Stop padding your resume

Include these three things instead

👋 Hi, it's Greg and Taylor. Welcome to our newsletter on everything you wish your CEO told you about how to get ahead.

I’m hiring for three roles right now, which means I'm looking at 10-20 resumes a day. My number one frustration: It's impossible to tell what the person has actually done, because their resume includes so much padding.

I spend 30 seconds (max) scanning a resume before I decide if someone gets a phone screen. This isn’t just impatience – I have less than an hour a day to review resumes, and hundreds of resumes to look at.

In those 30 seconds, I have to make a judgment: does this person have enough relevant experience to warrant a phone screen?

Most resumes make this impossible. Generic executive summaries, buzzword-heavy competency lists, out-of-context metrics, and even many job titles don’t help here. They tell me nothing about the projects you’ve actually accomplished in what context.

So here’s our proposal for the new resume – your career context, your “3 in 3”, and a short POV.

- Taylor

What I’m trying to suss out from your resume

In the 30 seconds I have to scan your resume, I’m trying to figure out three things:

1. The contexts you’ve worked in before (e.g., small vs. big companies, B2B vs. B2C, etc.)

2. Your top 3 projects in the last 3 years

3. Your succinct POV on how to be successful in the role

The easier you make it for me to glean this information, the better chance you stand of getting a phone screen.

1. Your career context

I want to know the types of companies, teams, and projects you’ve worked on before. This could be:

• Joined as the 10th employee at a startup, which then grew to 200 employees

• One of 10 consultants in the consulting arm of a 1,000-person company

• Only product manager for a startup tech product

Here, I’m trying to get a sense of whether you’ve worked in our specific context, or if you’ve worked in a context that could be useful to us. For example, right now we’re looking for an analyst/writer to grow Greg’s thought leadership brand – so I want to hear if they have experience working directly with executives, on small teams, with slide decks, etc.

2. Your “3 in 3”

Then, I want to see your top three projects in the last three years. The ones you were actually responsible for, that created meaningful change to the business, summarized thoroughly but succinctly.

Your projects should be described as:

1. What you did, in plain English. Not “led cross-functional initiatives to optimize customer acquisition funnels,” but “rebuilt our email signup flow because only 2% of visitors were converting.”

2. The direct impact to the business (not the second- or third-order effects). Don't tell me you “improved customer satisfaction” or that you “contributed to $1.2 million in incremental revenue” – tell me you “reduced support ticket volume by 40% by building an FAQ that answered the top 10 customer questions.”

Here’s an example from someone we work with at Section:

“Rebuilt the process to run hundreds of live programs and reduced the team needed to do it from 12 to 2.”

This approach does two things - it tells me exactly what you’re capable of doing, and it shows that you understand the “why” behind your work (without over-inflating the numbers - notice this person didn’t say they increased profit margins by 200%).

3. A relevant, succinct POV

I also want to see that you think about your work, not just execute tasks. The best way to do this is with one short paragraph about how to be successful in the role – ideally a non-obvious point of view.

Here are two snippets from a cover letter I recently liked (and moved forward). It’s not exactly a POV, but it’s close, making clear to me that this person understands the challenges this role will face and has a POV for how they’ll tackle them.

The stuff you don’t need

You’ve been told to include these things - don’t. I don’t read them and they mean nothing to me:

High-level executive summary. I don't read this - I skip straight to your experience. These summaries are usually generic (“Results-driven professional with 8+ years of experience in driving growth…”) and tell me nothing I can't figure out from your job titles and tenure.

List of generic “core competencies.” Unless you're applying for a very technical role where specific software knowledge matters, skip the laundry list of skills. “Strategic thinking,” “cross-functional collaboration,” and “data-driven decision making” could describe anyone – and they don’t even get your resume flagged by a machine (we asked our recruiting firm).

Meaningless numbers. Most resume advice will tell you to include hard numbers to show your impact - "Increased social media impressions by 800% YoY" or "Drove $200M in incremental revenue."

I disagree. Without context, these numbers are meaningless. I don't know if an 800% increase means from 100,000 to 800,000, or from 1 to 8. And I have no idea if you actually drove $200M in incremental revenue (unlikely) or if you're taking credit for something that many people contributed to.

You might be thinking - most companies (including yours) ask for a resume in the application. Don’t they want to see a traditional resume?

Maybe - I don’t, but others might. So do what the person who wrote me a cover letter above did - make this new resume format the first page that you submit, and add your traditional resume format as the second page.

My advice

I start every interview with, “Based on the job description, why are you a great fit for the role?”

If you answered with these three inputs – “this is the context I’ve worked in / these are the three most impactful projects I’ve done / this is my POV,” you’d blow me away. So few people can articulate this information quickly.

And by the way, if you’re going to send a message on LinkedIn, use this format as well. Don’t just ask for a 15-minute call – offer value to the employer, and they’ll see you as valuable.

Have a great week,

Greg and Taylor