Your Resume Sucks
But it doesn’t have to
It took me 9 months to land my first job after finishing a bachelor's degree in Economics. I remember that time better than I wish I did. Sitting in my bedroom at my parents' house, applying for jobs for 4-5 hours a day. Once I’d exhausted all the roles I would be even remotely qualified for, including an accounting job that paid less than I made working retail a year prior, I’d switch to playing video games for the rest of the day.
At first, I didn’t mind. School took a lot out of me and I was happy to have a break from studying for my International Trade final, where the bell curve meant my 60% ended up with a B+. That was until my sibling, 3 years my junior, started working an “adult job” related to her degree. Sure it was Co-op, but the pay was 3x higher than the accounting role I was just rejected for. Thankfully she was willing to give me $5 so I could play the original Spyro the Dragon on my PS3. She felt bad for me.
The problem wasn’t with my background. I had a good degree from a decent school. I had worked in retail for 5 years and spent my summers as a sheet metal worker, rounding out my resume nicely. But that’s where the problem was. My resume sucked, a lot.
Just a list of things I had done, which if taken at face value, was a reasonable background. But that’s the thing, employers don’t take you at your word. And for good reason - people lie all the time.
I was TELLING them I was qualified when they needed to SEE that I was. Looking back on it, my resume probably looked a bit made up. Who works manual labour while also working retail and pursuing a degree in Economics?
I eventually got a lucky break when I applied to a job that loved my background and was willing to give me an interview. I think one of the people liked that I had worked a labour job for an extended period - a signal I wouldn’t quit when things got hard. Thankfully I made it through the interview process and received a job offer!
I didn’t bother learning from those mistakes for a while. I was happy that I had a job and I was lucky to not be fired or laid off - something I’ve learned is often out of your control these days.
But after a few years, I started getting itchy for something new. I had learned an incredible amount and wanted to continue that learning - it was starting to stagnate after 2-3 years in that role. The problem was I was terrified after the last time I went job hunting.
So I set out to ensure I didn’t face the same issue again. I had a LinkedIn account that I logged into once every few months and I decided to check it out. I didn’t have many connections - less than 50. All just people I went to high school with. None of them worked in anything remotely related to data. So I searched for data people and found a couple talking about Machine Learning - a topic I had only recently learned about and was interested in. I started logging in daily to see what they were saying and to learn from them. It felt like magic - I had access to these incredibly smart people without having to ask them.
Through those people, I learned most of us struggle with resumes. These were experts in ML yet they had faced their own resume issues, something I assumed they magically knew because they were so smart. So I went deeper and found some people who talked ONLY about resumes and the job application process. I binged their content and took notes. I was sure I knew everything now and could get any interview I wanted.
But I was wrong. I had learned just enough to think I knew everything when I knew only a tiny bit. I was stuck in the same scenario I faced a few years prior. Nothing had changed and I was still seeing only rejection letters.
Then one of the ML folks posted about showing your experience instead of telling it and everything clicked. I just needed to find a way to prove that I was qualified instead of saying so.
Previously I had made claims without any evidence:
“I’ve been writing SQL for 2 years”
A statement without evidence. So I started to include more detail, helping with the evidence:
“I’ve been writing SQL on MS SQL Server for 2 years, analyzing grocery store sales data to increase profits and customer satisfaction”
Not a perfect bullet point by any means, but one that an interviewer can at least ask more about. That was about as far as I got before finding my next role. A role that would give me an incredible amount of insight into the hiring process.
That was in 2021. I joined a local tech company here in Vancouver as an Intermediate Data Analyst, a role I was extremely excited about. I promptly forgot about resumes as I tried to get a handle on all the SaaS terms being thrown around - ARPU, LTV, Tenure, Churn. It made me dizzy but I was determined to learn it all.
A year and a half in the company did layoffs, reducing headcount by 20%. Then more people left, even a few from my team, including my manager. I found myself with a promotion to Senior Data Analyst shortly after, leaving me as the most senior individual contributor reporting to people in management roles, not technical people like I was used to. Once the dust settled we knew that we needed to rebuild the data functions.
At the start of 2023, I was on hiring panels for all of the common data positions you can think of:
Data Analyst
Analytics Engineer
Data Engineer
Data Scientist
Machine Learning Engineer
For levels from Junior to Manager, including tech leads.
It was normal to get 500 applications for a role due to all the tech layoffs around that time. We had a pretty small HR/TA department, so the hiring panel often pitched in to see if any good resumes were missed. I was regularly looking at 20-30 resumes in a week, oftentimes multiples of that. I started to notice that the people I had the highest opinion of all had similar characteristics in their resumes. They were laid out in a way that was as easy to digest as possible, sticking to a linear format instead of a 2 column. They had bullet points with great supporting evidence, often including the outcome of a project or numeric representation relating to what they were trying to prove with their point.
The writing of these resumes made it easy to ask questions of the candidates. If they said they worked on a data migration project, moving 100 dashboards from Power BI to Tableau, I could ask further questions to see what their role was there. They also made it easy to be sure that they weren’t a risky hire.
That was always one of the biggest concerns - would we need to fire this person 2 months in and have to do this again? We didn’t need the smartest person ever, but we did need someone who was low risk to us while being a great asset.
Around this same time, I had a fortunate coincidence. Northeastern University’s Vancouver campus was across the street from our office and a few of us spent a volunteer day there, chatting with a group of Masters students. Most of them were in an analytics program and I was the only data person who volunteered - the rest were in HR/TA and Customer Success. So I ended up with a literal line out the door of folks asking questions. I had never felt so popular!
A few months later, their Director of Career Development and Experiential Learning reached out to me to see if I was willing to help with some workshops for students getting close to graduation. While they had their own career services department, data roles were a bit trickier to sort out. Many see them like Computer Science roles, with the main focus being only on technical savvy.
But there’s a big flaw in that thinking - Data Analyst roles require much more than knowledge of a programming language or two. Interviews are harder to put together. The soft skills and business understanding a Data Analyst has tend to be as important, if not more so, than technical skills. Especially as roles get more senior and a big part of the job becomes more squishy. Most Data Analyst’s stakeholders are other internal teams after all, and knowing how to navigate those teams and build relationships is make or break.
So I started trying to figure out how I could help these students. I wrote down everything I had learned over the years and started to put together a mini curriculum that I could teach in a few hours. Up to this point, all of my advice had been 1:1 - I would learn about each person’s unique scenario and provide guidance that was great for them but would have been mediocre for someone in a different situation.
Generalizing was initially quite hard, but I found ways to do it. It was less about giving people an exact answer for their scenario and instead explaining why and how I came to my conclusions. With a good number of examples and a strong resume template in hand, I achieved my goal.
Then I found a way to do this for interviewing as well. And networking. And cover letters. And even job applications.
It wasn’t overly polished at first, but it worked. People were getting results and thanked me for helping them get there
At this point, I decided that this shouldn’t be limited to only these students. After all, I was never in a Masters program and if I went back in time, I’d be stuck in the situation that I faced almost 8 years ago. So I created a course that covered everything in those workshops. I built the templates myself, created examples, and built everything into a logical flow so that anyone could follow along.
Thinking back to who I was coming out of University, I started to feel overwhelmed with the amount of effort a course like this might be for my former self. A resume alone took me weeks to create, let alone all the other things needed to optimize an application. So I set a target of 30 minutes of effort a day for 10 days to go through it all, using the medium of email to limit how quickly a person can do it. My student mindset was to go all out and just “get it done”. A recipe for frustration and quitting halfway through.
I’ve found that the output is much worse when I’ve tried to rush these steps. And in a job application, being 10% better is the difference between never hearing back and getting an interview. I figured the ultimate reward of being patient should be landing more interviews. I think this course will do that for you.
If you want to check it out, here’s some more info: https://learn.vandatacareers.com/data-analyst-launchpad/
