Let’s face it, with DEI requirements, a horrible economy, and hordes of H1B applicants applying to every job on LinkedIn, landing a job is more difficult than ever. Most of the people reading this are not going to check any diversity boxes on the application so maximizing your chances of landing an interview through resume hacking is absolutely essential.
I’ve worked as a tech recruiter for over a decade and trust me when I say, most people have no idea how to write a good resume. They often pile any and every achievement they have into an unreadable mess, pages long. I also see nothing but garbage advice passed around by “professional resume builders”.
On top of this, recruiters and HR professionals are typically the most smooth brained individuals at a tech company so if you are going to convince them you are a fit and get past the resume review filter, you will want to hack every potential advantage you can get. Here is my breakdown of how to use practical cynicism to hack the resume.
Philosophy of a Resume
Highlight Fit
The first thing that job seekers get wrong is thinking that the resume should be a comprehensive summary of all their work experience. They create pages documenting all their achievements, listing all the coding languages they know, or tools they have worked with.
However, a resume is not about listing everything you have done or know, but creating a document that clearly highlights how you fit the role you are applying for. Everything you put into a resume must be looked at through this lense: clear, concise, and relevant information.
Know Your Reading Comprehension Impaired Audience
Most recruiters are morons. They are what I call “color by number” recruiters who don’t have any ability to read between the lines and understand if a candidate is a good fit beyond the very simply guidelines given to them by their hiring manager.
To this end, you must write your resume such that even an HR employee can clearly understand that you are a fit for the role. Since we can’t submit a resumes in the form of a children’s picture book, strategies like having a professional summary at the top of your resume or highlighting key words are a MUST HAVE. You are writing for someone who is never going to read your entire resume and will barely understand words over a fourth grade reading level.
This goal of making the resume painfully easy to understand is core to many of the later strategies I will talk about around prioritizing high value real estate and tweaking resumes to mirror language, but knowing who you are communicating with is essential to getting your point across.
Adapting Your Resume to The Role
Considering the goal of the resume is highlighting how you fit the role, adapting your basic resume based on the job post to mirror language and clearly communicate fit is one of the most effective ways to resume hack. Again, we want whatever DEI champion HR mouth breather reading the resume to be able to say “we are looking for an experience senior sales person who has sold over 2 Million ARR in SAAS products to C Suite and this person says in their professional summary that they are an experience senior sales person who has sold over 2 Million ARR in SAAS products to C Suite! What are the odds!” Using the same exact language and highlighting the must haves from the job description makes it much more likely they will be able to connect the dots that you are indeed a fit for their role.
Don’t Lie Lie Aggressively
When I first wrote this article for professional consumption, I made the point that lying on your resume will only mean they will discover that lie later on in the process, but since then, real world experience has left me with a practical cynicism. Most companies are horrible at recruiting. They don’t know what they are looking for beyond the standards laid out by hiring managers and often most of the “need to haves” are really just “nice to haves”. You could be insanely smart, driven, competent, and the recruiter reading your resume might see you are missing some random requirement and throw your resume in the bin.
On top of this, you are definitely competing with a horde of third world H1B applicants who are completely fabricating their resumes and can barely get Java to return “Hello World”. Yes, you can maintain your moral standards and stick to the truth, but you better get comfortable with not being employed.
Instead, fucking lie. Your resume should have at least a 20% bump on all requirements. You need to have pulled in 1 Million ARR in contracts? You pulled 2.6 Million. You need 5 years experience in a leadership role? You have 6 and mentored other leaders in your company. Believe me, the people reading your resume are almost never going to check the validity of this so the chances of getting burned if you lie intelligently are basically zero.
If lying on your resume makes you uncomfortable (how cute), realize that the standards applied to assessing resumes are garbage and the other applicants are lying just as hard. Don’t hamstring yourself, just play the game as it exists. Knowing my reader base, you are probably smart enough that if you are hired, you will have no problems doing the work, so you aren’t duping them into hiring someone bad, you are just hacking their garbage resume assessment process.
Resume Structure Philosophy
Clean layout
Just like you can’t show up to an interview in a sloppy t-shirt and ripped jeans, your resume should look clean. Neat lines and margins, clear formatting, professional type. This should be pretty easy to understand, but you would be surprised how often people get lazy on this and trust me when I say, it will cost you.
Knowing the Value of Different Real Estate
Keeping in mind that the HR minion reading your resume is going to get bored halfway through the second sentence, we need to understand what areas of the resume are going to get the most eye traffic and make sure to front load the necessary information in those sections to prove fit early on. The professional summary at the top, last couple job titles, and the first line or two of our most recent role are pretty much guaranteed to be read while most everything else will only get scanned at best.
Making Information Easy to Find
There will be plenty of times that your resume will be scanned for very specific information. If you are an engineer, recruiters will probably want to know what languages you know. If you are a salesperson, you probably have to break down what market segments you have sold to. Again, recruiters are color by number and not going to dig through your resume so the easier you make it to parse directly to the information they want, the easier it will be for them to confirm the fit.
Not Just Skill But Level
I can’t tell you how many times I have read an engineering resume that lists a ton of languages, but give zero understanding of the level of proficiency. Yes, great that you listed SQL, but I have no clue if you watched an 20 minute youtube video or have been using it every day for 5 years.
You want to make this clear to the recruiter, especially if the job description is clear they need a certainly level of proficiency.
Standard Resume Structure
Heading
Name, email, and phone number required. You should also look to include your LinkedIn, GitHub, website, or any other information that does a good job showcasing your competence. If you are applying for an onsite job, not a bad idea to include your general location.
Professional Summary
The Professional Summary is the single most valuable piece of real estate in your resume and you should treat it as such. This is a paragraph just under the header of your resume that summarizes who you are, what you know, and what you are looking for in your next role. You want the recruiter to read this and think “this person is literally perfect for this role.” Make it impossible for them not to think so.
A good structure for this is something like “I am a successful senior <job title> with many years experience doing <exactly the job you have>. I value <all the things you are looking for as stated in the job description> and I am looking for a role in a <exactly the type of company they are>.” Yeah, might seem a bit ham-handed, but trust me, you need this level of obviousness to get through to a lot of these recruiters.
School Experience
After you have 2 years of work experience, your college experience goes at the bottom and should be very short. College is typically only relevant if you just graduated, went to a well known school for your field, or want to highlight a relevant major and a high GPA. Don’t waste high value real estate at the top of the page on something that doesn’t matter.
Small aside: I have very strong opinions on how our college systems are already dead and useless and people are starting to catch on. I talk to many entry level applicants just coming out of 4 years of undergrad and can’t explain basic things like how to be well organized, how to communicate effectively, effective processes for learning, what they want to do in their career, and a standard approach for solving problems. These are basic things colleges should be teaching and the fact that they are not means they are completely failing our students. Not to mention they are putting an entire generation in debt right from the start of their careers. As a recruiter I can tell you I basically pay no attention to college unless the applicant is right out of school, and even then it is only a very small part of what I consider.
Work Experience
The first job is your most visible and therefore most read and most important. Jobs DO NOT have to be in chronological order. You want to put the job that is most relevant to the role you are applying to at the top. You can still keep a good structure by breaking your work down into categories and putting the most relevant category first.
The first line or two of the job description is the most important and most likely to be read. The first line should summarize your work and your accomplishments. From there, you can go into more detail.
When you list your experience under a job, it should be in bullet points. Do not use a full paragraph. Paragraphs are hard to read quickly, and don’t do a good job of laying out clear points.
Abilities
If you end up going with a more Experienced style resume as I will explain later, instead of formatting your experience by position, you will probably opt to format by abilities. In this case,you want to highlight the abilities that are most relevant to the job, start with a summary sentence, and then an example or two to highlight those abilities.
Skills
Many jobs will require knowledge of certain skills and as I pointed out earlier, it is important to make this information easy to find and understand. You should also make it clear the level of knowledge you have with these skills, especially if you have a higher level mastery.
If you are in a technical profession like engineering, business analytics, or any other role that heavily requires technical proficiency, you should put the skills after the professional summary.
For non technical jobs, you can still include a list for general skills like AI prompting, G-Suite, Slack, LinkedIn, Excel, and even Google Search or more profession specific knowledge such as Hubspot and Salesforce for sales people, Greenhouse and Lever for recruiters, or google analytics, Canva, or Mailchimp for marketers. If you are applying to leadership roles or early stage startups, highlighting if you have the ability to stand up these technologies is important to include. Typically, I would include these at the bottom for none engineering roles as they are not as important, but good to make easy to find.
Blog, Portfolio, or Personal Website
If you want to signal a higher level of quality and knowledge around your work, one of the best ways to do that is to link to your blog, portfolio, website, or social media account (depending on content). If your content there looks professional and authoritative, it is a great way to make yourself standout.
Projects/Papers/Publications
You should only include these if you are just getting out of school or they are serious contributions to your field and relevant to the job you are applying for.
Volunteering
Do not include this unless you are just out of school and limited in experience or it is somehow relevant work experience to the job you are applying to. Probably better to lump it under interests if you want to include it.
Interests
I like this personally. It gives a little bit of personality to the resume. I am not saying spend a lot of time on this section, but if you actually do things besides watch netflix in your free time, you should throw it out there. Who knows when you will run into someone with similar interests, or it could give the interviewers something to chat with you about during the small talk part of interviews.
In the interest of hacking the resume, it might not be a bad idea to put pretty basic bitch hobbies and interests here. Rock climbing, pickleball, community gardening, etc are much more likely to hit with the recruiters who will be reading your resume.
Resumes Should Be High Quality
This should go without saying, but a good resume should look clean. Everything should be clearly labeled and organized. Take advantage of headings, bold, italics, bullet points and lines to make sections clear.
There should be ZERO mistakes. No misspelled words, no incorrect grammar.
ALWAYS PDF! If you send a doc file, there is always a chance the formatting will load incorrectly. There is nothing that is more of a turn off than a resume that loads in weird and has big gaps or ugly formating.
Styles of Resume
Basic
Good for people with 10 years or less experience. Standard format with professional summary at the top, skills if relevant, jobs with summaries, school at very the bottom. I highly recommend conveying progression through your jobs with your most recent or most impressive job at the top. Any extras like interests, hobbies, volunteer work, or side projects also go at the bottom if you can fit them in a one pager.
The Experienced
For job seekers with more than 10 years experience, instead of breaking down your experience by position, you can breakdown your experience by core abilities like leadership, knowledge of profession, and experience building. This way the recruiter doesn’t have to piece together what they are looking for by reading through each position description.
You can still include your work history in a short list near the bottom, and have a short couple line summary of your responsibilities and achievements, but again, we are making it easy for the recruiter to see the information that signals you are a fit.
The Creative
If you are applying for a role as a designer or some other creative field, it is very strongly suggested to build a creative resume that is not just text but includes graphics and visually appealing elements. This is simply a great way to show off your creative ability naturally through the resume. I would still use all of the fundamental principles we talked about earlier in regards to which parts of a resume to include and the hierarchy of resume real estate. I would also say that if you are in some sort of creative discipline, you should have a blog, personal site, or portfolio that showcases your best content.
Written Content of The Resume
Broad Then Narrow
Just like we front load the most relevant information into the high value real estate of the resume, we should also include a summary at the start of each section backed up with clear and easy details.
For example, for the start of my professional summary, I might write “A full life cycle recruiter for 10 years, I have built and run recruiting processes that effectively assess, engage, and hire high value candidates for seed to late stage tech startups.” For the first line of my last job I might write “At this seed stage company, I built and ran the full candidate life cycle, driving 35 high value hires in an 18 month period for all departments and levels across the business.” The following lines will go into more detail and you will see examples of this in the following sections.
Information Dense
All of the words you use in each sentence should convey meaning. For example, “I sourced candidates” is boring and doesn’t convey much. “I drove top of funnel by sourcing high value candidates using tools like LinkedIn Recruiter and leveraging bullion” conveys a lot more information.
More Specific Examples Are Best
The more you can cite specific numbers and results of your work, the more clearly the recruiter will be able to understand your ability and success. For example, “Over my year and a half with the company, I personally was responsible for 35 new hires, ranging from C suite, SVP, Director, and entry level roles across software engineering, finance, product management, marketing, and operations.”
Also, if you are lying about your metrics (which again, is encouraged), the more specific the lie, the more likely people are to believe it. Saying you generated 3.72 Million in ARR is more believable than just 3 Million.
Not Just What, But Why
If you want to display deeper level competence in a resume, not only talk about the what, but the why. For example, I might write “I believe that to hire quality candidates, companies need to sell and engage through the recruiting process. To this end, I developed a deep understanding of the company value proposition and always work with hiring managers to understand what would make these opportunities attractive to the right candidate.” This shows I not only do things that are important to getting the job done well, but understand why they are done. This might get lost on recruiters, but if you get to later stages, and hiring managers are reading your resume more carefully, they will appreciate this level of insight.
Resume Creation
Building Your Basic Resume from Scratch
Writing process could be a whole other article, but a quick summary is as follows:
Goal Set. Think of the jobs you are applying to, what they want to see, and what information is relevant to them deciding if you are a good fit. Once you understand what you are targeting, this will help you understand what you need to include.
Brainstorm. Get everything on paper that you might include in your resume. This is going to be far from a final draft so the idea is just to word vomit everything.
Form an Outline. Once you have the raw information down, start organizing things into an outline. Think of the Basic vs Experienced resumes styles, the sections like abilities, skills, and interests and sort the information where you want to see it.
Rough Draft. Use your outline and some basic resume template to start putting a rough draft together. Don’t worry about making it sound or look nice at this stage, just get hammer something out.
Iterate Between Outlines and Drafts. After you knock out your first draft, it is common to realize your flow needs tweaking. The best thing is to just make another outline and do another draft from scratch instead of trying to run through edit after edit to force it to work. I know it seems like a lot of work to do another draft from scratch, but trust me, hammering your first draft into a final draft almost always takes way longer and turns out way worse.
Polish. Once you get to a final draft you like, really go over it. Have other people read it and give thoughts. Make sure that it has no errors and that audiences find the information you are trying to convey clear and powerful.
Build Targeted Resumes
While you can send your basic resume out to job applications, small tweaks to the resume to be more targeted to each specific job are almost always worth the time investment. If you can mirror language from the job description, say in your professional summary that you are looking for a company that has the exact attributes of the company you are applying to, and highlight the things they state as must haves, your chance of landing an interview goes up 10x.
It is definitely a little more work, but taking even 10 minutes to tweak a resume to be specific to the role is worth it and will get easier each time you do it.
Conclusion
People get a lot of things about resumes wrong and you would be hard pressed to find a resume expert who is going to encourage you to apply practical cynicism. Knowing your target audience is a bunch of idiots who need their information spoon fed and will reject you in a second if you don’t match their criteria perfectly is essential to understanding how to build a good resume.
A good clean format that is easily searchable with important information front loaded into those high value real estate positions will increase your chances of being seen a fit. And don’t have an reservations about lying as no one else does and you aren’t actually going to have a problem doing the work once you get in. You simply need to play the game and hack their horrible resume review process.
I hope this helps you land that job anon and if you have any specific questions, don’t hesitate to reach out directly or drop them in the comments. Also, let me know if you would like to see more content like this.
Hail the Doers
Lying is wrong. Telling people to lie is wrong.
Hard disagree about lying. My husband is a tech executive and it infuriates him to waste his time in interview loops with someone who is clearly dishonest about their professional value. You can't pull it off as well as you think you can, you will always be found out, and if the hiring manager is minimally competent he or she would rather have someone with integrity who can be taught and developed over someone with poor character who can't be relied upon. Someone who will lie to get in the door is someone who will lie about their work while in the role and that causes problems for everyone. And if you are caught out misrepresenting yourself in the application process you will be remembered for doing so. Terrible advice.