Resume guides

Resume Guides by Job Title

Each guide takes a real resume bullet from that role, shows what a reviewer sees, and rewrites it. Plus the page structure that survives a first-pass screen, and the mistakes that filter out strong candidates.

Written from twenty years in engineering and engineering management, screening candidates at eBay, Sony PlayStation, Roche, and several medical device companies.

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AWS Solutions Architect

Architect resumes fail in a predictable way: they enumerate services instead of decisions. The job is choosing between options and living with the consequences — and that is what the resume has to show. Here is the difference, in diffs.

Data Engineer

Data engineering resumes converge on the same stack — Airflow, dbt, Snowflake, Python, one or two clouds. Everyone has it. What almost nobody writes down is whether their pipelines actually stayed up, and what the warehouse cost. Here is the difference, in diffs.

DevOps Engineer

DevOps resumes fail in a specific way: they list the platform instead of what changed because you ran it. Here is the difference, in diffs.

Electrical Engineer

Hardware has a brutal advantage over software as a resume subject: the design either shipped or it did not, and it either passed compliance or it came back. Most electrical engineering resumes never say which. Here is the difference, in diffs.

Engineering Manager

The engineering manager resume has a problem no other role has: your accomplishments were delivered by other people. Claiming them sounds dishonest, and disclaiming them makes you invisible. Here is how to thread it, in diffs.

Marketing Associate

Marketing is the most measurable function in most companies, which is why a marketing resume without numbers is read as a warning. Early career is no excuse — the numbers exist, they are just smaller. Here is the difference, in diffs.

Marketing Director

At director level the failure mode inverts. Junior marketers write about tasks; directors write about strategy so abstractly that nothing on the page can be verified. Both are invisible. Here is the difference, in diffs.

Mechanical Engineer

Every mechanical engineer applying to the job knows CAD. What separates the pile is whether your parts got made, what they cost, and how many times you were wrong before they worked. Here is the difference, in diffs.

Product Engineer

A product engineer is hired to decide what to build and then build it. Resumes that prove only the second half read as ordinary software engineering, and get sorted accordingly. Here is the difference, in diffs.

Product Manager

Product management resumes almost all describe things that shipped. Very few describe anything that changed because they shipped — which is the only question the hiring manager is asking. Here is the difference, in diffs.

Software Engineer

Most engineers are not rejected for lacking the skills. They are rejected because the resume describes a job category instead of the job in front of the reviewer. Here is the difference, in diffs.

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Why tailoring beats polishing

The first pass on a stack of applications is pattern-matching, not reading. Before that, there is usually a keyword search inside an applicant tracking system — which is a search index, not an adversary. A recruiter types terms pulled from the requisition, and resumes using those terms come back. Resumes describing the same work in different vocabulary do not.

Both filters reward the same thing: a resume written for one specific posting rather than for the general idea of your job. Almost nobody does it, because doing it properly takes forty-five minutes an application and you are applying to thirty.