What to put on your resumé

If you're brushing up your resumé, here's what it should look like:

"Achieved X business outcome for Y sort of company in a Z kind of project"

Where X is something Y cares about. Y is a company you'd love to work for (or with) and Z is the type of project you enjoy doing. Make sure Y companies have plenty of Z. Use less stilted language than my example above, that's just the formula for your bullet points.

For example:

• Swiz led a user signup rewrite that resulted in a 2x improvement in conversion rate
• Swiz owned an analytics vendor migration that reduced cost, improved HIPAA compliance, and simplified workflows

You don't need to weave Y into every bullet point. Describing the company arc once per job title is enough. Use X and Z bullet points to showcase how you contributed to that arc.

List technologies you'd enjoy working with at the bottom. That helps you filter for basic fit. No sense wasting time talking to COBOL shops, if all you know is TypeScript.

This email inspired by a friend who asked "What do I even do?". I said "Here's the only line you need on your resumé: Led project that recovered $X0,000,000 in missed revenue".

He really did that. And didn't have it on his brag sheet, I mean resumé.

Cheers,
~Swizec

PS: this is known as positioning. You're positioning yourself as an expert in what you do. This is how my partner got a BigTech job that 3000 people applied for.