Resume Roast: Business/Technology Masters Internship
Here is the first third of the first page of the redacted version of this resume, which is all the hiring manager will need to make their decision. Nonetheless, we encourage you to download the full resume so you can follow along.
Beauty Fades
First impression? Right off the bat, we’d say it’s gorgeous. The template they used is very beautiful and if the reader sees this resume in its full splendor, it should make a good impression.
Unfortunately, there’s about a 30% chance the reader will be seeing this hideous monstrosity instead:
What is going on? Well, the resume is in a PDF form, which is generally a good idea, but not if the resume contains columns. The way PDFs are encoded means the text gets read left to right across without any concept of columns, so they often parse into this ugly jumble like you see above. In fact, Amazon recently released their Textract library to make this kind of parsing easier, but you should not trust that the typical HR department will be so current with new technology.
So this resume has maybe a 10% better chance of impressing people if it’s viewed correctly, but about 30% chance it will be rendered as gibberish and rejected out of hand, putting the applicant at a deficit off the bat.
State Your Intentions
It’s fairly easy for the reader to discern the intention of this resume because we already wrote about it, but scanning just the resume, can you tell what job the person wants?
The first sentence describes an “International Business Student” who “likes to take initiative and seek out new challenges” which generally serves to bucket the person into the “business student” track, but doesn’t make it very clear what value they will add to your organization. Generally speaking, the company hiring you doesn’t really care what you “like to” do, but rather how you can add value. Do you care if your carpenter likes to swing a hammer, or if they are great at swinging a hammer?
We see “Python”, “Linux” and “R” listed as skills so we think they may be good with technology, but so much of the experience presented is business experience so we wonder if the technology skills are merely superficial. True, there is a master’s degree in computer systems engineering, but technical work is generally de-emphasized across the resume, so we’re left scratching our heads.
We asked the job seeker, and they replied that they were looking for a “Master’s Level Internship in Technology and Business”. This makes sense and is generally supported by the facts in the resume, but it’s not good that we needed to ask this. This phrase is essentially the thesis statement for the resume. Like a good thesis statement, it should be stated explicitly and noisily up front so the reader doesn’t need to make assumptions. It’s why we go on and on about a professional headline.
Tech Up
We see a lot of people at the intersection of technology and business, so this section will apply explicitly to people who are trying to gauge how to straddle this divide. We often see people who maybe have been working on the technology side of the business trying to figure out how to make the leap to the business side.
The common way to do this is to play down your tech experience and play up the business experience, putting yourself in the upper left quadrant in the chart above. We recommend the opposite, pushing as much technical expertise as possible, even if it comes at the expense of promoting business skills.
We’ve seen all sides of this divide and many of us have even lived it, so we sympathize intensely. You’re probably tired of feeling like a code monkey. You may think your brain and code are becoming simultaneously spaghettified. We can definitively assert the grass is not greener on the other side.
The simple fact is that technology positions are high in demand and low in supply. Business positions are low in demand and high in supply. Based on the numbers we see, you have roughly a 5x better chance of getting hired if you apply through the tech lane than the business lane. Plus, your salary will likely be significantly higher.
Many of the RezScore team graduated from MIT Sloan School of Management, a perfect microcosm of the business/tech divide. About a third of the students came from a tech or engineering background, and were using the MBA in part to make a shift from tech to business. We asked our class their biggest regret after graduation. Anecdotally, the most common reply was they wish they’d taken more computer science courses, as it would have been a better career move. They’ve seen both sides and know the grass is greener on the tech side.
You’re tired of coding you say? No problem. Get the job first, and once you have the job take every opportunity to lean into your business skills. If you are a half-decent communicator, it won’t be long before you’re serving as a translator between the tech team and the business team. Demonstrate more competency at organizing the product than coding it, and your responsibilities will quickly shift to product management.
The dirty secret is that most coders are not very good and don’t do all that much coding anyway. At most major tech companies, the coders only put in about 2 hours of coding work between meetings and time wasted goofing off. If you’re a good coder, this means you can basically get away with just 1 hour of coding and still keep pace with your peers. You can then devote about 3 hours of time to schmoozing and playing internal politics, which is basically all that happens on the business side anyway, and you’ll have logged 4 solid hours of productivity, which is well above the average. Of course, don’t mention these secrets during your interview.
VCs have a common refrain that they prefer investing in a startup with a technical CEO to a startup with a CEO from a business background. This is because it’s far easier to teach a tech CEO business skills than vice versa. A non-technical CEO is more likely to outgrow their usefulness as the company scales, but a technical CEO is more likely to remain CEO or shift to a CTO-level position. If you worry about moving into the CTO role, know that most CTOs we talk to lament that they are so busy with management tasks that they don’t have time to code.
If you’d like your resume subject to a roast, RezScore is the right place. We are always happy to review your resume! We built the world’s leading resume grader at https://rezscore.com/, which you can use to get a free, instant, and confidential resume grade, tips on improvement, salary estimates, and skills analysis. When you’re ready to apply for jobs, try out our new Jobs Board, where you can track your application through every step of the application process so your resume never falls into a black hole.
