The Google Resume (7 page)

An effective objective statement will not only direct your résumé toward the right roles, but will also tell the reader why he should hire you:

Project management and marketing professional with 10 years of experience growing new business unit from $10 million to $100 million seeking a position as a marketing lead in consumer software.

If you don’t need to redirect your résumé to a new role, you should probably stick to just a summary or a list of key accomplishments.

Be aware that objectives may prevent you from getting roles that could have interested you. What if that program manager lead position would have been perfect for you, but the recruiter doesn’t contact you because you said you were interested in marketing roles?

Summary (or Key Accomplishments)

While summaries can wow the reader, they’re usually so vague that they have no impact at all. Roy, an ex-Microsoft and current Google developer, says, “I would never look at a résumé and say, ‘Well, this person says he’s a go-getter. Let’s hire him.’ It’s like putting ‘Loves to Laugh’ on a
Match.com
dating profile. No one’s buying it.”

Your summary should read much more like key accomplishments—so much so, in fact, that these sections are often called “Summary and Key Accomplishments.”

The following objectives will demonstrate your value-add to the prospective company:

• “Software engineer lead with several years’ experience implementing large back-end systems in Java and C++, including three as a lead/team manager; led re-architecture of critical system that serves 50 million requests per month, reducing request latency by 20 percent; designed new API for financial product used by 5 of the 10 biggest banks, which accounted for an additional $10 million in revenue; awarded the prestigious ‘Green Sticker’ award, given to the top 5 percent of engineers based on total impact to firm.”
  
• “Program manager with five years of experience leading feature design of enterprise-oriented products; proposed solution and built team to solve number one cause of customer complaints, and completed project three months ahead of schedule; reduced development costs by 35 percent by creating plan to merge related products into one, more generalized product; oversaw integration of acquired technology by leading 17 developers and 9 testers from two companies, resulting in an additional $50 million of sales.”
  

Work Experience

For most candidates, the Work Experience section is the most important section of their résumé. Your work experience should, at the minimum, list your job title, company name, firm location, and dates of employment. If you are working for a large firm with many products, such as Microsoft or Amazon, you may also want to list your team.

Your most recent job should have around four or five bullets of one to two lines each. Each bullet should focus on your
accomplishments
, not your responsibilities, and should be backed up with numbers whenever possible.

If you have trouble creating this section, start with listing your biggest accomplishments on a sheet of paper. Remember, though, that what was the most impressive to you or your team, who understand the full complexities of the problem, may not be as impressive when described out of context and in a mere 25 words.

How Far Back Should It Go?

Without showing any gaps, you should list only as far as the positions are relevant—and usually no more than three to five jobs. This means that if your career started as an information technology (IT) technician, but you then moved to testing, and then later had a few programming positions, you can probably cut the IT technician. A résumé does not need to be a complete employment history.

Projects

Software engineers with substantial nonwork experience should include a Projects section. For recent graduates or current students, this is a great way to diversify your résumé and show some additional accomplishments.

Desktop Calendar
(Fall 2010, Individual Project): Implemented web-based calendar supporting online storage and syncing, meeting invites, and conflict resolution. Python, Javascript, AJAX. 20,000 lines of code
. Awarded “Honorable Mention” in Senior Design Projects.

If you are not applying for a software engineering position but have other substantial work, you can rename this section with a more appropriate title. For example, if you founded a club that accomplished some concrete goals and led your school’s shift to electronic course review, you might make this a “Leadership Experience” section.

Education

Even if you have a 4.0 from MIT, your experience usually matters more than education. Education is a checkbox, but an important one nonetheless.

In addition to the standard items (university name, dates attended, location), your education section should list the following:

• Major, minor, and degree.
  If your major has a nonstandard name, you should explain the curriculum on your résumé—and you can do so in a way that shapes the reader’s perception. For example, the University of Pennsylvania offers a major called “digital media design (DMD),” which is a fusion of computer science, communication, and fine arts (think: future Pixar engineers). A DMD student who is applying for a software engineering role at Amazon might describe it as “a computer science–based major with additional courses in design and communications.”
  
• GPA.
  Generally, recent graduates should list their GPA on their résumé if it’s at least a 3.0 out of 4.0. If your school lists GPA in a nonstandard way (such as on a 10.0 scale), you should consider translating your GPA to a more understood system, such as class rank.
  
• Activities.
  Recent graduates should list their most serious (that is, most impressive/relevant) activities on their résumé. Don’t list everything you did, though—everyone can have a lot of half-hearted activities, so an extensive list won’t impress anyone. More experienced candidates usually will not include activities.
  
• Related coursework.
  Current students and some recent graduates may want to list relevant courses. Make sure the courses are truly relevant, though. If the course names aren’t clearly understandable to someone not familiar with your university, you may want to give them more “user-friendly” names. This is also an excellent section to tailor to each position or company.
  
• Awards.
  If you received any awards in college, they often will be listed here. You could, instead, include an “Awards” section, but many candidates find that this takes up precious space. Students with low GPAs may find that awards help them compensate for an otherwise less impressive college experience.
  

While you must always include education on your résumé, this section should get shorter with more work experience. Many candidates with even two or three years of experience list just their major and degree.

What about High School?

High school almost never belongs on a résumé. There are probably only three exceptions to this—and two of them occur only very rarely:

• Freshmen and sophomores.
  Freshmen and sophomores might consider listing their high school on their résumé, but only if they really have nothing better to list. It’s unlikely to impress anyone.
  
• Building a connection.
  In rare cases, you might know that you’re sending your résumé to a fellow alum or someone else strongly connected to your high school. One candidate, Mark, included his small private high school on his résumé and wound up interviewing with someone whose daughter attended the same high school. He says it helped them build a connection.
  
• A very impressive accomplishment.
  If you have some very impressive accomplishments from high school and the only way to include them is to list your high school, this might be acceptable. However, it’s more likely that these accomplishments should go elsewhere, such as under an Awards section.
  

Which Comes First?

The rule of thumb is that education should be listed before work experience for current students (or graduates with no post-college work experience). For everyone else, work experience is listed first.

However, as tech companies are increasingly OK with small deviations, there is some flexibility with this decision. If your education is much stronger or more relevant than your work experience, or vice versa, you could deviate from custom. It is unusual, but the benefits might outweigh the costs.

One candidate whose résumé I reviewed had an electrical engineering degree and had been employed for several years as a software tester. While working full time, he had enrolled as a part-time student at Stanford, where he had recently completed four computer science courses. In this case, I recommended to him that he list his education first. His work experience would usually eliminate him from software engineer; his only saving grace was that he was taking computer science courses at Stanford. What other choice did we have?

Skills

This is a must for technical positions, and often unnecessary for nontechnical positions. This section should list any software, programming languages, foreign languages, or other specific skills you know. To avoid a lengthy, disorganized list, it is useful to divide up this list into appropriate categories.

However, just as a native English speaker would never list “English” as a skill, you should not list “obvious” skills such as Microsoft Office. It’s assumed. Likewise, familiarity with Windows and Mac can be left out unless you are also listing something less obvious, such as Linux.

Anything on your résumé is fair game, including all of your programming or foreign languages. Animas, a start-up medtech company outside Philadelphia, once interviewed a candidate who claimed to be fluent in Romanian, Portuguese, Greek, and Italian. He mostly did very well, and would have surely received an offer—except that the small company just so happened to have Romanian, Portuguese, Greek, and Italian employees, and they just so happened to be available for an interview that day. Animas didn’t care about the languages, but they did care about the honesty.

Awards and Honors

If you have awards or honors, you can choose to list those either with your work experience/education or in their own Awards section. The best decision largely depends on how much space you have and how much you want to emphasize your awards. Are your awards a key differentiating factor between you and other candidates?

Either way, you should list the dates and why you received the award. When your recruiter sees an award like the “Vincent R. Jacobs Award,” she has no idea what that means. Your awards should instead be listed as something like, “Recipient of Vincent R. Jacobs Award, given annually to the top woman by GPA out of the 3,000-person senior class.” If you can quantify your award to suggest the selectivity, that’s even better.

What Not to Include

For positions in the United States or Canada, a résumé should never include race, religion, sexual preference, marital status, or anything else associated with discrimination. Pictures, which are indicative of some these items should also not be included. Recruiters hate these pieces of information, because they expose the company to increased liability.

How Long Is Too Long?

When you go grocery shopping, you read every label, right? No snap decisions for you. You review all the pros and cons, evaluate the ingredients, and read all the great marketing material before you make a decision to purchase. And you do this for all 50,000 products, right? Because that’s the informed, savvy consumer you are.

OK, maybe not. If you’re anything like me, you probably make some snap decisions based on your initial impressions, only doing a “deep dive” once a product has passed the initial screening process—if at all.

Recruiters are much the same way. They can’t afford to read each and every line on a résumé to dig around for the most relevant times. The review process is more like a quick “skim” than actually reading.

So how long should your résumé be? In the United States, your résumé should be as reasonably possible. While senior candidates might be able to justify a two-page résumé, candidates with less than 5 or 10 years of experience should stick to just one page. If you’re finding it very difficult to squeeze your experience into those limits, that’s not surprising; everyone says that!

In the United States, shorter is generally better. When your recruiter spends only 15 to 30 seconds on your résumé, you want him to think you’re an A+ candidate. A one-page résumé forces you to be selective and include just the best stuff. When your résumé gets longer, more and more B or C content gets mixed in. Pretty soon, your recruiter sees you as a B candidate.

In the United Kingdom and other countries, candidates often submit curricula vitae, which can be several pages. Expectations vary by country. Countries with longer résumés as standard may be accustomed to spending more time reviewing each résumé.

How Do I Shorten My Résumé?

Everyone has trouble shortening their résumé. You get attached to your accomplishments, and you just hate to see them wiped off. Try giving your résumé to a friend and ask him or her to cut items, line by line. What do you not need?

Or ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have more than three prior jobs listed, or 15 years of experience?
  If you are an experienced candidate, your résumé need not stretch back much more than 10 or 15 years. Stick to only what’s relevant.
  
• Do you need to talk so much about your older jobs?
  If you have an older job that you’d like to include because, say, the firm has a strong name brand, you only need to spend one bullet on the job. The space allocated per position does not need to match the number of years spent.
  
• Can you cut some of your college experience?
  Things like coursework and activities can often take up more space than they are worth. Remove these, unless they truly add a new perspective or accomplishment.
  
• What does your objective/summary add?
  Objectives and summaries often take up three or four lines of text and add very little. Most people could remove their objective and summary and lose very little.
  
• Is everything relevant?
  Discussing your love for traveling is very rarely relevant, nor is the fact that you think you have strong communication skills. Kill the fluff.
  
• Can I be more concise?
  Résumés should use bullets with, yes, incomplete sentences. If you have meaty paragraphs and blocks of text, these should be trimmed. You don’t need to provide all the details.
  
• Is this the best résumé format?
  Often, a different format can create much more space. Try experimenting with the format, but don’t shrink the font size down too much or remove all the white space. It’s there for a reason.