Another way to talk about experience on your résumé
Common resume1 writing advice is to use numbers to measure your impact. You’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, we’ve all heard it. But is it good advice?
Well, what’s a resume or LinkedIn profile2 for? For recruiters and hiring managers to see if you’re a good fit for a role.
Your resume isn’t a performance review3. Sure, you will dive deep into impact you’ve had during interviews. But maybe your resume isn’t the right place for that?
What would it look like to list your experience in a way that helps someone quickly and easily see if your experience matches their needs for a position?
The first thing thing that comes to my mind is something like:
Your role
In general what you worked on
A few high level details
For example, from my LinkedIn profile for my current job:
Individual contributor on the frontend infrastructure team, helping build education-focused web apps. I work across the company with engineering teams, engineering managers, PMs, and designers on large engineering projects.
This includes setting technical direction for our frontends, migrations, testing infrastructure, and accessibility practices.
Pretty general, right? Not even a single number 🙀. Ideally someone reading it will get an idea of what I’m doing, and we can save the nitty-gritty for later.
At least that’s how I’m thinking about it. What do YOU think, though? How do you write about your experience on resumes?
I’m not going to write the accents on résumé every time in this article, because I’m lazy like that.
I actually don’t even write or maintain a resume anymore. Instead, if I need one I export my LinkedIn profile as a resume.
Although if you want an article on performance reviews, I’ve got you covered.