The Resume That Got Me Into Google

Key Takeaways

this is the resume that got me into Google Facebook and Uber but copying this template is useless what worked for me will not work for you that's because your education and work experience is completely different from mine some of you might not even have a fancy degree or job to put on your resume so the structure of perfect resume will be different for different people that's why instead of just showing you my resume today I'll also tell you why I chose to write my resume this way once you know the reasoning you can move different sections around to tailor the resume to fit your own unique profile at the end of the video I'll also tell you three things you can do to instantly improve your resume if you don't have a good degree or work experience if there's one thing amazon.com is about it's obsessive attention to the customer experience that's it pesos the founder of Amazon telling us how focusing on the customer was the key to success of Amazon yet when it comes to resume is nobody really thinks about the customer there are primarily three customers if you will for your resume number one is the recruiter that will shortlist your resume number two is hiring manager that would give the final stamp for whether you are worthy of an interview and number three which most people forget about is the resume filter which is a software that automatically filters out your resume if certain keywords are not present to get the final interview call we have to impress all three both hiring managers and recruiters are very busy people because they have to go through so many applications every day on an average they spend about 7 Seconds to read your resume to know what that feels like I set the timer and try reading my own resume I was more generous and gave myself double the time a hiring manager would take and this is how far I could reach in 15 seconds from this exercise it's obvious to me how you start your resume it's the single most important thing and I can bet you that recruiters don't even read your name until they have found something interesting in the top part of your resume so guard this top part with your life and write the most impressive thing about you here forget all the rules that a resume should start with education skills or whatever these rules are bogus and have no data to support them so if you have a weak educational work write your best project or skills here and if you see my resume I have listed all my skills at the top in hindsight this is actually the first mistake I made in my resume there are two more mistakes that I'll share later in the video but see if you can spot them yourself anyway I believe that the most impressive part about my background was my work experience at Amazon and that should have gone at the top but my previous job before Amazon was not as impressive and I used to avoid writing it at the top and for this resume I simply copy pasted my old template and made this plunder let this be a lesson for everyone that copy pasting others or even your own old template is not the best strategy now that you have intrigued the recruiter who are you they would have the urge to know who this amazing programmer is so they will come back to the very top to know your name write your name in large font to make it memorable give your basic contact details like phone number or email here if you have a LinkedIn profile add it if you don't make one and add it LinkedIn is a must in 2022 to be honest if you have a good LinkedIn profile you might not even need a resume to get hired if you want me to cover LinkedIn tips in the upcoming videos let me know in the comments enough about LinkedIn moving on if you have a GitHub or personal website include that here as well if you don't they are nice to have but not critical so don't sweat it now that we have that out of the way let's talk about the skills section here skill section does two things for us one it helps the recruiters figure out if you have the desired skills 2. it helps us get past the resume filter which is the Third customer of our resume as we discussed in the beginning so when applying for the job read the job post carefully to figure out the skills the recruiter is looking for and if you have them make sure you include them in your skills section before we talk about the work experience section let me tell you two mistakes I've seen many people make in their skills one they start rating themselves on their own skills frankly nobody really cares how good you think you are I mean I also felt like I was the best looking guy in the college but the girls in my college disagreed so please skip ratings second mistake many people make is that they include their soft skills this is the second mistake I made in my own resume I mean who doesn't think they are a team player and they deliver results these skills are redundant in my defense I was too much into Amazon's leadership principles at the time and I thought it would be a good idea to include them anyway save the space for something useful let's move on to the work experience for people who don't have work experience the equivalent section would be your projects here I would like to focus on how to talk about your projects there are three key want to answer when writing about the projects what did you do how did you do it and what was the impact so we start with an intriguing title that weaks the hiring manager let me explain what we did in a little more detail in the first sentence after that we talk about how we did it when explaining the how part we want the hiring manager to feel two things one they should be able to see that the project was challenging two they should feel that the project had a big scope it's not always possible to achieve this with every project but that's the goal in this example I've tried to show the technical challenges by mentioning some of the Technologies I used to demonstrate the scope of the project I have talked about the design discussions with multiple teams were involved after establishing how you achieved the final outcome you want to make a strong statement for the impact I dearly you want to add some metrics here my impact statement was very similar for all these projects so I just started one statement for impact but in an ideal scenario you want one for each project additionally if it's your personal project which has a working app providing a link to the app can also work as your impact statement and don't forget to start your sentences with action verbs if you don't know what that is we have another video on the channel for the basics of resume writing I believe everyone should know these Basics so make sure to check it out before we get into how to improve your resume when you don't have a degree or work experience let's talk about the right column on my resume on the top we have education with my GPA if you feel like your GPA is not good you can skip it below education we have honors and awards from my college time and some of the courses I did these two sections are the third and the final mistake I made in my resume this once you have worked in the industry for some time the awards from college and your coursework makes no difference the point I'm trying to make here is that just because you have done something doesn't mean that you have to mention it in your resume when it comes to resume is sometimes less is more at the bottom of the right column I have my interests outside work these are nothing but conversation starters that help break ice with the interviewer you can write your resume in the best possible way but there's still a possibility that you might not get a job that's because resumes are not just written resumes are built over time and there's a big difference between the two so if you're having a hard time finding a job focus on building your resume first you don't need a fancy degree or work experience to build your resume here are three ways to start building your resume right now first is to participate in the hackathons another way is to contribute to the open source projects and the last but the most effective way is to build your own personal projects today's video was more about psychology of resume writing I did not cover some very important topics like action words you should how to write your impact statement and the free online resources to make a beautiful resume to learn all these things watch this video at the top my name is sahil and I'll see you in the next one [Music]