Normally, a hiring manager spends 10 - 20 seconds to read a resume (they have to read probably 20 - 50 of them everyday). That means you only have 10 - 20 seconds to convince the hiring manager to move you to the next round. This tutorial is to help you achieve a higher success rate of moving on to the next round.
Read and watch to understand what employers look for
Read: My Personal Formula for a Winning Resume by Laszlo Bock, former Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google.
⬇️ Watch: Recruiter and Engineer tips from Google
What do hiring managers think when they scan your resume
Why do hiring managers read resumes? They want to find people to join their team.
Why do hiring managers want new people to join their team? Their team has more work to do than the number of people to do it.
Why can't hiring managers just take anyone in randomly? Because they want to make sure when people join their team, they can do the work.
How do they make sure people who'd join can do the work? Hiring managers with experience and domain knowledge knows with what kind of experience, people can do the work.
And they put that kind of experience they're looking for in the job descriptions, hidden into important keywords. The higher the matches of keywords in your resume and whatever the hiring manager has in his/her mind, the better the chance you'd move on.
After having the right keywords, hiring managers will look for previous impact in time and measurable metrics. For example: how much money you saved the company with your work, how long have you done that work for? 1 year? ...
Together, matched keywords show you've done the similar work before, meaningful impact shows you can deliver correct results on similar work. Hiring managers will likely feel more confident to move on with you.
Writing resume checklist
✅ Use the right format for student/recent graduate or experienced professional.
✅ Don't worry about the length, write it as long as you want, then take your time to solidify it to one page.
✅ Always use accomplish [X] as measured by [Y] by doing [Z] format to describe your work. Why? Because it gives the hiring manager a sense of betterness. If you don't show the measurement, they don't have a sense of how good or bad your work is.
✅ Read job description and use the keywords in job descriptions in your resume. This is what hiring managers scan for while reading your resume. If they don't see the keywords, it's highly likely that they won't move on with you. The order of appearance the keyword matters, the sooner, the more important.
✅ Do not include irrelevant information. This is equally important as including the right keywords. Why? Your time is a constant, if you spend your time on irrelevant experience, how much time left do you spend on relevant experience? Your resume length is one page. If you have space for irrelevant experience, that means you don't fill enough space for relevant experience.
✅ Use eye catching layout. How to implement this varies from person to person. The end goal is to make your resume feel elegant. It's still full of information but it's easy to scan through. My tip is using white spaces between the sections.
✅ One page for 10 years experience.