SDS 480: Top Five Resume Tips

(00:19):
In recent months, I’ve received a number of messages from people on LinkedIn or tagged in posts on LinkedIn, where people who have strong backgrounds are saying, I’m not getting any interviews for the data science jobs that I’m applying for. I’m not hearing anything back. So I reviewed these resumes, and in so doing, I came up with my five top tips to really sharpen up your resume, sharpen up the marketing of yourself, and give yourself your best foot forward for applying for data science jobs.

(00:55):
My first tip is to keep your resume to a single page. So one of the resumes sent to me, for example, is five pages long. It’s what we call an academic curriculum vitae or a CV. It’s a laundry list of all of the accomplishments that this person has had over their career, and they are impressive accomplishments. Lots of awards, mentorships, talks, poster presentations, papers, patents, but actually almost none of it was relevant to a data science career.

(01:25):
So this person happened to have a background in chemical engineering. And so it’s this five-page resume and 95% of the content on it wasn’t related to data science. It was about chemical engineering, which is impressive and useful background for being able to present yourself as a great problem solver, for example, but is not going to make anybody who is hiring for a data science role, get this resume and think, wow, what a great data scientist I have here. They think, wow, this looks like a great chemical engineer. Are they sure they’re applying for the right job?

(02:01):
Which brings me right to my second point, which is that you should tailor your resume to every single individual job application. So a great strategy is to have a giant document. So kind of like this person who had this five page resume. You could keep all of those bullets in a document for yourself, but then for every actual individual job application that you make, copy and paste the most relevant experiences, the most relevant education entries, the most relevant bullet points into one single document. Again, of course, a single page document. An alternative to having one giant document that you copy and paste into a smaller one is if you’re comfortable programming in the typesetting language LaTex, which is what I use for a lot of documents and presentations, and even my own resume. If you do it in LaTex, then you can actually just comment out the irrelevant lines of your resume for any particular job application, and you can uncomment those lines for some other applications.

(03:09):
My third point is that you should not include prose, not like pros and cons, but prose, as in not poetry or bullets of prose. Prose is a word that means full sentences and paragraphs. You should not have paragraphs in your resume. It shouldn’t look like a document. So one of the resumes that was sent to me, it starts off with a big paragraph at the top, and then every single experience entry on the resume has its own individual paragraph in it before we start getting to bullets. So no prose, you should have only bullets on your resume.

(03:50):
My fourth point is related, it’s another thing that we should not have on our resume and that’s lists. So actually that same resume that starts off with a paragraph at the top and has a paragraph in every experience entry as well, it also has at least three sections that include lists. So there’s a section at the top that I guess is supposed to be like a high-level summary list of the person’s key skills. And then there’s the paragraph of text, and then there’s nine other items in a three by three grid of, I guess, their secondary key skills, or maybe developing on the first list above the paragraph.

(04:32):
And then at the bottom of the resume, so they have a two-page resume. So of course I recommend they get it down to one page, but at the end of the resume, at the end of the second page, there’s then this laundry list of technical skills, and it’s broken down into data science skills, software languages, analytics tools and technologies, and there’s several dozen items in this technical skills list overall. There should be absolutely no lists on the resume.

(05:03):
Which brings me to my final point. What you should be doing is instead of having any prose at all, instead of having any laundry lists of skills at all, you should organize your one-page resume so that it has only relevant experience entries. So the irrelevant work is gone or it’s reduced to just a couple of bullet points. So for example, the person who has decades of chemical engineering experience that is now moving into data science. Data science relevant stuff should be all of that first page, the first 90% of it, and maybe just having one little experience entry at the bottom on their chemical engineering experience, on the decades of interesting, but not directly relevant experience.

(05:50):
So we organize our resume into these experience entry clumps. So you have your most recent experience, second most recent experience in reverse chronological order on the resume. And within each of those experience entries, you have only bullets, and what each bullet should do is it should include the skill that is most relevant to that bullet. So instead of having a laundry list of skills, you should have just a single skill or a few skills within a bullet. That bullet should start with a verb. So something like developed, created as the starting point of that bullet. And then ideally in the bullet alongside the skills and the verb, you should also have some specific quantity. So increase the runtime of this application by X percent, or improved the validation accuracy of this model by Y percent and so on.

(06:51):
All right, so you got it. To review my five top resume tips are that it should just be one page, that you should tailor your resume to each individual application, that it should not include any prose, that it should not include any lists, and that you should organize each skill within a bullet that includes a verb to start and a specific quantity. Also those bullets, they should just be one line long, ideally. Okay. I hope you find that helpful. If you’re looking for one-on-one guidance on your career or your resume in particular, check out my friend, Harpeet Sahota. He runs office hours every week. They’re called the Artists of Data Science Office Hours, and lots of brilliant people show up there. Lots of experienced people in the industry, and I’m sure they can help you out with your individual questions.

(07:46):
All right. That’s it for this episode of the SuperDataScience podcast. I’ll catch you on another round of this show very soon.