This RESUME Got Me My First Product Manager Job

[Music] hello so i have some very exciting news for you so you might know that i have been dedicating the past like half year of my life to finding a pm job and after probably dozens of on-sites and a couple of mental breakdowns i am very happy to announce that i have recently signed a job offer to become a product manager at a unicorn startup [Applause] and i'll definitely share a lot more details once i actually start the job but for now i want to reflect on the very beginning stage of this process back when i was writing my resume and as i was preparing to apply for jobs i knew that it would be an uphill battle since i am pretty young i haven't worked as a pm before and i've been out of the tech industry for two years but i guess somehow things worked out so in today's video i thought i would share a couple of things that i learned while crafting my resume that helped me land my very first job as a pm i'll start by going over some general tips for resume writing and then we'll actually take a look at my resume and go over a couple of key features that i think really help my resume stand out and a quick shout out to a short form which is today's lovely sponsor we will get back to them in a little bit but first let's get into the video [Music] now there are tons of videos and articles sprinkled around the web with resume tips i'll link a couple of those down below but here is a tldr first one-page resumes are the way to go because recruiters are sorting through probably hundreds of resumes and only have a few seconds to look at yours so they definitely won't have the time for anything more than one page second stick with just one column nowadays two column resumes are pretty trendy and in fact when i was applying for my very first full-time engineering role i had a two-column resume and it was successful and while i do admit that these are pretty visually appealing they are a bit harder for recruiters and hiring managers to read and so generally they're just not preferred in the industry so yeah as much as i hate to say it when it comes to resumes aesthetics really don't matter so don't go and waste 100 bucks buying a custom resume template or go crazy with sigma instead just focus on the content always show impact by having a number behind every single bullet point or achievement on your resume and finally ask for feedback i've always been pretty shy about this but this time around maybe it was just out of desperation but i shared my resume with absolutely everyone my parents my friends even people on reddit and one girl that actually helped me out a ton was this online community called tech career growth which was started by rajo pandey who you might know from youtube and alex choi so alex and rahul are both silicon valley tech leads and they both started this online community to provide free yet high quality career guidance for people in the tech industry and this is mostly through weekly zoom calls and a super vibrant slack community and so i found out about this after seeing a live session on rajo pandey's channel about how to write a resume it was really good timing because i then joined their slack group and shared my resume draft for feedback and i was just so surprised to see how thoughtful and detailed their feedback was on my resume so yeah i am super grateful for their help and yeah if you are a software engineer or just anyone in the tech industry looking for career guidance i would definitely recommend checking out their community and i will link it down below in the description as well now over the past few months in addition to writing my resume and doing a lot of mock interviews i have been reading a lot more than usual everything from pm interview guides to blog posts to book summaries and one tool i've more recently discovered that helps me learn as much as possible even when i'm short on time is short form which happens to be today's lovely sponsor short form makes the world's best guides non-fiction books think of them like super powered book summaries covering everything from the book's key ideas to commentary and even analyses of big picture ideas and short form has a huge library of book guides on everything from productivity to career to technology i've been diving deep into a lot of their product related content with books like crossing the chasm inspired and radical candor and i love how i can take short form on the go whether i'm reading on my phone as i eat breakfast or listening to audio guides as i walk yogi so yeah short form really has it all and if you want to try out a five day free trial do check out my special link shortform.com hashibar or click the link down below in the description and yeah thank you so much for supporting my channel and now let's go back to the video [Music] alright so i have my resume open right here on my desk so let's actually take a look now so on first impression my resume is quite standard with this one page and one column layout and i did make this with latex which is a document preparation system to make technical docs and i guess also resumes and latex does have a learning curve but i think overall it's worth it for the consistency they can get with both the design and formatting of your docs in my case i added my own spice to the standard template with custom fonts icons and various shades of gray they definitely weren't the easiest to set up but as with everything i had a lot of help from my friends google and stack overflow alright now let's dive into the meat of my resume the experience section now maybe i am tooting my own horn is that a saying but i think the one thing that really helped my resume stand out and actually helped me get interviews and get this job was the fact that i showed my work and what this means is that for nearly everything i worked on especially from the past two years of working for myself i used lynx as a proof of work let's talk about why this matters put yourself into the shoes of a recruiter you have a stack of hundreds of resumes to sort through let's say for product managers for each applicant you want to find enough proof that the candidate is good enough to pass them on to the hiring manager for some this might mean having an mba for others it might be that they already worked as an associate product manager at say google but if you don't have that formal experience or some big name on your resume i think the next best thing a recruiter can see is some visible examples of your work basically just proof that you have what it takes to do well on the job and for me i think using links was even more important since i don't have any pm experience and the product experience that i do have is through youtube which probably most people don't fully understand and i think actually the most effective use of links was this highlight section which basically just lists a couple of my favorite videos and honestly even though i'm sitting here now and talking about using links when i actually use them in my own resume i didn't really expect for people to actually click and watch these videos but i was really surprised because pretty much every single company i talked to mentioned that they had watched at least one of my videos before interviewing me in fact even at one of my very final on-site interviews the ceo himself said that he not only watched a couple of my videos but also could see some of my pm type skills in those videos themselves i guess this is kind of like the real life adaptation of what your english teacher probably taught you to show don't tell but the great thing here is that you don't need a youtube channel specifically to document your work something as simple as a github repo or medium or a blog or even twitter it would do the job so yeah basically a long story short however you do it documenting your work and making it publicly available is probably one of the best investments of time to help with amongst many other things your future job search alright so moving down a bit to the freedom section something i always made sure to do here was tell a story through every single bullet point because looking back at some of my old resumes i always wrote the most basic things like develop programs in matlab which really says nothing about what i actually accomplished and so instead here with nearly every single bullet point i tried to answer three questions what was the problem how did i solve it and what was the impact and when talking about impact i always tried to back it up with a number some were definitely approximations like 40 increase in efficiency but when i did make up my own let's call it impact metric i could always explain the rationale behind how i got to that number and that did definitely come up in a couple of interviews and the very last thing i did here was bold key highlights on my resume since i had such a mumbo jumbo of experiences i want to draw the eye to the most important aspects of my resume looking back i'm not a hundred percent sure if this actually helped so yeah let me know in the comments whether you think bolding text actually helps at all in a resume now even with the project section i tried to quantify my success success as much as possible i think this was especially helpful for haiku which was my consulting company because showing links and numbers especially for revenue helps show recruiters how i guess how legit the business actually was now something that might be a little bit weird is that i have links to viral reddit posts on my resume this is probably not the most traditional but my goal was to show that the products that i created like my job application bot or my icon pack could actually get traction with users and i also linked a github repo but i made sure that the readme was super easy to read with a gif of the app demo at the very top because no one not even a software engineer is going to read through my crappy code base when screening resumes then we've got the education section which is now at the bottom of my resume since after all i am three years out of college of course there is a lot more that i could have added here but i think i have the right amount of detail to catch the reader's attention without boring them with outdated details likewise for the skill section the main thing i did here was just strip down the information to just what's relevant for pm i've shown that i understand things like react and jira and figma but i took off irrelevant skills like c or scheme or microsoft word [Music] and yeah that that is my resume and if you like the layout i want to use it yourself i will link the github repo down below where you can find the raw lag tech file a pdf preview as well as the link to edit their resume online and otherwise i hope you liked today's video if you did please give it a big like and subscribe follow me on social media if you want to thank you again short form for sponsoring today's video and yogi and i will see you in the next one once again [Music] that's it i am done [Music] you

Channel: harshibar

Views: 191,827

Keywords: resume template, faang resume, faang resume example, harshibar resume, resume, product manager resume, resume product manager, pm resume, pm resume review, pm resume skills, harshibar, how to write a resume, product manager resume examples, product manager, product manager resume tips, pm resume example, product management resume, product management, project manager resume, project management resume, product manager role, project management, associate product manager

Id: -gvqFb9YLT4

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021