A few months ago, I made a post in my alumni network. It got a huge response. Even after all these months, people are finding it useful. I’ll just share it here with as few edits as required.
To give you a sense of the context, this is how that post began with.
Oh man, I posted two jobs today. The resumes I received are depressing. Gen feedback for the juniors.
- You don’t need a career objective in the resume. If you must have one, please be sincere. Otherwise it sounds sort of familiar
- Keep the resume to one page. That’s all the attention you’ll get from the reviewer.
- Don’t write an insincere cover letter. It’s better to go with nothing.
Resources:
- Most of this applies to you as well, Karen Kavett’s video
- This is a great tool to make good looking resumes - cvmkr
The reasoning:
The more data that you give, more will be the variables on which the recruiter has to evaluate you. The resume is only there to answer this question - ‘Should I speak with this person?’. Make that decision simple. The actual selection only happens in the interview.
To tell you in a technical way, try to keep the reviewer at cognitive ease. And this is not about confidence, if you research well about the company, it takes just one or two sentences to catch their eye.
What makes me confident about these assertions? There is a rule called WYSIATI - “What you see is all there is”. It’s explained very well by Daniel Kahnemahn in his landmark book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I’ll probably write about it sometime later. Ofcourse, the upside is without all that bullshit, your resume actually looks prettier.
The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little. - Daniel Kahneman