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My Resume Approach
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:
Project: Land & Farm Data Imports
Team: Marketplace Verticals
Role: Technical Manager, Principal Engineer, Full Stack Engineer
- Managed the release of a new data import system supporting third party data imports.
- Designed high throughput system maximizing tracking, batching, and parallel execution, including more than 10 million property images
- Participated in implementation of the feature including administrative pages and performance monitoring.
Result: System supported continual import management of more than 750,000 land listing from external data providers
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!
My Cover Letter Approach
As I’ve been involved in my search for a new role, I’ve taken several different approaches to cover letters. I’m going to outline what I am currently doing and my rationale for doing so.
One of the challenges of preparing resumes or cover letters has been the depth and breadth of my experience. I spent time as a long term engineer, as an engineering manager with a high percentage of hands on coding expected, and as an engineering manager not expected to code but to be firmly involved in technical processes and decision making. That can make things like “tailored” details on resumes difficult. I felt that it was difficult to adequately state what I perceive my value to be.
I wanted to arrive at a repeatable, scalable process that would take just a few minutes for each job posting. I wanted the documents I prepared to adequately represent my career and qualifications. I needed speed and ease as I, like many of my colleagues, cycled through hundreds of applications.
As of this writing, it’s up for debate if my approach will ultimately be successful. I do think it has managed to get the attention of quite a few companies that might not have otherwise noticed. Responses to those applications seem to be better. During several interview cycles my cover letter was referred to as a resource for the conversation.
There were several general sentiments I heard when this journey began. There was a predominant feeling that cover letters are never read. It was suggested that even though they weren’t read, they couldn’t necessarily hurt. They could be viewed as a tiebreaker should recruiters or hiring managers be choosing between strong candidates in this highly competitive market.
After a couple of weeks of choosing to ignore cover letters, since the prevailing wisdom is they were ignored, I actually decided to completely change direction. If cover letters are never read, except in rare instances, I could do what I want with them.
I chose to use my cover letter to surface all of the information I couldn’t fit on the resume I was including with my application.
I recognize this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but, hey, if no one’s going to read it….
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thus, I went from no cover letter to a 9 pager that includes:
- Page One: A targeted cover letter, with mostly templated information, summarizing my career highlights and the value I bring. It contains a paragraph introducing me; a paragraph on my general philosophy; a paragraph on what I’ve done as a manager; and a paragraph on what I’ve accomplished as an engineer. Within two or three minutes, I can adjust content, add specific information, and optimize for the position I am interested in. A variation of that cover letter can be found here.
- Page Two: A portfolio of the websites, systems, and companies that I have had an impact on. Many times candidates are asked for this portfolio, and I automatically include it in my cover letter, just in case someone opens it and decides to scroll past the first page. That portfolio can be found here.
- Pages Three through Nine: A list of the critical projects I’ve delivered, and my role in delivering them, along with the results. I’ve missed a few here and there and update this list as I recall things. For example, in a recent interview I talked about a feature I built into one of my web portals that would include the entire logging history of the system into the web page, piggybacking and enhancing Microsoft .NET’s native tracing feature. I’m going to add that to the list soon.
Having the list ready to go gives me a couple of other efficiencies.
First, if a company doesn’t ask for a cover letter, and I really want to send one, I’ll simply include it as the first page of my resume by copying page one from here and adjusting it for those needs.
Second, I have my list of projects ready to go, already in consistent format with my resume. I then pick and choose the relevant projects from this list to include on the resume I will send based on the company’s requirements.
So, while I am tailoring my resume, I’m not rewriting narratives or reorganizing. I can be ready to apply to any position within 5-10 minutes with a consistent, complete narrative.
If you are also searching for a new role, I wish you good luck.
On Meeting Your Muse (2014 Elohim-fest), and the blessings of the Watch
We all have our inspirations, the people who bring out the best of us. I have managed to do a lot of things over the course of my life that might be unexpected were you to meet me for the first time. My forays into music and writing are two of them.
I can still remember the defining moments that drove me to play music: When I was 14 and picked up a guitar for the first time I was told I would never be a guitar player because I did not have the “look”; In my sophomore year of high school, the first time I saw KISS live on video, I was hooked on bass and hooked on the epic coolness that is Gene Simmons on stage and thought, if I could not be a guitar player, perhaps I could be a bass player. In my senior year of high school I started up a fledgling rock band and began to learn bass to MTV videos, specifically to the galloping awesomeness of Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris.
But the one thing that got me absolutely driven to play was my first glimpse of the brilliance that is George Lynch. Although he is a guitar player, and I am a bass player who can also play guitar, his music is what drove me to play. I consider him a muse, one of my “heroes”. Someday I hope to simply shake his hand and tell him how much of a difference he made in my life.
I mention George, and the intensity of my love for his work, as well as the positive and negative events that led to what I consider to be a successful music career, to put context into the story of this event. To a lesser degree professionally, but perhaps to a larger degree personally, I have a similar muse in the writing world. In many ways his work is so powerful, so amazing, that at times it seems overwhelming for me to even engage as an author; I’ve written tons of poetry but I find it difficult to write actual stories because I just know it can never be that good. I would love to one day be considered a good author, and in the last few years I’ve tried to write short stories and had difficulties with finding the “voice” of various characters as I work through story ideas.
One way that I’ve managed to get the writing juices flowing is through an online community known as “Kevin’s Watch”. I joined the Watch in 2008 and have nearly 2,000 posts there. You can check it out here when you have the time and if you are so inclined. It’s simply an awesome community of people with like interests and who have actually become friends. And it’s not in the Facebook friends kind of way, either. We all have an interest in our favorite fantasy author, but on top of that we discuss other novels, other artists, tell jokes, and even rant at each other in one of the more civil (allegedly) political forums, our very own “Think Tank”. The group has turned out a few anthologies of short stories and I’ve used that as well as some internal discussion forums to try to move my writing forward.
All of which is background for an event that happened last weekend in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the home of my favorite author, Stephen R. Donaldson. He is the author of the Series That Changed Me, the incomparable Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. They are epic fantasy in a way that Tolkien is not, driven by strong characterization and heroic characters that grip you with their passion and dedication to what is right. In the midst of this amazing world, Thomas Covenant stands as an embodiment of all that could be wrong with the universe, an anti-hero who is driven to criminal actions by his inability to believe in a fantasy world filled with the purity of untainted love and beauty. There is no more vivid world to lose yourself in, no more vivid story to immerse yourself in. A Second and Last Chronicles have followed, along with Mordant’s Need, a two-part series that is well worth reading, and the Gap Sequence, a five volume brutal examination of man’s basest desires and depravity that builds for three and half books to a gripping climax that leaves you turning page after page after page, an absolutely transcendent work of ever-increasing intensity that doesn’t let up for more than a thousand pages. And there are books of short stories as well as a mystery series.
Stephen R. Donaldson’s website
For a different perspective on this event, visit Lynne Cantwell’s fantastic blog at Hearth/Myth
For the last decade, after the release of a book, Mr. Donaldson has agreed to meet with fans of his, mostly from Kevin’s Watch, for a dinner and interactive Q&A session. Dubbed “Elohim-fest” after a race of characters that Thomas Covenant encounters, this “meet and greet” has reached its fourth incarnation, with over 40 of us attending from as far away as Australia and Finland. I myself attended for the first time, with two goals. One was to merely shake the man’s hand and acknowledge everything he’s done for me; the other was to ask him one of those “how do you do what you do” questions, specifically around the struggles I’ve had with voice in my stories. In poetry, meter and rhyme can dictate voice; in prose, I still struggled with it.
Asking My Question
So I asked him my question, something on the order of, “How do you write dialogue that sounds real to your readers, and that doesn’t sound like something you yourself would say?”
I can’t really tell you what he said to be honest, because as he answered the question, he maintained eye contact with me the whole time, and just to have him know for that few minutes that I existed was more than enough! It was beyond words.
Stephen R. Donaldson
That in itself was amazing. To actually meet a hero of mine. How often do people really get to do that?
But the weekend was so much more than that, mostly because Kevin’s Watch, as a community beyond your everyday internet community, made it that. I’m fairly socially awkward around people until I get to know them, and to be honest, a small part of me was dreading dropping myself into an environment with people I’d only met online. Back in 1997 I was part of the first “internet chat rooms” at Yahoo! and had some disastrous “meet and greet” events in those days. Plus I just don’t usually believe that what I have to say is going to be of much interest to others. But Danlo (the host of the event and the man we all owe much thanks to, along with his lovely wife) made everyone feel at home at a gathering the night before the event, and I completely felt as if I’d known these people all my life, which in a way, I sort of have, given my now 6 years as a member of the Watch. I had so many amazing conversations and talked to people from all over the world in ways that I would not have done without the Watch. I made some unexpected friends as well. I can’t wait for the next one when they have it…as much for another chance to sit in a room with my favorite author as to simply talk about writing with people who are engaged.
So, the moral of the story, I suppose, is to go and meet your muses if you can. And when you do, I hope that you will meet a bunch of wonderful people who are on the same journey, and be able to count them as friends. It’s a great feeling and one that is hard to describe, and even harder to replicate.
Be welcome and true.
Rob Hope 