What is this thing you are reading (background)
I’ve reviewed somewhere between 10k-100k resumes in my life mostly in science, tech, and management consulting. More than some, less than others, but certainly enough to have some opinions.
Though I’ve helped a lot of people write resumes for their usual job acquiring purposes, I’ve also found that many steps of the resume writing process are a great exercise even for people not looking for a job. I’m writing a post that walks through the methodology. I think it is pretty great and has helped people thinking about their strengths, their goals, themselves, even careers. It also optimizes time spent for anyone who actually needs a resume.
BUT, that post is too long and I haven’t figured out how to shorten it yet to something reasonable. This is an extract that stands reasonably alone and captures one of the most important points. In reality, this is my philosophy for everything in life, you are just seeing it applied to a line of a resume. Btw if you are wondering about the purpose of the image with the dog? It is to get clicks and spread joy. That is the Baobao’s purpose.
Everything needs a purpose
I should be able to point to ANY line on your resume and ask you what the purpose of that line is. This is especially true because as a reviewer, I often just look at a random line of a resume and think “what is the purpose of this bullet”. Or as an interview I just ask “what was the purpose of this project you described” and it is a bad sign when the answer is a non-answer.
So. Again. Every single word on a resume should have a purpose. I like to use undergrad degree as an example. Most people just include it because that is what you do. Stop and think for a second “what is the point of including your undergrad degree”. Ok, no seriously, stop and think about it before jumping to what I’m going to list as my reasons. I know you can just read ahead, but that won’t be as effective as if you put a minute into thinking first.
Fine, you win, here are some purposes for that undergrad line:
You want to connect with someone who sees your resume. This gives you 3 added opportunities for that. It is an odds game, but maybe someone will say “oh I have a close friend/family who went to your school” or “I lived in that state for 7 years!” or maybe “I also studied your major”. This is a good reason. Lean into this both here and in other spots on your resume.
Maybe you want to stress your undergrad skill set because it is different from the rest of your skills or something you are trying to stand out on. Great purpose!
Dates. Maybe the dates show continuity explain that you went straight from undergrad to whatever you did next. Think about whether these tell a story you are excited to talk about. Also, people want to see how old you are and they cheat and use this as a proxy. That is just a thing that happens, I haven’t personally had a reason to worry about it so I haven’t looked for ways around it
Finally: Undergrad still qualifies as “something you just include” so it has to be on there. Fine. That is also a purpose. But it isn’t true for everything. If you spent 2 years doing a job that doesn’t help your resume at all, don’t include it if the only purpose is “well it is something I did, shouldn’t it be on there?”
So, yes, absolutely every single line on your resume is something that a reviewer or interviewer could find their eyes settling on. For no good reason. No matter where it is on your resume. It also is a decision you have made to give up the opportunity to include something else great about yourself!
Your goal is to make sure that anything a reviewer reads is something you really want to talk about because it shows off how great you are. You also want to make sure every word related to that thing points them towards asking a question you want to answer. For undergrad, think about the reasons you came up with (or, fine, the ones I came up with) for why it might be on there. Then think:
- How important is this line overall (use that next to determine ranking)
- What specific details do I want them to see (School name? years? degree? location?). If there is any word that you can drop, do it. If it isn’t important to you to put your full degree as “Applied Physics and Engineering” then just call it “Applied Physics”.
I’ll try this one more time, because this is perhaps the most important take away from everything I’ve written if you are using this resume for more than self-assessment. Imagine you are a manager who really needs to hire someone because you are drowning with work right now. You are in the lucky position of having 150 resumes on your desk because hiring is your top priority. But 20 other things are on fire that you need to deal with.
How long do you really think you can dedicate to each of those resumes? 1 minute each puts you at 2.5 hours of intense unbroken review and humans get tired. It isn’t fair, but you may find yourself creating shortcuts to rule out resumes even faster than that, so that you can spend more time with the promising ones.
Ok stop imagining, now you are you again. In the worst case, your resume has seconds instead of minutes to make a good impression. Do you want an exhausted reviewer to waste some of those precious seconds on the words “and Engineering”? What if her/his mind starts to wander down some tangent about why those words are even necessary. No. Don’t give that option. Optimize every word and every line to serve an intended purpose.
In the best case, your resume will delight the reviewer and s/he will spend many glorious moments pouring over it. Guess what, optimizing every word and every line to serve an intended purpose will be just as impactful for making you shine. If the reviewer realizes that you put so much intention behind every word, it will almost certainly be appreciated. More likely, s/he will just think “wow, I am really happy with everything on here, what a great candidate” without realizing it is because of the intention and that is good too so why not.
Generalizing Beyond Resumes
Good. Now just do that for everything. All of life. I think this was implied, right? It was supposed to be implied. But now it is explicit.
Everything.