How To Write A Resume Big-Tech Recruiters Can't Ignore transcript

At 1:00 a.m. on a cold November night, I uploaded this resume onto Apple's career site. Woah, that rhymed. Okay, didn't plan on that. I was half asleep, but awake enough to fully expect it to go into a database and for me to never hear about it ever again. 9 days later, a recruiter emailed me. That is the resume that got me shortlisted for the program manager role at Apple. I did not get the job and will go into why towards the end. I think that's somewhat besides the point of this video, but definitely do stick around for that learning because it's important. But, this resume did its one job. It got somebody at Apple to stop scrolling and revert back to me. So, I pulled it apart line by line and turned it into the closest thing I have to a resume almanac. I get DMs practically every day on LinkedIn

around people requesting me to do their resumes and such. So, my goal with this video is when these people message me now, I can just point them to this foundational video. And then, if you would still like me to review your resume, please do continue to message me on LinkedIn. I'm more than happy to do that. But first, make sure you watch this until the end because if you do, quite honestly, you won't really need me or anyone else to review your resume. You will be good to go. And I'm not going to cover stuff like delete your photo, don't have your address. That I I trust you all to already be better than that.

This is for those people that already have the basics right and are just trying to go from 80 to 100%. That is my targeted audience for this video. I hope you fall into that, I guess. Okay, so chapter one, the one test that runs everything. Before we go into a single tactic, here is the idea that this entire video basically hinges on. A recruiter gives your resume its first pass in six, maybe seven seconds. In that window, they're not doing any meaningful reading. They're scanning for a reason to either say yes, keep reading, or no, next. Remember that every line on your page is fighting for those first six to seven seconds. So, here's the test that decides what stays, what gets written, what gets cut. And it's just two simple words. So, what?

Let weekly stakeholders think, "So, what? Did anything move?" Let the weekly stakeholders think, "That cut launch delays by 30%." Same meeting, but only one of them earns its seconds. Hold "So, what?" in your head for the rest of this. Every rule after this is really just a way of answering it faster. Chapter two, sections and the order that actually matters. Most people get the sections right and the order wrong. Remember, when recruiters scan your resume, they're following the F pattern. So, stuff that's in the top third of the page is bound to get way more eyeballs on it than stuff below.

So, make sure that whatever your crown jewels are around your profile or resume are in that top third because if they're not, chances are no eyeballs will ever even land on them. So, if you're a fresh master's grad, your call is education versus experience at the very top. If your internships are strong and on brand for the role that you're applying, lead with experience first, then have that followed by education. If your headline is your program, perhaps at a super reputed university, lead with that and then follow your internships if they're a little bit thinner. If you're 5 years in or close to that, it's honestly not even a debate. Experience goes directly under your header and it has to dominate the page. Education can even shrink to a one-line towards the very bottom. Nobody really cares at your level. Again, drop

the GPA, drop the coursework. Nobody cares about your 2019 electives. The mistake I see from candidates all the time is running the same template for a decade. Stuff that was relevant to when you got hired as an early careers is just simply no longer relevant anymore. So, you need to change around your order. Chapter three, the overview, small or gone. This one will probably be short. It's your call to include your professional summary. It's that's fine.

I personally don't recommend it, but I have seen resumes get shortlisted with that as well. So, that's totally okay. Just make sure that at any cost it cannot cross more than three entire lines on your resume. If it does, it means you have to be cutting it down in some way, shape, size, or form. I don't care how. I'll let you decide that, but please please do not have a five-to-six-line summary because no one's reading that and you're wasting valuable real estate at the very top of your page. Chapter four, power verbs are your engine. Let's get into the line level craft/wordsmithing now. This I feel is where the already decent resumes get separated from the ones that actually get callbacks. Every bullet on your resume must start with a strong power verb. It's called power for a reason, and if you don't know what

those are, feel free to have ChatGPT or Claude or what have you write or come up with those verbs for you to then use. Responsible for, help with, worked on, these aren't power verbs. These make you feel like a passenger. Nobody wants to hire a passenger. People want to hire leaders. So, the whole point of using power verbs is that you then come across as a leader. Build, shipped, designed, launched, led, hell, spearheaded. spearheaded. If if if if you could if you really want to put yourself out there, I promise, even spearheaded is actually better than just saying worked on. Like just let's just please not do that. Cut, reduced, accelerated, streamlined are all good.

Gained, grew, expanded, generated, saved, increased, all of these work as long as they show just how powerful of a leader you are. And yes, you are. Don't ever tell yourself that you're not. And I guess just some cautions. Don't start five bullets with like the same two or three power verbs scattered across them. Make sure you're not going back to the same wells again and again. Finally, again, I know I said spearheaded, which is out there, but try to at least match the verb to the actual task that you were trying to describe. Chapter five, the bullet formula and the I don't have numbers. Here's the shape that every bullet on your resume should take. What you did, the result it produced, and the number that proves the result that you wrote about. Clean way to hold it.

Accomplished X by doing Y, measured by Z. Handled client reporting. Rebuilt the client reporting flow and cut turn around from 3 days to 4 hours for an 18-person team. Same job, but only one of them opens the conversation up. But Naman, my work didn't have any numbers. numbers. It did. How many people, how much time, how much money, what percent, how often, at what scale? You touched something. There are ways to quantify things. Trust me, you just need to dig really deep and come up with accurate measurements of what those things were. Even a rough honest estimate is fine. Across three markets, across an 18-person team, all of these give otherwise soft bullets a strong spine. And one nuance I would like to share here is you should lead with the result when the result is actually really impressive. Lead with

the action when the action is the more impressive part. Again, going back to our F rule, stuff that is powerful and shiny and good and nice that you want eyes on should come first. In fact, a good way to do this is also just by bolding the first two letters of every bullet just to highlight what it is that you did if the recruiter doesn't want to read the entire sentence. Just by looking at that first two or three words, they should be able to get a pretty good strong idea about exactly what you did and if they're interested, that's when they can read the entire sentence. Chapter six, projects and which ones to include. This is the section that people actually also ask me about one of the most commonly type asked questions, especially from new grads. And it's interesting because this is where the grad and mid-career

formulas split on their heads completely. Like, they're completely different. If you're early careers, projects have to be load-bearing. Step one, do actually good, meaningful projects. It They don't have to steal data sets off Kaggle just to do a run-of-the-mill Kaggle project that every resume has. Try and think of a problem that you had personally that you solved. That will probably carry way more weight just in terms of being impressive and unique to actually draw attention rather than just like an Airbnb type data set that every resume has. Remember that each project bullet should still answer the same resume bullet formula we covered in the previous chapter. The problem, what you actually built, and what came of it.

Users, accuracy, time saved, used by 200 people in the department. We want an outcome, not just a description. A capstone that you shipped and published live beats five toy projects every single time. If you have a link, even better. Make sure to link it. And again, if your experience kind of already proves the point, it's okay to consider deleting projects altogether just to let your bullets breathe and give them the spotlight that they deserve. Chapter seven, not every job gets equal space.

Here's a really random lever that people just don't seem to ever pull on purpose, and I think it's such a missed opportunity. Space equals importance, and you, as the owner of your resume, get to decide what goes where. Your current {slash} most recent {slash} hopefully most relevant position has to get the most amount of space. We'll say four to six bullets. The one before that drops to about three bullets. Older off-track roles probably shrink to a single line if they even make the cut.

Remember, an internship you did seven years ago does not need to be mentioned on your resume just because you did it. If it's not relevant, consider dropping it and using that real estate for the bullets that actually will help you get the job that you're applying for. The benefit of this is it gets you two birds from the same stone. One, it enlarges or spotlights stuff you want spotlighted. Second, it ensures you don't have to worry about fitting everything in one page. It automatically takes care of the clutter that doesn't belong on your resume. For early grad students, make sure that you're splitting out the most relevant work experience for the role into as many bullets as you possibly can. If your summer internship is more relevant for the job you're applying for than your on-campus jobs and such, and

your on-campus job is the more recent one, that's okay. Feel free to ignore or that, put it lower, skip it, I don't care, but just make sure that you highlight your internship front and center right at the very top. Chapter eight, skills and the almost right killers. Okay, let's do skills first real quick. Group them in a way that the eyes can parse easily. Languages, tools, domains instead of a 40-word comma-separated soup. A giant list of just word salad reads as touched everything, mastered nothing. You don't want that. And remember, every skill you write on the page is inviting potential questions on your interview. So, don't just bloat it up for the sake of bloating it up. It's It's what's the point? And now, the nuances that trip up even good candidates. Adjectives about yourself, hardworking, detail-oriented,

team player, please delete them. Like, I'm sorry I have to even come out and say this, but those do not belong on your resume. Yes, even cross-functional collaboration. Show you did that through your resume bullets. You don't need to write it up front. It's like as they say, right? Show, don't tell. Buzzwords with no substance underneath, synergy, results-driven, dynamic, everybody's dynamic. What are we doing? Duties included, this is not a job description, this is the resume of a leader. Yep, and you you are a leader, remember. Oh, yeah, one big one, tense drift. If you've been writing your bullets such as worked on, did it something, led baba, don't suddenly shift to leads or works on or {slash} delivers dashboard. Make sure you're consistent with your tense. And finally, the wall.

So, if you have a bullet that's like four lines, that's just a straight-up paragraph that no one's reading. Make sure that all of your bullets max to max fit within two entire lines on your resume. resume. Do not until you can really, really justify it, do not go into a third line. If you have to, consider breaking it up into two different bullets just cuz it makes readability very difficult. Almost towards the end here, I promise. Keep going if you've watched till here, thanks. That's awesome. And also, if you watched till here, why are we not subscribing? That just doesn't make any sense, but chapter nine, one page, two pages, and the job description. Here's where I'm going to settle the page count once and for all. Grad or under seven to eight years in, one page. At five years, of course, some people can earn a

second, but your second page has to be as strong as your first throughout, consistently. A weak, watered-down page two hurts you more than no page two. The skill that you're demonstrating here is one of editing, and they can see through it. Last thing, and I'll keep it light because you know these basics, but please, please, please actually read the job description. If you're not trying to do that, I have a separate video coming up on how to use Codex or Cloud Code to actually just one-shot apply for your jobs and such. We will cover this separately, maybe more over there, but try and make it so your exact phrase covers what you were doing and also matches the job description. Remember, ATS is actually matching the words to the job description words. So, that's just the rule of the game. And so, when you align directly, that really plays

into your favor, and we want to do that to the extent possible. Okay, and yeah, as promised, we'll we can go into why I didn't get Apple. The short of it is that through the series of interviews, it was clear to me not at the time, but many months later after retrospection, that Apple is a very much perfection-driven culture where you're it's it's you stuff that they put out cannot fail. Like, they're not allowed the liberty to fail. And through various points in my interview process, including a couple high-stress test cases, no, actually they're called case studies, I let it slip just because that's the type of person I am that I'm more completionism over perfectionism, and it was just I think it just turned out to be a culture mismatch, which I'm actually Yeah, I have no hard feelings about not getting it cuz I think it

would probably not have been the right fit for me anyway. Okay, and then finally, how do you do all this? I'm a big fan of LaTeX and overleaf.com. I'll link the template that I used in the description for free for you to steal. Do whatever you want to do it with. Share it with a friend or two. help help spread the word, spread the knowledge, spread the treasure. The sections etc. will already be in the right order for you to just dump your stuff. You can even use ChatGPT and be like, "Hey, update this LaTeX code with my stuff."

And then you can dump in your bullets and you can just export and get your entire PDF ready to go in one shot. Next in this series is the LinkedIn profile that stops recruiters and gets you those inbound emails. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. Until then, let's get some interviews and convert them. Thanks for