Creating a Resume is the first step in applying for any job role. Summarizing your education, skills, projects & experience is a difficult but necessary task. I’m writing to share a step-by-step process to craft an impressive resume for data science roles.
Follow along with this video to create your resume step-by-step from scratch: https://youtu.be/h6XRPmSBEM4
How Recruiters and Employers Evaluate Resumes
- Recruiters and employers often look at dozens, if not hundreds of Resumes every day
- While screening, most recruiters spend less than 20 seconds on a Resume before rejecting the candidate
- Your Resume needs to be clear & concise and should convey your best qualities at the first glance
- If you have all the skills for a position, but aren’t getting shortlisted, your Resume might be the problem
Follow these five steps to craft an impressive resume.
Step 1: List all your education, skills, experience, projects & accomplishments
- Create a Google Doc and list your entire professional history in chronological order
- This includes education (bachelor’s, masters etc.), key projects, work experience, online courses etc.
- The idea here is to be as detailed as possible, you’ll pick from this doc while creating your resume
- Spend a few hours or maybe even a couple of days on this to create an exhaustive list
Step 2: Research job listings and identify the right roles to target
- Read through job listings for your target role on sites like AngelList, Glassdoor, LinkedIn jobs etc.
- Fill out this spreadsheet to identify the top skills required for each role (create one sheet per role)
- The roles you should target are the ones for which you already have most if not all of the skills
- If you don’t have sufficient skills for any of the roles, you need to focus on learning & doing projects
Step 3: Carefully craft a 1-page resume for the role(s) you’re targeting
- Pick relevant points from your bio document and craft a 1-page resume for each target role
- You need just 4 sections: Work Experience, Education, Skills & Certifications and Projects
- In each section, include crisp & clear bullet points to provide evidence for one or more of the required skills
- Reorder the sections to ensure that the first half of the page is the most impactful
Step 4: Polish your resume & share with friends/colleagues for review
- Proofread your resume carefully and fix typos or missing/incorrect information
- Highlight important keywords (tools, techniques, libraries, skills) to ensure that they are visible at the first glance
- Share the resume with your friends for review. It’s ideal to get reviews from people who are working in the target role
Step 5: Make minor modifications while applying and keep iterating on your resume
- For each job you apply to, read job descriptions carefully to identify if your resume is suitable for the job
- Sometimes it might help to reorder sections or add/remove/modify information based on the job you’re applying to
- If you’re not getting shortlisted, set aside some time every week to review and improve your Resume
The important part: Don’t lose heart and keep improving! It’s not enough to just improve your Resume, you need to continually improve your skills and build great projects.
