Résumé Writing

Questions and model answers

1. When you write a résumé, what do you spend the most time on?

   Cutting things, honestly. The first draft is always about twice as long as it should be, and everything in it felt essential when I wrote it. So most of the work is deciding what to lose. I have a rule now — if I can't say why a line would make somebody want to meet me, it goes. That took out a whole section about software I'd used twice. The other thing that eats time is the wording of each bullet. "Responsible for" tells you nothing, so I try to say what actually changed because I was there. That is much harder than listing duties, and it is the only part anyone reads closely. Everything above it just gets scanned.

2. Would you rather have a one-page résumé or a detailed two-page one?

   One page, and I think two pages is usually a decision nobody made. It happens because cutting is uncomfortable, not because the second page earns its place. Whoever reads it is giving you somewhere between ten and thirty seconds, and a second page mostly guarantees the weakest material is on it. There is a real exception — if you've genuinely done fifteen years of relevant work, one page starts hiding things that matter. But for anyone under about thirty, a second page is almost always the same story told twice. I'd rather leave a reader wanting one more detail than have them stop halfway down page two, which is the more common outcome by far. And nobody's ever complained that a resume was too short.

3. Tell me about a time you applied for something and didn't get it.

   I applied for a summer research position I badly wanted, and I didn't even get an interview. What stung was that I'd been told informally I was a strong candidate. Afterwards I asked the coordinator what happened, which felt awkward but turned out to be the useful part. She said my application read like someone who wanted the experience rather than someone interested in that specific work — I'd written about what I would gain, and never about the project itself. That was completely true and I hadn't seen it. The next application I wrote started with a question I actually had about their research. I got that one, though I've never been sure how much was the rewrite and how much was luck.

4. Do you think résumés are still a useful way to judge someone?

   Useful for a first filter, useless for the actual decision — and most of the complaints come from expecting the second thing from a tool built for the first. A résumé can tell you whether someone has plausibly done the work before. That is a genuine question and it answers it cheaply, which matters when there are four hundred applicants. What it cannot tell you is whether someone is any good, because the format rewards people who write well about themselves, and that is a different skill from the job in almost every case. So I'd keep them and stop pretending. Use the résumé to decide who to talk to, and decide everything else by talking to them.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.