How To Write a Killer Resume

A pre-requisite to land an interview in your dream company.

Though this does not need to be said separately, a resume is essentially your representation in a stack of papers that shall be designed to communicate about you & your work/achievements in a crisp, clear, and concise manner. (Read the words italicized again). Be extremely frugal with words.

A resume is a brief which tells about you before the interviewer gets to meet you in person. So it should be interesting & informative enough for him/her to nudge them in wanting to meet you.

Try to keep the resume limited to one page (It’s a debatable topic but the lesser the better).

Template

Choose an elegant template with a professional font (Helvetica, Open Sans).

Sections

Given the resume itself is a summary of one’s professional experience, adding a summary might be redundant. Even if you choose to write one, it should not be more than 2 lines explaining your career objectives.

Sections to be included:

• Given the resume itself is a summary of one’s professional experience, adding a summary might be redundant. Even if you choose to write one, it should not be more than 2 lines explaining your career objectives.
  
• Professional Experience: Company Name & Company Description (One liner about the organization)
  
• Education
  
• Skills
  
• Awards/Extra-Curricular Activities and achievements

Sections not to be included

• Hobbies
  
• Address
  
• Parents Details
  
• Disclaimer saying above details are true ( I mean it’s obvious)

Accomplishments, Not Responsibilities 

(Perfectly mentioned in Cracking the PM Interview book by Gayle Mcdowell)

Please do not write things such as was responsible for writing PRDs. These are part of your job and you’re expected to know and be good at these boilerplate skillsets.

Avoid writing the details of the project such as:

• Designed and Led a pricing team in order to develop a personalized pricing framework and managed the entire product life cycle including development, QA & Cross team integration (Responsibility Oriented)
  
• Increased the conversion by 4% by building a personalized pricing framework factoring in the customer attributes. (Achievement Oriented)
  
• The sheer advantage of taking the achievement-oriented route is that it excites the interviewer to understand the impact and pulls him/her in to ask you more questions about it. The benefit is two-fold: First, your work controls the narrative. Second, it also allows you to build a storyline highlighting your other important attributes such as Analytical skills, Stakeholder management, leadership, etc.

The core is whatever you’re putting on the resume should be in sync and should be a compelling and cohesive storyline highlighting who you are and what you’ve done! Everything should connect back to adding value to the career of product management or its trait, if it’s not, it shouldn’t be there or probably should be written better.