Writing the perfect Resume

My company has been interviewing at my alma mater (College of William and Mary). Microsoft asked me to give some guidance to students who were considering writing one of their first resumes in order to land an interview at Microsoft. Here is the guidance I offered – and it holds true whether you're a university student, creating a resume for your first real job, or a seasoned executive interviewing for that career-maker move.

The overall guidance is that you need to be clear what you are interviewing for – without that clarity, your resume will be too vague and open-ended to convince anyone that you're the perfect fit for a specific job. Start by identifying your target job opportunity. Are you applying to be a Developer? A Tester? A Program Manager? A Project Manager? What is the position you're applying for?

Now take a blank piece of paper and pretend you are the hiring manager. Hopefully you know a bit about the job you're applying for – have you researched the company, read the job description, and learned a bit about the group you're hoping to work in? If so, you should be able to be able to put yourself in the position of the hiring manager. Ultimately, he's going to see your resume / CV and spend a couple of minutes reading it to see if you are even remotely a good candidate for his job. Take a blank piece of paper and write down the top qualities that the hiring manager would be looking for. These might be attributes such as she's looking for a strong organizer, or someone who deals well with ambiguity, a strong communicator, someone who has experience working with multiple stakeholders and working to gain consensus. Or maybe she's looking for a programmer with strong experience in web applications, or backend services, or someone who has a proven track record of working with outsourced test resources or hands-on experience creating and driving a SQL test strategy. Once you've written down all the qualities you can think of, take a new piece of paper and order these from most important to least important. The focus of this exercise isn't necessarily to be perfect – no one is going to see it – but the focus is to help you fine tune your resume.

Once you have the stacked-ranked list of qualities that you estimate the hiring manager wants in his ideal candidate, write down next to each one what YOU have done either professionally or personally that proves you have that skill. Ideally, you would have several examples which can prove that you not only have done it once, but can be relied upon to do it routinely. When you're thinking about these items, be as specific and quantitative as possible. It's one thing that you've organized a large, successful conference with a bunch of customers; It's quite another thing that you've organized a conference for 1,000 customers with only two weeks' notice that resulted in an additional $1M worth of sales deals being closed. Have you worked as a volunteer at your school's computer lab? What does that prove to the hiring manager? Does it show that you have helped train up an average of 10 students a week to a level of proficiency where they can independently build PowerPoint presentations? Does it show that you can manage the end-to-end operation of 10 computers, the network, and system patch management?

At this point, you should have a list of competencies that are ideal for the job position you are applying for. Next to each one, you should also have multiple examples of specific things you have done that demonstrate that you have this particular skill. At this point, you can tailor your resume / CV to really highlight those specific competencies. Go through your resume and for each job experience or other item you highlight, make sure to work in a specific competency's example. If you have items on your resume / CV that do not support any of the specific items you want to highlight for the hiring manager, you need to ask yourself why that particular resume item is required. Maybe you want to highlight something in particular, but if there's not a good reason, you're probably taking up space without adding a lot of value.

The purpose of this entire exercise is to bridge the gap between what a hiring manager is looking for in context of specific position, and a resume that you need to build that captures in one or two pages a wealth of experience, both professionally and personally. By following this general approach, you may well wind up with a hiring manager who reads your resume and walks away – even subconsciously – saying, "wow, this person is a great candidate."

Now that you've landed the interview, it's time to prepare for the interview. Go back to your list of your own experiences that have proven your capabilities. Some of these items now appear on your resume. You should certainly be prepared to talk through those items in more detailed if required. But you should also make sure to be well acquainted with the other items that support the same competency required for the position. For example, if one of the competencies you predict the hiring manager cares about is strong organizational skills, you must be prepared at the interview stage to cite numerous examples that all tell the same compelling story. Your resume's example is one of those supporting items, but not the only one (remember, you came up with several examples that all prove your organizational skills).

By preparing your resume in this manner and thinking through your interview in a similar mindset, you can absolutely do a fantastic job at making a strong showing during the entire experience. It goes without saying that it's always better to be honest than to lie or stretch the truth – it takes a wealth of information to build up credibility and only one lie to tear it all down and move onto the next applicant. Best of luck!

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