Three Resume Tips

I have been asked a few times to review student resumes and in my current position I review quite a few resumes of potential candidates.

I think a lot of resume advice out there is tied to formatting, presentation, and writing style. While all of that is important, I think that it’s been well-adjudicated.

In this article, I would like discuss the content of your resume. I’m going to describe three rules that I made up to guide your resume’s content.

1. The Percent Allocation Rule: the amount of space you allocate to a section should be proportional to the relevance of that section.

   You should assume that the resume reviewer will read a random(ish) sample of your resume. The more impressive the thing is, the more space you want it to take up so that the random sample is more likely to encounter it.

   At this point in my career, my last two positions take up half of my resume, and then two conference talks take up ~20%, and my BS+MS from Mines takes up only a single line.

   For most students, the following sections are likely the most important: internships (work experience), education, side projects.

2. The Top-Down Rule: you should assume that the random sampling from the percent allocation rule is weighted towards the top of the resume.

   Put the most important things for humans up there, and leave all of the stuff for automated systems at the bottom. In my opinion, a good example of something that should go towards the bottom is a skills section.

   For me, this means that my degrees from Mines are at the very bottom of my resume since my experience in my most recent engineering roles greatly overshadows my academic accomplishments.

3. The 5 Minute Rule: you should be able to talk about every line in your resume for at least five minutes to a recruiter or interviewer.

   If you don’t have five minutes of things to say about a thing, it probably shouldn’t be on your resume. You don’t have to be able to talk exactly about that one specific thing for five minutes, but you should be able to branch out from there with at least five minutes of content.

   At the very least you should be able to describe a specific challenge you faced while doing the thing, how you overcame that challenge, and what you learned from doing so.

   When practicing for interviews, I might even practice doing this for every line of your resume, so that you know how to bend the conversation towards whatever you want to bend it towards regardless of what you are asked about.

These are a few of the rules I’ve come up with for my resume. Do you have other resume tips? I’m happy to hear about them in the comments!