The Resume. No BS Recruiters Guide.
How to Write a Resume That I (The Recruiter Reading It) Won't Hate.
I haven’t reviewed a million resumes yet but it's certainly in the hundreds of thousands. One thing is clear: there are a lot of bad resumes out there.
I’ve been a tech recruiter for the best part of a decade and have hired people from the world’s top tech companies. I don’t claim to be an expert resume writer but I do see the same mistakes over and over. So here it is, straight from the person who is actually reviewing your resume and deciding whether you get an interview or not:
The No BS Recruiters Guide to Writing a Resume:
Contents:
General rules:
Length: No hard rules. 2-3 pages are probably good for 95% of people to concisely demonstrate their experience. Use common sense: Don't cut super important experience because you want to fit everything on 1 page, if you’re going over 5 pages you’re probably overdoing it.
Font: Readable + Professional. Size 10 is fine. No smaller than 9, no larger than 12.
Format: Make the words and experience on your resume exciting not the design. If you want to show off your creativity, create a website and put a link to it at the top.
Use spellcheck. Typos and spelling mistakes in the ONLY 2 pages of work a future employer will see before deciding whether to hire you? Big red flag.
Dedicate space appropriately for the role you’re applying for: Really important. If you’re applying for a developer job and have 1 development internship but 5 years experience in various customer service jobs. Dedicate between 80% to 100% of your “work experience” section to the single internship. The harsh truth is that your other experience does not matter beyond showing that you’ve held down a job.
No lies. Once you submit that resume, it’s out there forever and the company has written proof of your deception. Bad idea.
No sensitive information. If you include information that is not yet public knowledge (client names, unreleased product details, company financials etc). All it shows it that you won’t keep our companies information confidential either.
Don’t include your references. If a company wants them they’ll ask at the end of the hiring process.
Once you’re done writing your resume. Save it as a PDF and use that when you apply.
Here’s the structure:
Header
Summary
Experience
Education
Interests/ Misc
Not a hard rule: just put the important and most relevant stuff first.
If you’re a student/ less than 2 years exp. I’d probably structure it like this instead:
Header
Summary
Education
Experience
Projects
Interests/ Misc
Header:
Must Haves: Name, Email, Phone Number, City
Optional (but highly encouraged): LinkedIn, Link to your work (website, GitHub, portfolio etc). Hyperlink these.
Circumstantial: The words “Open to relo” or “relocating to X” if you’re applying for a role that requires you to be in another city. Your visa status: “Open work permit” or “PR Holder” or “H1B Visa” - Whatever shows you can legally work for the role you’re applying for.
What NOT to include:
Anything not listed above. For clarity, this includes:
Any images: Picture of your face, images of the certifications you have or anything else for that matter.
Your home address, DOB, Marital Status
Objective “To acquire a fulfilling role where I can deliver value and excellent customer satisfaction” - Waste of space.
Summary:
Optional but recommended.
Either write >3 lines or put a short list of bullet points.
Think about how you would summarize your entire career in a few lines. It’s the opportunity to draw themes across multiple roles and highlight your biggest accomplishments. This might be the only thing a recruiter will read before deciding whether to pass on your profile or not, so put your best stuff here.
This is also the area of your resume I would recommend adapting depending on what job you’re applying for to demonstrate that you match the experience they’re looking for.
Things I would include here:
Years of experience and job title. “Senior Product Manager with 7 years of experience building B2B SaaS products 0-1 across fintech, biotech and eCommerce”
Any major accomplishments including metrics: “Launch X new product from the ground up. Grew it from 0 to 100,000 users over 12 months”
Skills/ Certifications. No more than 1 line; but if you have hard skills/ certifications that most jobs you’re applying for require. You can put them here. “CFA Level II and PMP Certified”
Skills:
Just get rid of this section. It sucks and I don’t read it. 1 bullet point in your summary is totally fine as a maximum. You’ll have the chance to highlight any technologies you’ve used during the “experience” part of your profile
If you have a table with 200 skills listed; not only do I not read it, but I also hate you.
Experience:
List your experience in reverse chronological order - Most recent experience first.
You don’t need to include every job you’ve ever had - Just from the time that you started doing semi-relevant stuff for the job you’re applying for.
DEDICATE SPACE APPROPRIATELY - I cannot stress this enough. If you’re dedicating the same amount of real estate to your 4 month internship that happened 6 years ago as you are to your last role where you’ve had all your major career accomplishments - You are failing to write an effective resume. It’s totally fine for the early stuff to include just one line of information.
Here is how to format every role:
Headline: Title, Company, Location, Dates of Employment
Sub-Heading: Company Summary
Body:
Bullet Points of experience that at a minimum follow this formula 50% of the time:
"Achieved X as measured by Y by doing Z" (Laszlo Bock)
The final bullet point should highlight any technologies you used in this role.
Let’s break this down further:
Headline:
When you list the company name. Hyperlink the company's website.
For your title, use the industry standard title for your role:
Coding Wizard → Software Developer
Conversion Optimization Wrangler → Marketing Analyst
You get it.
Important to note: If there is an obvious reason that a role ended in a short timeframe then put it in brackets. Examples of this would be: contract, internship, mass layoff, relocated to X or company acquired. Short tenure is a red flag for recruiters so it’s good to be able to address it right away.
Dates of Employment: Month and Year. Either of these formats works:
02/2022 - 09/2023
Feb 2022 - Sept 2023
Tangent: If you’ve worked for the same employer in multiple roles. Do this:
Acme Corp. Feb 2020 - July 2023
Vice President Jan 2022-July 2023
~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~
Senior Manager Feb 2020-Dec 2021
~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~
Company Summary:
Maybe not something you’re used to seeing in these resume guides. But the chances are very high that I’ve never heard of some of the companies you’ve worked at. So I need you to give some context.
1-2 lines max. I challenge you to try to summarize the company in as few words as possible:
“Series D B2B Fintech Unicorn”
“Boston-based PR firm focused on Healthcare sector”
However, up to two sentences would be fine for this section if needed. Some of the things you can include here:
Industry, Size, Stage, Type of Customers, Valuation, Location.
If you were there during meaningful change that’s also worth noting:
“Company grew from 50 to 700 people”
“Company IPO’d in 2021”
“Acquired by ACME Corp in July 2022”
Body:
Every bullet point should answer this question: What did you achieve in this role?
Think about the following items when you put these together: Thanks to Sam Struan for this framework. Check him out.
Time: What did you do, how quickly did you do it?
Improved support ticket resolution times by 58% with the introduction of a product and feature enablement process
Led the discovery, prioritization and delivery of various features in X app that increased DAU from 125k to 165k in two months.
Money: How much did you make/ sell/ save?
Individually closed $520k+ in ARR in FY2021 finishing the year 140% above quota. 2021 President’s Club.
Maintained revenue of $15M ARR while reducing advertising spending by 40% through contract negotiations and doubling down on our highest conversion channels (Instagram and Facebook).
Team: Who else was there? What was your role on the team? how big was it? who did you report to? cross-functional partners?
Team Lead for the 6-person Marketing Analytics Team. Mentored 2 Jr Analysts and reported directly into the CMO.
Led a team of 12 developers to implement APIs that enabled the internal analytics team to increase reporting speed by ~30%
Scope: How big are we talking? City/ State/ Country level scope?
Managed a team of 4 AEs and 2 BDRs, directly responsible for all sales across the Western Canada Region (BC, AB, SK)
I’ll also add a bonus: Comparison: Is this good?
Launched Project X in 6 months - Cool. Unless you set out to do it in 3 months and it cost 4x your budget? I need to hear “Delivered the project 1 month ahead of schedule and 15% under budget”
Sold $100k of X - Sounds good, unless everyone else on your team sold $500k. So I need to know “Finished the year as the top performer in the Western US Region for 2021”
At a bare minimum, 50% of your bullet points need to include some kind of metrics. You want that number to be closer to 75%-100%.
The other pieces should provide some clarity/ context or highlight any non-metric-driven achievements
Led the following campaigns X, Y and Z
Promoted 4x in a 3-year span from Junior Analyst to Senior Manager.
Acted as the lead analyst for the company’s IPO readiness special project
Led the launch of our Oakland office including growth planning, securing the office location and hiring the first 10 people.
Skills: For the final bullet point you can list the top 3-7 technologies that you used in this role.
Technologies: SQL, Excel, Tableau, Looker and Databricks.
If you want to go way deeper on this topic; take a watch of Andrew LaCivita.
Education:
I recommend a pretty simple formula. Title + 2-3 bullet points per degree. This can be a little longer if you’re still a student/ new grad.
Outline:
Certification (+ Major), School, Years
If the faculty you went to is well known then it may be good to include that here too “X School of Business, Y University”
Academic achievements: Minor, Dean’s List, Scholarships, Awards, Publications
Totally fine if you want to include your major in this section instead
Don’t add your GPA unless it’s excellent (90%/ 3.8+) OR a certain GPA is a prerequisite for the role you’re applying for.
Good examples of things to include here:
Summa cum Laude, Minor in Entrepreneurship, X Entrance Scholarship, Published Y paper (hyperlinked), Z case competition winner.
If you did a master’s or thesis-based degree it’s okay to highlight what your thesis was focused on
Extracurricular: Clubs, Activities, Varsity Sports
You definitely want to show a more well-rounded profile. This is a good chance to do so especially if you have extracurriculars relevant to your degree/ career. Good examples:
Teaching assistant for Econ 204, Varsity Rowing (4 years), Alpha Kappa Psi Business Fraternity (Vice President), Created the cryptocurrency club, Student Government Treasurer.
Other Notes:
You should dedicate space in the education section in the same way as the experience section. Focus on the relevant stuff. If you did a 4-year history degree then did a 12-week coding bootcamp and you’re applying for a developer job: The 12-week bootcamp should be the majority of your education section.
Final Note: I need to know when I can hire you full-time:
If you have not graduated yet, put your expected graduation date.
If you are studying part-time while working, highlight that.
Projects: (if early in your career)
Only include this in the absence of having professional experience for the role you’re applying for.
I’d follow the same format as the experience section aka:
Give some context, highlight what you achieved and list the tools/ technologies you used to achieve this.
Academic Research could be another title for this section if more applicable.
Interests/ Miscellaneous
Call this section whatever you want depending on what kind of content you’ll be putting here. Some ideas would be: Personal, Extracurricular, Miscellaneous, Interests, Volunteer Experience, Other
A lot of people think this is a waste of space/ not important, I understand that opinion but I’m strongly in the camp that sees this section as a massive opportunity for a few reasons:
If I see someone has done something genuinely hard or impressive it's hard not to have a more favourable opinion of them. If you’re an ironman or a black belt or chess champion, without knowing anything else I’m going to make a lot of favourable assumptions about you: things like you’re going to be competitive, achievement-oriented and a hard worker.
It’s a shot in the dark that can lead to a foot in the door. Metaphors aside, if the person reading your resume or conducting your interview has a similar interest it's likely going to be a bonding opportunity or something that will come up during small talk. Even if there isn’t a shared interest there’s been plenty of times I’ve seen something that’s caught my eye and from a curiosity standpoint, I’ll ask about it to learn more. “Drone Racing”, “Rowing the Atlantic” and “Competitive Eating” all stand out as things I’ve had conversations about.
It will help you stand out. A lot of people have career similar backgrounds so it’s an opportunity to add some personality to your profile. It’s also hard to forget candidates who have interesting lives outside of work. Anecdotally I’ve also noticed that as people climb into executive-level roles, what they do outside of work becomes more and more talked about.
Possible things to include in this section:
Any major achievements or anything you practice at a high level: awards in any type of competition whether that be athletic, artistic or otherwise
Things you’ve created: Mobile games because you wanted to learn a technology, a model for predicting fantasy football scores, an e-commerce store that you run etc.
Any non-profit organizations that you’re a part of and what your role is
Any for-profit organizations you’re a part of (Side hustle, board member etc).
Just general hobbies: Photography, Scuba Diving, Podcasting, Traveling, Pottery - Whatever you’re into
Languages spoken/ Countries of citizenship
Any additional education/ certifications: Courses you’ve completed
Final thought: I tend to like seeing anything that can quantify your hobbies. There is a difference between:
Interests: Taekwondo and Travelling
v.s.
Interest: Taekwondo (Black Belt) and Travelling (Visited every continent and 43 countries)
Next Steps
So there you have it. I’ll try to keep this as a semi-live document that can be an up-to-date source of truth for you. Please let me know if there’s anything I’ve missed or if you come across any other amazing resources on this topic.
Until then all the best with your job search. More to come!
I Want More
If you’d like to read more on this topic, here are a few A+ resources I’ve come across:
Video: How to Write a Winning Resume with Ramit Sethi - Ramit Sethi
Person: Andrew LaCivita - LOTS of great content. Here’s a recent video on this topic: How to Make Your Resume Stand Out in 2023
Article: Top 10 Resume Writing Tips from a Recruiter- Glen Cathey
Person: Follow Sam Struan on LinkedIn, he posts a lot of good content on this topic
Person: Laszlo Bock