Rob Hope

Once it was clear I needed to find a new role, I took a hard look at my resume, which needed a refresher after my lengthy tenure at Amazon. With the advent of ATS scanning, AI, and the competitive job market, it was unclear what the ultimate purpose of my resume was. Was it to get past the technology-driven screening? Was it to meet some arbitrary format requirement? Was it to just “get in the door” and get a conversation with a recruiter?

The answer to this might have been “yes to all three”, but that’s just not my style. If I’m going to produce a resume, I want it to present me in the best possible light, and be reflective of my values and the bar I hold. My resume should make it clear who I am and what I can accomplish first. At some point in the process, a hiring manager or a recruiter is going to read it, and when they do, I want them to have a clear perspective on my career and value.

With that, I decided to ignore a lot of the conventional wisdom I’d received in favor of creating a resume that felt right to me. The risk of misrepresenting myself in two pages felt greater than the risk of going over page length to get the information correct.

First, I decided to create a template with the full list of skills, experiences, and education, which I would then adjust or trim down as necessary depending on the position. My goal was to be able to create a solid resume in the 3 page length range in just a few minutes. I also created a “standard” version of this template I could use for virtually any position if I didn’t want to tailor it. This was useful for such things as LinkedIn’s Easy Apply, which I did use early on in my search.

I separated management and engineering experience, treating them as equal yet different, which in my opinion, they are. This allowed me to call out the depth of my experience in each, and to list different skills for each. I took the time and space to explain details that are important for each item in the skill list. “Written communication” is great, but “taught more than 2,500 Amazonians effective writing culture” is more impactful and more in line with my overall impact. Nuance can be lost in a list of skills; “technical management” means different things if I’m running a team of 5 versus three teams of 8 each, and I can do both if necessary.

I did my best to get skills down to the first page, but always valued clarity over page length, so if things were really relevant, they didn’t come off even if page length was over.

I then followed that with my list of experience by company and role. For each company, I’d list 3-4 relevant projects, along with the role I played, regardless of title, the project, several bullet points, and the result. Many projects I played more than just the management role. When I was at CoStar, technical managers were expected to code half the time; in many of the projects there I was also the most experienced engineer and did a lot of the design work. So one of those projects would read like this:

After my experience, I listed my degree. As part of my degree plan, I was awarded 18 certifications between 2012 and 2014. Few are relevant today, but if they are for a particular position, I will include them as part of my education.

With a template listing all the things, I can then make targeted adjustments based on the position’s requirements, often comparing them side by side to my list of skills. In most cases, I can get this down to 3 pages, sometimes 4, within just a few minutes. It was more important to me to have a solid case for getting a phone call that wasn’t just driven by ATS, and to make sure that I did not remove key skills just to satisfy page length.

To be fair, I did incorporate a lot of specific technical feedback I received. My current resume has no dates on it, on the advice that my capabilities were more relevant than timing. In cases where a cover letter was not asked for, and I felt a cover letter would help, I would insert a cover letter as the first page of the resume.

One might suggest this doesn’t fulfill the AI screening requirements, but I think it does. First, if skills are in alignment based on my comparison, that’s a good sign we’ll match. But second, most AI tools I’ve worked with require prompts or narratives, and my resume is richly narrative. I have no data on this, but I assume that if there are no hard page length restrictions, my narratives enhance my ability to match an AI tool.

An online version of this format, without projects and including dates, is found here.

I noticed an almost immediate increase in contacts once I implemented this format and shied away from the shorter, less accurate resumes I originally sent. I’m pretty happy now with how it presents me and will continue to use this as my search continues.

If you are currently looking for a new role, I wish you good luck!