I’m not super accustomed to the whole hiring processes because, for most of my career, I wasn’t looking at the first pass of application submissions. But that’s changed over the past couple years, and I just wanna say: your resume is terrible.

You don’t chunk information in a way that’s scannable. You include excessive detail way too early in the process. You don’t understand who is reading and reviewing this document. You build it in a tool unrelated to the work you do daily. And, one of my biggest pet-peeves, you include ratings/graphs for skills which give zero-context for your actual experience.

So let me help. It won’t take long and you’ll see better results from your job applications.

Your Initial Audience

Before the hiring manager ever sees your application, resume, or portfolio, it’s got to get past a few potential hurdles:

• Human Resources (who probably doesn’t understand the job all that well)
• Recruiting Agency (may know the job a bit better than HR, but will often reformat your resume to match their template)
• Scanning Software (which looks for keywords and rates you against the job posting)
• And, depending on the level, an executive or administrative assistant (whose job is to guard their bosses precious time)

All of your charts, design flourishes, and lengthy descriptions make it harder for these people to do their job. And if your resume is longer than 1 page, it’s likely they will give it less time than you’d expect. Why? They have a million other things to do, and every applicant will share the same block of time. Just because you wrote twice as much as the next person doesn’t mean you’ll get twice the review time.

Your Time to Shine

If you make it past those first sets of firewalls, your resume will finally get time with the hiring manager. This person has a spot open (e.g.: a staffing shortage or a backfill) and thus has too much on their plate. They aren’t looking to sit down and read a novella between meetings, and they definitely don’t want to decipher your charts; they just need a general idea of how well qualified you are for this role.

So, how does this step work? In my experience, HR passes on a bunch of resumes and we dump them in a folder to be sorted into yes, no, and maybe subfolders. The yeses and strongest maybe’s go through a pre-screener call or email with HR (made up of a handful of relevant questions from the team). The rest sit idle, waiting to be moved into the recycling bin sometime down the road.

At this point, my advice is fairly specific to design and development roles, but we don’t spend much time on your resume… if there’s a portfolio site to open, that’s the first thing we click. If your portfolio lacks work that applies to the role, you go in the no folder. If your portfolio looks okay, we give the resume a deeper look noting things like past roles, titles, companies, and experience; if we have questions, we look you up on LinkedIn, so make sure your profile is more detailed than your resume.

Side note: Ideally, everyone would get a response detailing why they aren’t moving forward with the role, but no matter the size of the company, there often isn’t time. HR folks don’t hear anything but who to line-up for a pre-screener or interview, and don’t want to send a rejection notice too quickly. Once interviews begin, the other applicants tend to get lost in the noise of day-to-day work. If you do hear back, it’s probably a form letter because the job posting was closed. I’ve gotten feedback from just one company out of the hundreds I’ve applied to, and it’s only because I knew the hiring manager from a past job and they reached out via unofficial channels to tell me.

Your Interview(s)

If you made it this far, congrats, your resume did its job. This is the last time it might be referenced, because most people want to use the interview to ask about your portfolio projects and working style directly. Especially in more conversational interviews, your resume won’t be able to help. But take note of the questions you’ve been asked, the programs and processes mentioned, and the names & titles of folks you interviewed with. These are all priceless bits of information that you can mine and refine.

If your training was in Adobe XD but all you heard them mention was Figma, get to learning it ASAP! If the role needed direct engineering engagement and you don’t know the first thing about code, then use something like FreeCodeCamp.org to learn the basics (starting with HTML, CSS, & JS is honestly pretty simple). And use the titles of people interviewing you comb through job postings to see what your path forward might look like, and if you’re interested in that work.

Where previous generations would recommend sending a thank you note or email after your interview, I prefer using LinkedIn. Send them a request to connect and personalize the note by thanking them for their time and consideration. Not everyone is an active user of LinkedIn, so don’t take silence as a bad omen, but those who are active will appreciate you reaching out and gaining more secondary & tertiary connections (especially if the interview went well).

Example Resumes

Below are a couple examples of resume’s from me and my team at work. They’re all various levels of simple and straight-forward, and at least in my case, this has been the template I’ve used for over a decade now.

Mine was originally made in InDesign, and recently I recreated it in Figma since that’s my design tool of choice these days. Having it in a tool that I enjoy means that updating it is quick and easy, and with it in a browser based tool, I can get at it from almost any device.

I hope this helped and good luck on your next job submission!