I Care About What You've Done, Not Who (You Say) You Are

As a hiring manager, when I read your resume, I assume you're bullshitting me.

I've reviewed tons of resumes, mostly for software engineer, data scientist, engineering manager, and director of engineering roles. I'm reviewing a lot more now as Hypervisor, helping people land jobs, in these unprecedented times. I thought it might be helpful to understand how somebody in my position interprets your resume.

The first thing we need to acknowledge together is that there is a huge amount of subjectivity, and little verifiability, in the content of resumes. You know this, because you're writing your resume to paint yourself in the best possible light, with tricks such as:

• Inflating or bending the title or roles you assign to yourself
• Giving your activities and responsibilities the most generous description possible
• Cramming in keywords, especially technology skills, to match recruiter searches
• Omitting anything negative

Now, what you maybe don't realize, and need to understand, is that I, and others in my position as hiring manager, know you're doing this, and are internally correcting for this bias in our assessment of you.

A Few Negative Examples

Head of ___ Engineering

In my experience, most "Head of" titles are self-awarded and therefore I mentally filter as junk. Especially at the scale of organizational leadership (<100 people) I am typically interviewing for, very few companies I care about award this as a legitimate job or role title, and I suspect candidates are trying to use this to gain prestige, or mask a more mundane title, such as "Engineering Manager"

Led a team of X responsible for ____

Owner of ____

Being responsible for something, or "owning" something, doesn't convey to me the authority you might be trying to claim, and doesn't tell me anything at all about how you performed. All I really get out of this is some senior leader of yours did their job, by making sure you had a clear area of focus. It also raises a red flag, that I'll probe into, about you potentially having a problem being territorial and/or a gatekeeper.

Skills: React, Python, Django, MongoDB, GCP, AWS, GeoCities, Azure, Spring, COBOL, Kubernetes, Docker, ColdFusion, Krav Maga, Adobe Flex, deep reinforcement learning ....

First of all, if you really are an expert-level, professional practitioner of this particular set of technologies, you are truly the rarest of all of the ninja unicorn rock stars, and should proceed directly to FANG to collect your Tesla full of RSUs.

Otherwise, please don't put every technology you've ever written a "Hello World" in, or every discipline you've watched a 5 minute YouTube video for, on your resume and try to impress me. I'll figure it out pretty quick when I ask about it, which becomes an unnecessary negative point against you when I figure out your experience is much more shallow than you've claimed.

So What Am I Looking For?

What's most important to me is simple: what have you accomplished? While you can describe yourself however you'd like, it's much more difficult to fake actual accomplishments in your job. When we speak, I'm going to be focusing on your accomplishments, so don't fake them, because good interviewers will quickly find inconsistencies in your stories.

The following are not accomplishments:

• Having a particular job/title/role (This means you passed an interview, not necessarily succeeded at the job)
• Claiming a particular responsibility (Means you have typed a few words into your resume)
• Claiming a skill (Again, means you've successfully typed the name of that skill into your resume).

So, what have you accomplished in your job/role? What benefit have you had for your company, stakeholders, or customers - whatever is appropriate in your context?

How did you do when you were assigned a particular responsibility? Did you do well at it? What evidence can you present to back that up?

What did you do with your skills? What did you build?

These are the questions I'm going to have when I look at your resume, and you have a better chance of getting my attention (and therefore continuing with your candidacy) if you answer them directly on the resume. Otherwise, best case I'm going to grill you about these when we talk, or worst case I assume you haven't accomplished anything and will delete your resume.

Good Examples

Led a team responsible for improving conversion in our iOS product, accomplishing a 10% lift in 6 months with a team of 3.

Now you've told me not just what you were responsible for (meaning: assigned to do), but you've told me how you did at it. Metrics are always going to be the most impressive way to express what you've done, but don't fake them if you don't have them.

Launched a web app (Python/React/Kubernetes/AWS) that helped coordinate volunteers for a senior outreach program.

Downplays the skill keywords in favor of showing what you've done with them. Even if your resume doesn't show you having a lot of time experience with a skill, having a concrete example of finishing a project that uses that skill helps me have confidence that you'll be able to perform, if the role I'm hiring for requires that skill.

Professional Summary:

Accomplished software engineering leader. At ___, built up a new team of 25 to deliver our product MVP on-time. At ____, led the group that successfully migrated our core technology to the cloud, while maintaining 99.999% system uptime.

My favorite "professional summary" sections are really just a "greatest hits" of the bullet points used describing jobs later on in the resume. It tells me what you are most proud of having accomplished, and helps me put in context the rest of the content of your resume.

Closing Notes

I have my own professional and cultural biases embedded in how I approach hiring; for example, I favor a more egalitarian, servant-leader management approach, and so titles aren't as important to me. However, there are many people out there who value titles, and will judge them more highly than I do.

Companies worth working for are going to present you with a diversity of people and backgrounds on their interview panels, each looking for their own favored attributes.

How do you reconcile this? On your resume, you can highlight both titles and accomplishments - list your roles/titles for the people who will care about them, and also list your accomplishments for people like me who are looking for them. When speaking during interviews, use the questions you're being asked to tailor your answer to the person asking them. For me, I use words like "impact" and "results" a lot - when you hear these words, talk about your accomplishments, and don't try to impress me with abstract principles or big titles.

If you have an engineering job interview coming up, and would like personalized coaching and feedback from an experienced senior engineering leader, I'm offering interview preparation packages through Hypervisor. Improve your interviewing skills, become more comfortable and confident, and get the feedback you don't get from real interviews!

Cover photo by bruce mars on Unsplash