For the past 20 months, this question has been answered by two contradicting voices in my head. The first voice, that has the personality of a sane, organized, professional human, encourages me to focus on numbers and metrics, and sticking to the point, and tweaking the Resume as per corporate guidelines, and following pre-defined templates, and using popular keywords. The other voice is a vagabond and a rebel shouting – “Why follow the format? Let’s add pictures and colors and mention everything that makes you cool. How else would you stand out?” Right from the first semester, I have been struggling to settle the dispute between these two voices. As a result, my Resume now looks like their marriage certificate.
Despite having worked on my Resume several times in the past, it took me a lot of trial and error to get to the one I am currently using to apply for jobs. In fact, it is still evolving and changes with most job applications depending upon the job role and company. There are several reasons why it was particularly challenging for me to nail down a good Resume. First – my profile is a bit weird. My experience over the past decade (after completing my Engineering in Electronics and Telecommunication) ranges from Product Manager at an IT book publishing firm to Bollywood actor to flood relief volunteer to travel content writer and team manager to graduate student. Trying to display everything I want in one page proved to be a bit of a challenge.
Second – I am targeting two types of roles – one that aligns more with my past experience and another that aligns with my recent education and career interest. Coming up with two perfect sales pitches for these two different types of jobs was an interesting challenge but something that I thoroughly enjoyed. After a lot of trial and error, and leaving out a bunch of stuff I thought makes me “awesome”, I was able to make some progress.
Thankfully, you are never alone in the resume-building process. My resume-building journey began with the Professional Development class in Fall 2018. I then took a trip to the Career Management Center at UTD where most of what I had put down was crossed out and I was given a new, professional format. It helped me get my experience in the STAR format with metrics showcasing how my work actually accounted to achieving something for my firm. I tweaked it a bit as per my personality. But at one point I got carried away. One of the biggest blunders I made was included a terrible picture of myself working on a project in my Resume, thinking that it will make me stand out. A recruiter at the UTD career fair rightly gave me an earful saying that such a Resume is extremely difficult to read, and the ATS will never pick something like this up.
So, I decided to grow the hell up and act like a professional. I cleaned up the format, removed my picture, and tried to paint it with my words. Over a period of time, I also asked friends and colleagues to review my resume, all of whom gave me great (sometimes contradicting) feedback. I also used a lot of advice given by Austin Belcak on LinkedIn and in his emails (yes, I am a subscriber). Thanks to his expertise and some very helpful tips from major corporations like Google and MIT, I think I have two Resumes that can get the job done. Whether they really get me a job is still to be seen.
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This is the sixth post of my #10DaysToGraduate series where I share 10 key lessons from my Master’s degree in the form of a countdown to May 8, my graduation date.