Ethan Evans has reviewed more than 10,000 résumés as a vice president at companies including Amazon. He walks us through the six biggest mistakes that could cost you the job you apply for.
Courtesy of Keith Anderson
Nine years into his education career, Keith Anderson was fed up with his job as an adjunct teacher.
"It was low pay, no insurance, and no sense of community," Anderson told Business Insider.
He dreamed of leaving his $27,000 salary behind and working at a Big Tech company like Google. His friends and family told him that someone whose career experience was almost solely in education would never get an interview at a Magnificent 7 company.
Anderson ignored them and applied to every role he could find at Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix. He also applied to many tech startups. His initial efforts ended in disappointment.
"I applied to about 100 jobs but didn't hear a word back. I was devastated," he said.
The coach was equally discouraging. He said Anderson lacked the traditional background of Big Tech hires and recommended he pivot to another education role, which shook Anderson's confidence.
He tried again by hiring a résumé writer who created a polished, ATS-friendly, keyword-heavy résumé. After blasting it out to even more Magnificent 7 job postings, he still heard crickets.
Anderson tried using LinkedIn to cold message more than 50 Google employees. Most ignored him, and when someone did respond, he struggled to keep the conversation going.
Many of his teacher friends were also dissatisfied and exploring new career paths. A small group began meeting monthly to support and review each other's résumés.
Anderson also started attending tech networking events and connecting with people transitioning from other industries, such as nonprofits. "I was genuinely curious about their journeys, so I often asked to see their résumés to better understand how they framed their experience and told their story," Anderson said.
He noticed that while all of the résumés were polished and loaded with impact-driven metrics, none of them adequately expressed that there was a unique person behind the accolades.
This realization led Anderson to try these four résumé strategies, ultimately landing him a Google job.
Anderson realized that no one would likely open a door for him unless they first felt comfortable with him. He reworked his résumé to reflect his authentic personality. He added an 'Interests' section and placed it at the top.
"This made sense to me because when I'd first meet someone, I'd share some unique tidbits about myself to build a warm first impression," Anderson said.
He also went beyond listing generic interests and strove to highlight specific details that couldn't be associated with anyone else.
"Instead of saying things like 'I enjoy cooking,' I shared that I entered a pie contest and came in 3rd place," Anderson said. "That small, quirky detail made me stick out and made me human."
Anderson realized he needed to be able to speak the industry lingo he used in his résumé confidently. While the writer he'd hired had filled his résumé with all the right buzzwords for the tech industry, it created a new problem.
"I didn't know how to actually talk about my experience in the language of the tech world during phone screens," Anderson said. "This caused me to stall in the interview process because I sounded disconnected from the résumé I'd submitted."
He started listening to talks, interviews, and meetings with influential people in the tech industry. He wrote down key phrases and terminology that he'd hear repeatedly and rewrote his résumé using those exact terms.
"I wanted the language to feel natural so that when I spoke during interviews, it would align with how the hiring managers were already talking," he said.
Anderson needed to create a unique selling point that helped showcase his educational background as an asset, not a liability.
"I realized that the combination of my creative background — education, writing, and linguistics — and the analytical, technical side I was building made me a more valuable candidate," he said.
Anderson chose the phrase "Creative + Code" to communicate his brand. He made it a big part of the messaging on his LinkedIn and portfolio and included it in his résumé's summary section in bold.
"Creative" represented his ability to teach, communicate, solve problems, and bring a fresh perspective. "Code" represented his technical and analytical skills, which he developed through coursework and self-study in front-end development coding.
Anderson realized he needed to craft his résumé with a clear audience rather than targeting it more generally.
Since he was applying to roles at Google Hardware, he studied the types of problems those teams were facing and adjusted his résumé to show how his skills could solve those specific pain points.
"I gravitate toward new technology, so I became really excited about the team and project at Google when it opened."
Once he began focusing on the audience and the specific challenges they were hiring to solve, he finally started gaining traction. He adjusted his résumé to tailor it for each role he applied to.
After one recruiter screening, six rounds of interviews, and a project, Google offered Anderson a job as a web developer in 2015.
He stayed at Google for two years before joining Meta, Uber, DoorDash, and the telehealth startup Calibrate. In 2022, Anderson left Big Tech to start his own career coaching company, Career Alchemy.
Anderson said his Google manager told him he was hired because of his perspective, not because of his experience, and he offered a unique combination of skills they didn't realize they needed until he showed them.
"Landing a job at Google wasn't about being the most qualified," Anderson said. "It was about clearly positioning myself as the solution to a problem they didn't even know they had."
Do you have a story to share about breaking into Big Tech? Contact this editor at [email protected].
Ethan Evans; BI
I've reviewed over 10,000+ résumés and conducted more than 2,500 interviews in my career as a VP at multiple companies, including Amazon.
I ran recruiting at three startups, and now I coach individuals through their job searches. I know what recruiters and hiring managers want in a résumé — and what mistakes could cost you the job.
I often see six mistakes. The first three are the most damaging, and 90% of résumés contain at least one of them.
Recruiters and managers are under tremendous pressure and usually review résumés as quickly as possible. Your résumé has to be optimized to catch their eye quickly. The goal is for them to skim it and think it would be worthwhile to interview you.
Here are the three biggest mistakes that could cost you the job you apply for.
This is the most common mistake I see on résumés. People write down what they did by saying "wrote code," "managed employees," or "worked on X project."
Senior performers, however, know they're valued for their impact and make a point to show the results of their work.
You can rewrite nearly every bullet on your résumé in a way that describes why your work matters and shows that your presence made a positive difference to the team, the product, and the bottom line.
Here are some tricks to help do this:
Without an objective, a recruiter or hiring manager has to guess if you want the job. If you're a recruiter with a pile of résumés, you're not going to waste your time doing any guessing.
An objective clearly states what kind of role you're looking for in your next job, and a great objective is formulaic and short enough to be read in a single glance. Don't just talk about yourself in subjective terms.
An example of the formula for a senior engineer role would be, "Seeking a role as a Sr. Engineer where I can apply my proven ability shipping scaled services to deliver valuable innovation for the business."
The first part simply states the role you seek. This is particularly important if you want to do something different from your last job.
The second part allows you to state your highest qualifications for a role. Highlight the top reason to put your résumé in the "call" pile.
The third part shows you're there to help the manager and the company. While you're looking for a "good job" for yourself, the manager is not focused on "giving someone a good job." You want to convey that you're not just interested in yourself but that you're also dedicated to providing value to your new manager.
Here's my own objective in my executive coaching résumé as an example:
Objective: Provide professional development at scale, guiding transitions to executive leadership.
Proven executive leadership of multiple $500M+ businesses across games, video, apps, and music. Global leadership experience of teams 800+. Technical inventor; 60+ issued patents.
Many résumés are long, lasting three or more pages or using a tiny font to cram the page.
The mistake is writing what we want to write about rather than what the reader needs to know. I call these "happy words." They occur when a résumé opens with the candidate writing positive sentences about who they think they are. It looks like this:
"Motivated self-starter looking for a positive environment where I can bring my technical skills and passion to a worthy project. Great coworker and mentor. Adaptable, fast learner."
It's natural to want to share what we see as our most positive traits. Unfortunately, managers looking at dozens of résumés daily will ignore this because it doesn't tell what the candidate can do.
The rule to follow is "show, don't tell." If you're a fast learner, include bullets on your résumé that show this. For example: "Learned and applied X to project Y, going from first effort to customer shipment in nine weeks."
The goal of your résumé is to put your three best accomplishments per role in front of the manager. If you write too much, they will skim over your biggest accomplishments. It is best to keep your résumé under 1,000 words.
My résumé is 700 words long and covers a 30-year career, and I created it on Microsoft Word in two hours.
Once you've written a solid résumé, look out for these three more mistakes before applying to any job.
Many résumés try to cram keywords at the top to pass through the applicant tracking system. There are two significant problems with this approach.
Over 80% of all jobs go to someone with a networking connection to the role. Focusing on getting through the ATS means you're focusing on jobs where you have no networking connection, and therefore, you're competing against everyone else.
The second problem is that this makes the résumé hard for a human to read, and it buries your strongest accomplishments in the body of the text.
The ideal approach is to write your résumé for human eyes, then leverage your network to get it into the hands of someone who will read it. If you want to include keywords, put them at the end of your résumé in a 'skills' section.
If you're a new graduate, the expected résumé format is to list your education at the top. If you have work experience, your education should be below your work history.
Another element of your education section is your GPA. If you do not list your GPA, the reader will assume it is poor. You're better off listing it if you did well (above a 3.3).
While you can safely remove your GPA once you're 10 years out of school, if you graduated with honors, it may be worth keeping forever.
The bottom of your résumé is the place to list most certifications unless you have a critical attribute like security clearance or an expected certification for the role you seek. You can put those near the top.
There are two benefits to ending your résumé with a little information about hobbies, charitable activities, and interests.
These interests humanize you. If someone has read to the bottom of your résumé, you won their attention. Giving a little personal texture at the bottom helps you be memorable.
Second, managers and recruiters look for icebreakers if they call you. Maybe they ski or have a dog, too, so listing things like this creates more chances to connect emotionally.
Once you're confident in your résumé, don't procrastinate by continuing to polish it. Focus on networking to get a good reference for a job.
One last mistake I see is candidates failing to leverage their carefully crafted résumé language on LinkedIn. To get the most out of LinkedIn, put your crisp objective statement in the "About" section of the profile. Then, copy your job bullets into each section of "Work History."
Fill out your education and other information, and keep it current. This way, recruiters can find you while you sleep.
Ethan Evans is a retired Amazon vice president with over 23 years of experience as a business executive.
Farah Sharghi
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Farah Sharghi, a job search coach and former technical recruiter who estimates she's conducted thousands of interviews at tech companies like Google, TikTok, Uber, and Lyft. It's been edited for length and clarity.
The thing that I see the most, whether it's for jobs in tech or in other industries, is that people don't realize the system that they're in.
If you are applying to corporate jobs, you have to understand that a corporation is there to make money. They're not there to do you a service.
What I mean by that is people come to me and they say they want me to rewrite the résumé, which I'm happy to do. But I'll look at their old résumé and it's just a list of things that they've done without any business outcomes.
And I go, "Well, then, what did you do at work?"
"Well, I did this, I did that," they'll say.
OK, well, why?
If you're exchanging your labor for money, you have to ask yourself, from the employer's perspective, why are you doing all this stuff What is your work's outcome for the business?
A lot of people don't really understand that.
As I work with clients, it's kind of an eye-opening experience for them. They start to realize their labor is worth money and if it's worth money, they have to be able to communicate that, not only to themselves but to other companies.
They do that through their résumés and the interview process. And then when they're working, they understand the value of their labor relative to the work they're doing for the company that they're working for.
That's the resounding overarching theme across a lot of résumés I've seen.
When I work with people, I try to pull from them like, "Listen, in order for me to write the most effective résumé possible for you, I need additional details because if I just put someone else's name on your résumé, anybody can say that they did your job."
So what makes you unique to other people? And why should a business hire you? What business need are you actually solving for that? What business need do they have that needs to be solved?
If you can't answer these questions, you're going to be taken advantage of in the marketplace.
Naïveté does not pay off. Companies find people for jobs — not jobs for people.
