Resume Review Service — A Secret Weapon
6 min readAug 19, 2024
The resume has a single purpose — to get an interview.
Did you know?
Experienced recruiters spend 5–20 seconds on each resume!
The resume ought to be your best document, marketing your abilities in the best way.
As a hiring manager myself, I’ve been rejecting resumes that had serious issues as elaborated below, and they didn’t get an interview.
Would you happily accept a sloppy resume with spelling mistakes and no indication of how well they did their job?
🔎 Why resume review?
Having a resume review is advantageous. Right now the job market is an employer market, which means the competition for open positions is higher than usual, and you need to increase your chances of passing the initial resume screening, which is done by a recruiter or by the hiring manager.
Additionally, you can purchase products to help you build a resume such as Manager Tools ‘.
The potential employer wants to see what you did and how well.
This is the secret sauce — give them exactly this.
🙄 Disclaimers
- Resumes can be very country/culture dependent. For example in many countries one does not mention hobbies, in others, it’s a red flag if they are missing, as an employer might be afraid they’d have to handle a nervous breakdown. Some require a photo and in some it’s ineffective. Some require a passport number. Make sure the reviewer is aware of your local market to avoid a wrong resume review.
- For any advice on resumes, including this one — use judgment — are they trying to sell a tool like CV builder or a resume review service? Are they using pseudo-scientific articles copied over the internet, suggesting “2.4x higher chance if your CV is 2 pages” or “a standard deviation of 382 words per page”?
- When applying for a specific position that has a list of expectations from a resume, do it their way.
- An academic CV is very different from the general resume, this article doesn’t apply to it.
✅ The Checklist
Before asking friends or a paid professional for a resume review, go over this checklist and see whether it gets a higher response rate:
- Single page. If people with 30 years of experience can do it, so can you. “Compress” old and irrelevant jobs to make room for more relevant ones and keep one page
- Structure:
> Relevant personal details (name, email, links like LinkedIn)
> Employment experience from latest to earliest
> Education and certifications from latest to earliest
> Additional relevant info, such as languages, driver’s license, special accomplishments - No holes (periods of not working or studying) — “If I see a hole in your resume, I assume you were in prison”. Most employers understand explanations, such as taking care of a relative, being sick, sabbatical, etc., and those who don’t — better not work for them
- For each workplace
> Dates (year and month), company, location, role
> Responsibilities as a paragraph. Example:
Engineering manager, leading a team of 5 full stack engineers, working in kanban methodology. I was responsible for the on-time delivery and feasibility of solutions, as well as growing the engineers professionally and managing their performance.
> Accomplishments as bullet points — an accomplishment is a verb (what you did), a result (quantified) and a method (how you did it).
Note that you can measure yourself even if the company doesn’t, e.g. how many calls per day, how many security incidents…
For example:
> Increased user engagement by 20% by decreasing app loading time by optimizing the web server and DB queries
> Increased eNPS from 3.2 to 4.3 by conducting weekly 1:1s with my direct reports, giving constant feedback and coaching
> Reduced cycle time from 22 days to 3 days by modifying the team’s ways of working
> Increased retention from 80% to 95% by deploying individual development plans
> Shortened average time to hire from 4 weeks to 14 days by revising the hiring process utilizing behavioral questions
> Reduced monthly cloud infrastructure costs from $50K to $14K by removing waste and optimizing code
> Built 8 websites with 99.99% uptime that served 20K monthly users and yearly revenue of $200K
> Prepared company monthly report with 99.99% precision and always on time
> For managers — include the team’s achievements as yours! You set the goals, gave feedback, guided, supported, removed blockers, set budgets and aligned stakeholders. Formalize what your contribution was - Leave out:
> Objective paragraph — fluff that wastes space and everyone is anyway a “dedicated team player striving for achievements” — ignored by recruiters
> Irrelevant info like a summer job when you were 16 when you are now 45
> Keywords/skills list/tools/buzzwords — doesn’t tell how well you did it. Blend skills in the responsibilities and accomplishments
> Hobbies
> Internal code names that say nothing, like “system X2D”, “project maverick”
> White-font ATS (applicant tracking system) readable but human-unreadable didn’t prove to have better search results by recruiters
> Obvious field names like phone, name, address… recruiters are intelligent enough to realize what they are
> Photo — wastes space of what you did and how well, and can bias (gender, age, race) - The small details:
> No spelling mistakes — use a tool
> No grammar mistakes — use a tool
> No wrong dates
> Grammatical tense — a mix of present and past is confusing and inconsistent
> Don’t use your current employer’s email - Visuals — the resume is a formal standard document
> No special background that may make it hard to read when printed or on other computers
> Make use of the space, e.g. a single paragraph for a 30-year career is questionable
> Special fonts may not work on printers or other computers
> Visual tools are dangerous, they might leave out details, create weird spacing and break lines
> Consistent location format, date format, fonts and sizes, make it easy to read - Verify:
> Read the resume a day after, see if all makes sense
> Feed the resume into text-to-speech and listen to it
> Let someone else proofread and tell them what to focus on (only spelling, only dates)
> Know what you wrote, don’t be surprised in an interview, “Oh, did I write that?”
⛔️ Anti Patterns
- Writing only “Senior Marketing leader at Google” does not serve the purpose, one can even assume you were fired
- Writing responsibilities as bullet points achievements “Lead 4 engineers”
- Writing “by contract had to do X” doesn’t communicate if you even did it, and certainly not how well
- Writing your goals (unclear whether you achieved them)
- Lacking data, e.g. “various clients” instead of how many, “high revenue” without a number
- Having wrong dates or more than one job as “present”
📆 When to Write
- Keep journaling about your successes, accomplishments, failures, learnings, etc. in a separate journal file. It’s also good for the performance reviews — you won’t have to invest a lot of time and forget things
- Keep it fresh, better not start when you just got fired and are under stress — update it occasionally, e.g. every 2–3 months
✉️ Cover Letter
Cover letters are still widespread and required. A good cover letter gives you an advantage over other applicants. While the resume is your “feature set”, the cover letter shows the benefit for the hiring company.
Checklist:
- Cover letter per job, even when applying for two separate jobs in the same organization
- Open with the recruiter’s name when known from the job ad or found on their website or professional network
- State what you apply for, as recruiters are responsible for many open positions. E.g.: “I am glad to apply for the head of sales position in Hamburg as posted on LinkedIn”
- Why you match — mirror the job ad.
They actually tell you what they are after. It will feel familiar to the reader, but not a copy. Of course, only with true statements.
E.g.: “I worked as a head of sales in the same industry and increased the sales by…” - Next level: research the company and department and add things you find, for example, if they are now migrating from on-premise to the cloud and you have experience with it
