Pre-Event Preparation & Resources

Illustrate your skills and impact by describing the work you did in detail, using concrete action verbs. Avoid words like organize, develop, coordinate. They can be very, very vague. You want to use sentences that help your resume reader visualize you doing the work itself.

If you organized a school-wide startup career fair, what actions did you take to do each of those things? How many companies came? How did you get the companies to come to campus? How did you get students to attend and how was the event designed?

Most things can be measured. If you worked with small business to improve your local recycling rates, how many small businesses? How much did recycling rates improve? If you developed an app, how many people downloaded it? If you worked on a UI flow, how many screens did you design?

Also, use digits, even if <10. It’s easier to read during a quick scan.

School can go at the top. Projects and work experiences should come next, but prioritize whichever one has the most relevant work and skills to the job you seek. Skills should go at the bottom.

• Highly proficient should denote anything you’re comfortable wielding and/or have used to execute on some specific work.
• This organizes your skills into two digestible groups, rather than leaving them in a scattered list.

• Link your work so that people can explore it for themselves and see your commits.

• Use consistent verb tenses. Pick present or past-tense, not both.
• If job titles are bolded and positions are italicized, make sure that holds across all sections.

• Your interests are cool, but if irrelevant to the position you’re seeking, cut them.
• Skip the GPA if you’re recruiting for startups unless your position is inherently or culturally academic (research, consulting), or if your GPA is under 3.50.
• We generally advise leaving out coursework and emphasizing projects you did for courses instead.
• Any soft-skills are fluff unless you can substantiate or quantify them.

“Collaborative & supportive” doesn’t provide any meaning.

“Can facilitate collaboration in teams of 25+” is a lot more concrete.

• Never list your skills as percentages. There’s no such thing as 20% of a skill because there’s no real 100% of a skill.