once we’ve started something, we need persistence to drive it to completion. Some signals of persistence that I’ve seen:
Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year. Being good at anything that requires consistent effort, e.g. a Kaggle master, a chess master, a professional athlete, etc. Having previously joined another early startup before and stuck around.
I have some examples of this! I should highlight them on my resume / profile.
Examples of interesting projects that I’ve seen:
A personal website that looks exactly like MacOS. A CLI tool to autocomplete your bash commands. Matcha-making robot arm.
I have a ton of examples of this. (My old personal website, some of the Zettelkasten scripts I’ve written, some of my Airtable scripts, etc).
People were quick to point out to me: the most common advice for writing resumes is “quantify your impact,” e.g. how much money you’ve saved for your company, how much faster you’ve made your program. Due to this advice, many candidates have told me that they need to have metrics on their resumes. Sometimes, when unable to quantify their impact, they settle for what they can quantify.
Unfortunately, not all that are quantifiable are impactful. Showing the number of code reviews you’ve participated in, without any context, doesn’t say anything flattering. It’d be better if you could show how the learnings from all these code reviews are relevant to the role you’re applying for: e.g. how they helped you become a better engineer.
Metrics that we’d love to see I do care about metrics. I especially appreciate metrics that are presented with two components:
How they can be tied to business objectives. Your contribution in achieving that metric. Here are some of the metrics that we’ve found convincing:
Part of a 2-data-scientist team that owns feature engineering for a fraud detection system. Added 200 new features, resulting in a reducing the false positive rate from 20% to 15%, while keeping the false negative the same. Built caching strategy using application-level caching & Redis for 2000 QPS, leading to a decrease in response time by 50%.
Not all impact has metrics Fixing a bug or helping a coworker out is impactful, but hard to measure. It’s a great signal when your work receives awards and recognitions, such as:
An internal company award (e.g. intern of the year, MVP, founder award, winning hackathon) Promotions, e.g. I was impressed with a candidate that went from being a data scientist to a senior MLE to a staff MLE within 4 years. Glowing recommendations from previous teammates and managers. We actually made an offer to a candidate after two of their references talked about how much this candidate helped and mentored them.
I should mention my promo in my resume probably.
Some tips to shorten your resume Find repetition and remove them. For example, do you need to list all 5 of your personal projects, or the top 3 would suffice? Remove irrelevant experience, even if that creates gaps in your resume. Personally, I don’t care about gaps — everyone needs time to recharge and take care of personal matters. Most resumes I’ve seen can have shorter education sections. Remove common skills, e.g. git, notebook, MS Word/Excel. Find a more efficient format, e.g. using multiple columns. Reduce font size, page margin.
If you’re applying to a small startup, say, of less than 20 people, spend some time researching who works at that startup and email them directly. Send your resume as a PDF instead of an editable format like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. The editable format might not render correctly on other people’s computers. If you can get someone who used to supervise you to talk about how great you are, include their quote in your resume. Quotes from friends/family don’t count. Don’t use abbreviations unless you know for sure your audience knows what you’re talking about.
If you’ve contributed to open source projects, include links to the PRs or a public architectural design you’re the most proud of.
If you’ve been working for 2+ years, remove your GPA and coursework. I care more about your work experience.
Resume resources There are many resources on how to write a resume. Here are some of them:
- Reddit has a great guide on engineering resumes
- Writing a great resume : YC Ultimate Startup Job Guide
- Google Recruiters Say Using the X-Y-Z Formula on Your Resume Will Improve Your Odds of Getting Hired at Google
- Why Resume Screening Doesn’t Work
- Companies Need More Workers. Why Do They Reject Millions of Résumés? - WSJ