Analyzing The Art of the Technical Resume
Everything in this article is inflammatory. Why? Because no one agrees on any of this. So let’s jump in and take a mildly analytical approach to resume writing.
What’s the final answer to writing technical resumes? It depends.
If you want to jump ahead to my recommended ATS-friend resume template, go here: https://www.stratacore.com/rainier-cyber-resume.
Unfortunately, every recruiter will tell you that your resume needs work. Why does your resume need work? Because no matter who helped you write it, no matter what template you used, no matter what format you tried, resume is art, not science. Compounding that matter, each industry and sometimes vertical within that industry might have some nuance. Over the last three years, I’ve been on quest to solve exactly that problem.
When I was staring down the likelihood of transitioning out of a US Military Cyber Unit into the civilian world, I knew that my experience would much more likely rhyme with the experience of my civilian peers than equate at a 1:1 swap. I did take some solace knowing that my technical aspect of my cyber security resume would transfer better than when I had been in the Infantry! However, there were so many templates on the market ranging from frilly, colorful masterpieces to custom, LaTeX-built options it was difficult to know where to start and whom to trust. Of course, today there are many more easily findable resume templates, some of them paid versions, than when I began this journey which compounds the matter. Clearly, adding another template to the mix does not necessarily help! However, I am of the mind that putting in the consolidated guidance from reading the substantial corpus of musings from other professionals into one place and explain why a candidate should consider each aspect of the resume directly into the template will help people build better resumes from the start.
So what makes one template better than another? The answer is usually for whom the resume template is designed and optimized.
One of the first problems I ran into was that none of my fellow recruiters could neither agree on nor articulate why a candidate should use or not use either a career summary or objective statement on a resume. Admittedly, I didn’t ask every single one of them but it was enough of a problem that I wanted to know more so I started buying books, reading articles and resumes, and studying ATSs to figure out why. Turns out, most people that read resumes forget whom resumes are for and why they exist.
The answer on career summary versus career objective, by the way, is generally that you should have a career summary unless you are transitioning careers, entering/re-entering the workforce, or some other highly-extenuating circumstance in which case a very short objective statement might be appropriate. Yes, then sentence has many qualifiers in it. That’s because the art is slowly, ever so slowly, turning into a science.
In the Ladders Resume Guide 2019, Marc Cenedella points out that there are four main audiences for any given resume: the junior HR professional, the hiring manager, the applicant tracking system (ATS), and recruiters. Specifically, Marc talks about internal recruiters but I like to add external recruiters because, well, I started a recruiting company and we need to be able to read the resume, too. If you, the candidate, are able to hand your resume directly to a hiring manager, congratulations, your resume need not consider all four audiences! In that case, the resume might dramatically differ from a resume that will go through an ATS.
Note: Ironically, Marc says that candidates should never use an objective statement and should always use a career summary. Professionally, after working directly with many candidates that are going through major life/work transitions (transitioning careers into cyber, transitioning out of the military, or re-entering the work force) and reading as much of the existing corpus I can find and, I disagree.
Most people are familiar with the concept that bullets themselves should address a candidate’s actual results in a given job role that stemmed from their actions (the CAR/VAR format: verb + actions taken + result) rather than a list of responsibilities or list of technologies the candidate interacted with during their time in that position. However, most candidates do not realize that their resume must be ready to interface with the lowest common denominator among the four audiences: a poorly executed applicant tracking system. Of course, there are a few ATSs that are good, but planning on the hope that the company you are applying to uses one of the good ATSs is planning for failure. These vile instrumentations are the death of many a resume. For example, many ATSs will either mangle a resume into a nearly unreadable conflagration that is effectively unreadable by the HR professional hoping to use their company-mandated ATS to see if you are a fit for a position or the ATS might just plain drop your resume if it cannot successfully interpret the content. The goal with the ATS is to not just get your resume past an ATS, but to do so in a manner that is easy to read for the recruiter or HR professional on the other side of the ATS.
Effectively, do not give any one of the four audiences a single reason to skip over your resume.
For the ATS — The most unreasonably pedantic of the four audiences. To pass the ATS hurdle, use the KISS methodology: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Use no more than the one standard column, use consistent formatting and bullets, avoid headers, footers, and strange punctuation ( ; \\ // | ~ ). Remember: most ATSs were built to rapidly parse unstructured data and were built at low cost. Do you really want to trust your resume to the guy who barely passed his parsing class? On top of that, if an ATS has, at any point, suffered from a scheming junior penetration tester who put a reference to Little Bobby Drop Tables on their resume, the sysadms and devs might just play it more safe than sorry and drop any resume that looks out of normal. So…let the resume look normal and let your bullets speak for you. If you really want to understand, find either a recruiter or HR professional that sits behind even an average ATS and they will regale you of the pain it takes to sift through the gibberish that the ATS provided them. Listening to that conversation ran range from hilarious to painfully awkward as rightly complain. Make their job easy!
For the Junior HR Professional— These folk have been working in HR just long enough to think they know how to read a resume. A junior HR professional’s goal is often to determine if your past performance is sufficiently strong enough to refer you to someone else in the hiring chain: either an internal recruiter or possibly the hiring manager. They will take points off or just plain toss your resume for all the silly, mundane things they can think of. I literally just yesterday had a recruiter tell me that it is company policy to automatically throw away any resume that uses more than one font. More examples of :
- Submitting a CV instead of a resume
- Using more than one font
- Using a font size that is hard to read
- Writing too long because it’s boring to read
- Writing too short because it doesn’t provide enough information
- Non-judicious use of white space. Note: If you are following the VAR/CAR format, each bullet will be probably be 2–3 lines long (because it depends, sometimes one line is fine). Write the bullet, and then edit it to shorten it up until it is either two complete lines long or three complete lines long. If you can’t, then combine it with another appropriate bullet, make it coherent, and then trim back down until you get a good length of either two or three complete lines long. If you do not fill a complete line, then you are wasting space! Remember: many professionals will take points off for mundane things like wasting space.
- Using strange punctuation like semicolons even though the usage might be technically correct. If you have to pull out your favorite style guide to show a recruiter that your usage of strange punctuation is correct, then you have already failed. Most people don’t read The Little, Brown Handbook or The Elements of Style.
- Misspelling, especially for past tense verbs like Led vs Lead
- Using color for positions that don’t require color (consider color if going for UX/UI and graphic designer jobs but know that it’s a gamble)
For the Internal/External Recruiters— If junior HR professionals look at what you have done in the past, recruiters begin to make judgement calls on what we think you are capable of in the future. If you meet 60% of the requirements, do we think that taking the time and risk for the organization to train you is a good gamble? If not, then your resume probably gets dropped. If yes, then we will probably refer you over to the actual hiring manager. We usually have three piles when sorting resumes: Yes, No, and Maybe. A resume that shows both technical background and an ability to generate results probably goes in the Yes pile. If you lack either background or results, you probably go in the Maybe pile. The Maybe pile means that you are currently less of a priority because we don’t know enough information to make a good judgement call. Remember: hiring you must increase the company’s bottom line in some way either through revenue generation or loss prevention (in dollars or reputation).
For the Hiring Managers— Most likely you will have the easiest time with the hiring manager. However, you have to get past the hurdles a company might have in place to get access to the hiring manager. Hopefully, the hiring manager invested the time up front in developing the position description that allows everyone else in the chain to find you.
The obvious outcome of the above research combined with a bit of experience is that if everyone will tell you that your resume is wrong, your goal should be to build a resume that is the least wrong possible. So that’s what I built. I think. That “least wrong” template is available on my company webpage. Certainly there are templates or consolidated guidelines that are better than mine but I have yet to find them so this is the best that I know of (are there resume competitions?). If you happen to be in HR or manage an ATS, I would love to connect and through my resume template through your ATS until I have a quantitatively sound template capable of working with the entire market. Connect with me.
The living document that is my resume template which combines all of this this ongoing “research” is available at https://www.stratacore.com/rainier-cyber-resume. The website also has instructions and guidance which coach candidates through the writing process and the template itself has guidance in it. I literally updated it again last week because one of my candidates found an error. Of course, it’s still not perfect, because it can’t be. It’s just the least bad one around.
To be clear: this is not a ding on the overworked HR professionals, recruiters, hiring managers, and ATS managers in the world. We love you. We respect you. We joke with you in jest. Unless you fail to increase a poor-performing ATS’s performance. In that case, shame.
Rainier Cyber is a Vet-focused Cyber Recruiting company that places candidates with industry across the country and also in classified environments.
