You are over-complicating your resume. Here’s why you aren’t getting call backs.

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

This is Part 4 of a multi-part series focused on how I executed my career transition from oil & gas into tech. Using this approach, I landed interviews with 15 companies and received four offers for product management positions. Follow my blog @medium for regular updates.

In the previous post, I detailed how to research the core skills needed for your target role and how to map your transferable skills. The next step, which can be equally time consuming, is distilling your transferable skills and work experience into succinct bullets.

It’s pretty challenging to distill, translate, and summarize your accomplishments into two line bullets. Overall, I probably spent close to three months iteratively tweaking my resume.

Here are practical tips distilled from my own journey. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but rather a high graded list of what worked for me.

1. The Six Second rule. Resumes are skimmed, not read. Shorter is better. A bulk of my product management experience is distilled on the first page of my resume. The second half consists of relevant volunteer experience, education, and skills.
2. Keep it relevant: Less is better. People try to cram in every last morsel of their experience in the resume. Stick to relevant experience in the last decade and summarize the junior roles. For instance, I condensed the first five years of my experience as “Various Engineering Roles”.
3. Focus on accomplishments. Hiring managers want to know what you can do for them. The best piece of advice I ever received on writing resumes was to show you made money or how you saved money for the company. That’s it. That maybe a bit black and white, but the key point is that you have to show your accomplishments. Unfortunately, most resumes look like a copy-paste of your job description, which isn’t impactful at all.
4. Quantify your results. Nothing conveys your accomplishments better than numbers. How much incremental revenue did you make or save the company? How much time did you save by implementing a new process.
5. Let your resume breathe: stick to minimum 1" margins all around. Line spacing of 6–8 points between bullets. Use a splash of color. Make your resume interesting to look at at visually.
6. Get external help. Translating 10+ years of experience succinctly into five bullets per job takes a lot of time and mental energy. I knew that to impress someone in six seconds despite lacking direct tech experience would require professional help. Career transition professionals can help you get into the mind of hiring managers. They can act as a sounding board for job transition anxiety by challenging your misconceptions.

This advice sounds simple, but more often than not, most bullets simply regurgitate the job description as shown below:

• Increased the productivity of development team by leading in Product Owner role
• Conceived services and products that helped company close fundraising from new investors

This is what strong versions of the above bullets look like:

• Increased the productivity of development team by 10% through creation of best practices, guidelines, timeline estimates, agile development, “no-meeting Wednesdays” and regular bug triaging
• Conceived and owned proof-of-concept predictive trading feature which demonstrated ability to increase profits by 25%; this was a key driver is closing $10MM fundraising round.

[Source: Cracking the Product Management Interview]

Notice how the new and improved bullets talk about what he did, how he did it, and quantified the results in terms revenue generated or time saved (which translates to money). If you can do this through out your entire resume, trust me, you are going to have no problems getting call backs.

Parting Thoughts

Resume writers: It’s tempting to pay someone to write your resume. But think about this way: are you willing to pay someone $300 to produce a document that’s going to net you $100k a year? For some, it’s worth it. But I believe you should take control of it just like your finances.

That said, relying on resumes alone when pivoting is incredibly useless. Even in the oil patch, my resume wasn’t enough to get me interviews, and I had spent a decade at Shell Canada, an incredibly well regarded brand!

To fully execute on your pivot, you need to skip the recruiters and land your well crafted resume directly in hiring managers’ inbox through networking.

The only way to do that is to network heavily. But there is a method to the madness. In my next post, I will delve into the mysterious world of networking with a focus on how to build your network in a new industry. I will walk you through how I approached contacts, setup virtual meetings; and what I talked about during these coffee meetings (hint: I didn’t).