Sorry, but your resume is probably terrible.

If you are just transitioning out of being an academic and writing your first resume, then sorry to burst your bubble - but it is probably terrible. Seriously. 

Academics typically describe their careers in CVs, cirriculum vitae’s, and these tend to be very long and highly detailed documents, often capturing project by project work in great detail. And at some level that makes sense, at least for academic positions. Those documents are written for a highly technical audience with the goal of demonstrating how highly skilled you are, and how you would fit into a particular research group or university department. But that doesn’t make sense outside of academics, and it can work against you. 

I thought the first few drafts of my resume were really good, and so did my academic friends. I had managed to cut down my CV to four single spaced pages and yet I captured the most important details. Some people warned me that it was still way too long, but I didn’t listen and started submitting it. I submitted lots of resumes, but I never heard anything back. Just crickets. In truth, it was a wall of text - no one wants to read an essay posing as a resume. 

Then a friend offered to help re-write my resume with me, but he said it had to be two pages or less. That seemed impossible at the time, how was I going to get all those important details in, like which statistical methods I used for each project. Or how I constructed a game theory model to help our understand cooperative interactions between individuals? Where would it all go?  

I was able to have a few lines per section, that was it. It was an emotionally painful process, and it involved maybe two dozen iterations back and forth. And I wasn’t confident at all in what we had produced, but I started submitting that resume to new jobs, and low and behold I started getting responses. It blew my mind! What was the difference?

The first rule of communicating effectively is knowing your audience. If you submit a four page resume for most jobs, it’s less likely to be read by reviewers. They will get dozens of resumes, and they have to quickly go through them and high grade them in most cases. You may be the best candidate they get, but if your resume languishses at the bottom of the pile, they'll never know it. A four page resume probably doesn’t have the right information on the first page, and it’s way too detailed for a general audience. The point of a resume is to get an interview, that’s where you can wow them with your expertise and experience. So what does a good resume look like? I can only speak to my own experience writing resumes and reviewing resumes at three different jobs. I’m not a professional HR person, so your mileage may very, but this is true for me. 

First of all, it has to be two pages or less. That is absolutely critical. I promise you that you can get all of the details you need for a resume in two pages, and if you don’t think that you can, then you need to go back and edit it some more. Writing a first good resume is hard and time consuming. 

Next,you want to prioritize the real estate or your resume. People will start reading at the top left and then move down and to the left. Do you have the most relevant experience and skills summarized and prominently displayed? Is your name and contact information easy to find? 

The most important line of your resume is at the top of your first page. In my case I have used this to describe myself in 8 to 10 words. If I am applying for data science roles it would say something like “Data scientist with fifteen years experience turning data into insights”. Now my audience has an easy way to remember who I am, and what my primary skills are. Boom. Below that I will have my contact information, so that they can easily find it (incidentally, I also list my email address and phone number on the footer of the second page too). After that I will describe my top 5 to 8 relevant job skills and experiences for that specific position, but I don’t just list them, it’s not just a list of technologies: 

R

MySQL 

Technical writing

Etc

Instead you should write

Presented oral presentations at international conferences

20 years using R to analyze complex data sets

5 years setting up MySQL databases and writing ETLs

Developed & deployed in-flight machine learning classification tool in Python

Then in the remaining sections of your resume, you provide support for each of those bullet points. You don't have to reinforce the same points across different jobs, just highlight it at the first stage in chronology. For example, if you started using R as an undergraduate, you should only include it in the undergraduate section.

Once you have done this, you should have a good generic starting point resume to apply for different jobs. You should take the time to customize this base template for each specific job, changing the order of your skills highlights, removing some line items and adding others to really highlight your fit. But that should be relatively painless once you have a good starting base.  

This is a lot of work and it's going to take a lot of drafts. Contact your friends who have transitioned out of academics to get their support, or friends who are working in fields similar to the jobs you're interested in applying for and get their feedback. You don't have to accept all of their recommendations, what's more important is to understand their reasoning and incorporate their advice. 

Lastly, please consider including a cover letter, but keep it short - less than one page. Make sure you have done your research about the company and about the position. Reach out to people on your LinkedIn networks to get background information about that employer. If you don't know anyone who works for that company, but there is someone in your secondary network, then ask for an introduction from someone in your primary network. Most people are happy to help, and it's a great way to network. Then make your cover letter explain - using your resume as a reference - why you want to work there. You should probably re-write this for every job. I think it also helps to make sure your resume is congruent with the job you're applying for. Good luck!

Tomorrow I will write about how working in industry is different than working in academics and the types of growing pains I had adjusting. 

Cheers,

Brad

p.s. If you really find yourself struggling, consider contacting a recruiter - either an independent recruiter or one at an agency. When it comes to selecting a recruiter, you want to pick someone who has had years of experience. If you are in the Vancouver area, I can highly recommend Mark Strong. Look him up, he is great. 

p.p.s. I wrote most of this at 5:00 am this morning with a sick 7 year old's head in my lap. I've done my best to give this a quick one-over for grammar, but it's not going to be perfect!