How to get your resume to 'good enough'
... and the resume that I used to leave consulting and get a start-up job
Updating your resume—especially if it’s been collecting dust on your Google Drive (or worse, in a pleather portfolio with your alma mater's logo stamped on it) for a couple years—is a huge pain. And since it’s often the first thing you have to do when you’re starting to look for jobs, it can be a sizable blocker.
That’s why I try to do a quarterly or biannual touch-up of my resume to make sure it’s never too outdated… you never know when you might need to whip it out. So while I was at it this latest round, I wanted to share some tips and tricks—both from using it to land my first post-consulting role and from my experience being the interviewer on the other side of the table. Shall we?
Your resume matters, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Don’t agonize over the resume. Seriously. Take it from the ultimate Type A, insecure overachiever here. We’re constantly inundated with tips like, Customize your resume to each role! and Make sure your cover letter hits XYZ points! and Address the hiring manager by name in your cover letter and sure, those may apply generally (except the last one—don’t do that, that’s creepy), but the truth is this: you’ll have a much higher ROI on your time if you use it to network and try to get an employee referral vs. wordsmithing your resume.
Think back (like, way back) to when you were writing your college admissions essays. If you were like me—again, Type A, insecure overachiever—you probably got 10 different people to review it and pick it apart. But there’s a certain threshold at which point additional feedback becomes unhelpful, not because your reviewers aren’t great, but it’s too much of a cognitive load to figure out whose advice to take when there are conflicting signals. For instance, I had one person who loved the intro statement of my resume (“I’m an entrepreneurial product manager with 4 years of experience…”). Another friend thought I should remove it altogether. I, personally, was proud of that intro and thought it injected some personality into the resume, so I ended up going with my gut. TLDR: don’t get too many cooks in the kitchen—less is more in this scenario.
Good is good enough when it comes to resumes. Even if you tailor the hell out of it and use phrases and words from the JD and name-drop company core values, blah blah blah… I can say from a hiring manager / interviewer POV, the most affirmative, glowing review I could give about someone’s resume—without having spoken to them at all—is: “It looks like she might be a good fit.” I can guarantee that making a bullet point here and there shine a little harder is simply not going to move the needle on the hiring manager or recruiter’s general impression of you.
So here’s what’s worked for me: spend a few hours on updating your resume, staying laser-focused on the bullets I’ll outline below. Send it to three people max, ideally those who already sit a few steps ahead in the direction you’d like to move. This sounds obvious, but I don’t think enough people apply it in practice. For instance, if you’re in consulting and hoping to transition to a strategy role at a big tech company, don’t allocate more than one of your three (seriously! Three max) precious reviews to someone who’s… a manager in consulting. No offense. Ask that friend who’s a Strategy Manager at Salesforce what she thinks. Ask someone who’s a Business Operations lead at Facebook to give her take. And don’t be afraid to look thirsty by asking someone you don’t know very well (like someone who’s agreed to an informational interview) for a review. Studies show that even with perfect strangers, we tend to underestimate by about half how likely people are to help us. Not only that, but they give higher quality help than we expect.
So, how do you get to ‘good enough’ to 1) get your foot in the door for an initial phone screen and/or 2) give whoever’s referring you something credible to pass on directly to the recruiting or hiring team? Let’s talk shop.
What does good look like in a resume?
You demonstrate high fit. Unfortunately, recruiters will err on the side of wanting to confirm that you have prior experience that aligns with the role’s needs rather than try and suss out your potential as a real hard-working smarty pants to do the job well. This is why having a referral is so important, especially for a stretch role or for a career transition: it greatly increases your odds of getting in front of a hiring manager who may see your potential as worth taking a risk on, even if you don’t have the exact experience they’re looking for. That said—with or without a referral—if you have a certain type of role in mind, you can make it easier on the recruiter by highlighting relevant, if not directly transferrable, experiences. Say, you’re interested in a Growth role at TikTok. They’re going to be looking for experience either in acquisition (=getting more eyeballs, users, registrations, free users converting to paid users) or retention (=driving more engagement with the product, higher satisfaction, higher CLV). So, play to that. For instance, if you have had a role in spinning up a referral program, or designing a customer satisfaction survey? Those are your acquisition and retention bullet points right there. Take a minute to think through the big categories of experience (in this case: acquisition or retention) that the recruiter will want to see and make sure you address those with directly or indirectly applicable bullets.
You use the language that your audience uses. For instance, in Product, customers = users. So for instance, if you’re in consulting and have performed customer interviews, you should reframe your work from ‘customer interviews’ to ‘user research.’ You’d be surprised how much more powerful the same underlying content can be if the bullet point is framed properly, or presented in familiar language.
You hone in on the key experiences that matter most to this role. Not every experience deserves a bullet point. I’m sorry, you’re going to have to kill some of your darlings. If you don’t have a ton of experience, maybe you’ll actually need all of them but if so, remember that people will skim your resume in less than 30 seconds and be intentional about the ordering of the bullets.
You don’t waste real estate proving that you did the job. Instead, you tell the hiring manager what you actually did in the role. This was a mistake that I’d made in an early draft of my PM resume. I listed things like the fact that I had come up with a product vision and strategy, created and prioritized roadmaps, and led cross-functional teams. See? I’m a real PM! But in the end, all that told recruiters was… that I was a PM. I could’ve put those bullets to better use by explaining my impact or area of the product that I was enhancing.
You speak clearly and plainly. Explain your contribution as if you were speaking to a middle-schooler who doesn’t know what operating models, governance frameworks, or benchmarking means. For you consulting folks, this means cutting out the jargon and spelling out the core question that your client hired you to answer. Here’s how I organized my post-consulting resume (a few years old—and certainly not perfect, but might be helpful to you as an example), which I was leveraging to get Strategy & Operations, Corporate Strategy, and BizOps type of roles:
Low-hanging fruit to improve your resume
When applying to a role, use the ‘Paste’ feature to add a quick cover letter blurb instead of creating and attaching a new cover letter Word doc each time. Cover letters certainly indicate interest in the role and can bring some color to an otherwise dry resume. From an interviewer point of view, it’s always a plus to see those. But I personally never write more than one, max two, paragraphs, and I don’t spend time customizing Word docs for each role. Instead, I’ll write a couple of sentences about why the mission resonates with me, and the unique skills and perspective I’d bring to the team (Linda Zhang, former Product Lead at Faire, talks about the concept of a talent stack more eloquently than I ever could here).
Lastly, don’t forget about your digital resume. Recruiters on LinkedIn have a special search engine that allows them to search for certain keywords in your profile (see below for their view). So again, think about the types of experiences or competencies a recruiter hiring for your dream role are looking for. Then do some personal SEO and find ways to bring those keywords into your profile, either in your bio, the details of your work experience, or your skills section. Another tip: if you’re open to moving, you might even change your location to match the city you want to be in in case recruiters are optimizing for local candidates.
There you have it! I’m sure there’s a million other ways you can optimize your resume, but these are the tips and tricks that stood out to me as I refreshed mine a few weeks ago. Again, please time-box this activity—I can’t reiterate this enough: your goal is not to craft the ‘perfect’ resume but rather get it to ‘good enough’. Your time is better spent on meaningful networking. And like, going outside / being a person out of work. Sorry, you know I had to.
Great article - thanks much for sharing! Two questions - 1. What do you suggest to put as a job title in a resume in cases where the official title does not match the actual responsibilities (e.g. Analyst vs Program Manager)? 2. With regards to changing geo-location - do you suggest changing location in both LinkedIn and resume, or just in LinkedIn alone?