How This Techie Scored a $500,000 Role at Meta with a No-Frills Resume

Deciding on the resume format can be a difficult task for anybody applying for jobs. Hemant Pandey, a software engineer who has worked for companies like Tesla and Meta, says that he has relied on just a single resume format since college which may sound crazy to today's generation who feel the need to build the resume from scratch every time they are applying for a new job.

Pandey, who grew up in India and later moved to California, says that this resume format has gotten him a $500,000 senior software engineer role at Meta and offers from TikTok and LinkedIn. According to Pandey, a couple of things worked for him which he also recommends others to keep in the resumes. 

First of all, he advises everybody to summarize their work experiences. "I like to keep it very ambiguous," Pandey said. "If people ask me what I did at Salesforce, I can help them know more by explaining rather than writing a paragraph." He uses one to three bullet points for each role, per Business Insider.

Pandey also recommends that everybody add their GPA to their resume even if it's not impressive. Pandey says that adding the GPA acts like the opportunity to share a story during the interview, "I generally share how I bombed my first semester and was intimidated," he said about getting a low GPA and almost losing an internship he was offered. He talks about how he had to push himself to keep up with more experienced students and eventually scored better in the following semesters. "This makes a good growth and learning-from-failures story."

Pandey also talks about how it will always be a good idea to showcase technical skills even if he is moving towards senior positions where coding becomes restricted to quite an extent." "But if I still interview for a startup, they don't care about how I'm leading or shipping products," he said. "They care about if I can write code, if I'm tech savvy enough," he adds. 

Pandey also stresses the importance of paying attention to personal branding which comes in handy to boost careers. According to top experts, building personal brands has gotten even more important with the inception of the digital world. "Building a personal brand connected to your business is more important than ever because people won't do business with anyone they don't trust," said Quynh Mai, the founder of a digital creative agency, via BI.

According to Glassdoor, keywords are important when it comes to resumes, and hiring managers look for keywords that match the job profile. For example, a certificate in Search Engine Optimisation can be useful when looking for a job in a digital media agency. 

Best resumes also reflect the overall career progression in an organized manner. This means, mentioning the key responsibilities one has held in the companies they have worked in. It is also good to include links to your professional profiles and have a general online portfolio. Remember that hiring managers have to look through a sea of resumes and generally have to absorb all the information from a single resume in just 30 seconds or so. Therefore, making the resume concise and to the point can help showcase the most important achievements or skill sets.