Overview

The resume is a critical component of your job application, it gives the recruiter an overview of who you are, your accomplishments, and why they should hire you. Most recruiters will spend less than a minute glancing at your resume, so it’s important that you make your profile stand out. This guide will cover 5 main sections:

• Why is the resume important?

• Details Matter! 

• Section by section guidelines  

• Tailoring your resume to a job opening 

• Resume not-to-do list

Why is the Resume Important?The main purpose of a resume is to get you an interview, not a jobThe resume is you on a single page. You should show a holistic view of your candidacy from professional work, education, and extracurricular activities to community leadership and hobbies. These topics will guide the discussion during the interview; thus, it is critical to pick what will serve you favorablyUse the resume to demonstrate your excellent written communication skills by writing quantified accomplishments

Details Matter!

It’s better if you follow a consistent and standard formatting for your resume. Here are some formatting tips for you to follow:

• Margins should be .5 top to bottom, 0.75 on the sides. 

• Your Name should be in 20 pt with bolded font

• Email/phone to be 10 pt italics 

• Headers: 14 bold

• Company, title, location and dates: 10 pt bold 

• Bullet points: 10 pt

• Your name should be written in the following format: First Name. First letter of the second name. Last name. (e.g. Khalid M. AlQahtani)

Section by Section Guidelines 

A well-organized resume includes the appropriate sections that can get the recruiter’s attention to help you land a job interview. Although every person’s resume is unique and different, there are some sections that you should always include and other optional ones that depend on where you are in your journey. Here are both standard and optional sections:

• Contact Information

• Work Experience

• Education

• Skills, Interests, and Hobbies (Optional)

• Leadership & Extracurriculars (Optional)

• Certificates (Optional)

Contact Information 

• List your name followed by your phone number and email address 

• LinkedIn profile link 

• Portfolio or blog link (if applicable)

• Include your address in the following format: City, Country 

Work Experience 

• The order of this section typically flows in a chronological order (latest first)

• Write the date in the following format: Month/Year. And if you are still at the same company, write the starting date with a dash and write present as the end date (See example below)

• If the company is not well-known, write a 1–2-line description here to give the reader some idea of the company’s activity and size (you can also add a hyperlink on the company name that takes the reader to the company’s website)

• When describing your role at the company, always stick to bullet points

• A good method to follow when describing your role by mentioning your quantified accomplishments is (Leadership-Action-Impact-Significant of impact) 

• Make sure you showcase accomplishments and not responsibilities

• Try to include numerical values to quantify your impact with your former employor as it attracts the reader’s eyes 

• If you had multiple roles within the same company, the old ones should have fewer bullet points, showcase that your impact grew as you progressed in the company

• If you have had multiple roles within your company, include the overall tenure at the company and tenure for each position as shown below

Education 

• Write the college university name along with the city and the country 

• Write the year of graduation 

• Always focus on strengthen your resume, so if your GPA is not high; avoid including it here (if less than 3/4 or 3.8/5, its might be safer to not include it here)

• Include academic honors if you managed to achieve any 

Leadership & Extracurriculars 

• If you are a person with side hustles, this section can make you stand out among others 

• It shows that you are a hard worker, can multi-task, and can take more responsibilities instead of writing them as a skill 

Professional Certificates 

• If you are applying for a job and you already took legit courses or certificates related to it, these will help you stand out among other candidates

• If the certification is job-critical, its will be essential to include it in your resume

Skills, Interest, Hobbies 

• Avoid writing soft skills like hard worker/problem solving 

• Write technical skills instead that are related to the job. For example, if you are applying for a design role you include Figma/adobe

Tailoring Your Resume to a Job Opening 

Let’s take a real-life example, we are going to use a Senior Product Manager opening posted by Gitlab in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and you can find the details of it in the appendix section at the end (Note that you might not find the opening available now on Gitlab website). We will give you a detailed guide on how to exactly fit and tailor your resume to this opening, it also can apply to any other job opening: 

• You should hit some, if not most, of the responsibilities of the job and most, if not all, of the requirements of the job, implying that you are qualified to do the job through either experience, skills, knowledge, or a combination of them

• For the first responsibility on the job description, you should include a bullet point in a current or previous role, extracurricular experience, or side project on how you did drive or now driving the product in the right direction through effective roadmaps, breakdown of high-level features, having the right balance among new features, improvements, and bug fixes, and return on investment. If you do not have this experience at all pertaining to this job responsibility, show at least you have the skills or knowledge, for example, in the form of a certificate or course. One example of a quantified accomplishment that relates to this responsibility is shown below:

• Collaborated with cross-functional team to develop, test, and deploy an education platform while focusing on 4 high-impact features, enabling educators to create meaningful content and teaching 100K+ diverse students on various topics. (vs. 70K students on most platforms)

• For the second responsibility, again you should include a bullet point in a current or previous role, extracurricular experience, or side project on how you took or taking an active role in defining the future of a product by showing how you contribute to the product vision and innovation. 

• Now, for the rest of the responsibilities of this job, you should do the same activity until you cover some, if not most of them. However, if there are certain responsibilities that you did not do, that is fine as you are not expected to have performed all the responsibilities because this job would not be challenging nor a learning opportunity for you if that’s the case

• For the job requirements, ideally you should hit most of them, if not all again. You should list examples rather than merely telling that you have this skill or used this tool. Show how you used it and what it helped you achieve. If you cannot include all that in the resume, include the most important ones based on the job description. For example, “Strong technically: you understand how software is built, packaged, deployed and operated” is one of the requirements. You should show how you worked with a team to build, test, package, and deploy a software/product. Here is an example shown below:

• Led the team to build, test, and deploy a ride-sharing platform for blind people while focusing on 3 high-impact features, enabling 10k+ customers to connect with drivers instantly and providing 7k+ daily rides (vs. 5k daily rides as industry average)

• Bonus point: experience with GitLab is one of the requirements. While it is a bonus, it would be great to add it. One can download GitLab and use it for 30 mins or an hour so that he or she can mention that he or she has experience using it. If an interview is scheduled, one can dive deeper into the product to be ready for answering relevant questions

• While tailoring your resume to a job description is great, making every word in the job description on the resume may seem suspicious. Choose your keywords wisely

Resume Not-To-Do List

General:

• The resume should not be more than a page as historically recruiters spend about 60 seconds on a resume. One should have everything in one page

• Do not make numbers one to ten written out, but have them as actual numbers 1-10. This also applies for all numbers. This will allow numbers to stand out easily

• Do not use colors or a template in your resume. Colors may introduce subjectivity and bias. Use the standard white and black

• Do not include an unprofessional email

• Do not include a headshot

• Do not include buzzwords or industry-jargons

• Do not include visible tables or images

• Spell check your resume. No typos and grammar mistakes make you look professional.

• Do not leave clear empty spaces unfilled 

• Do not include a resume objective statement. They are only applicable if you are shifting or just starting your career 

• Do not leave the important information at the end, always make sure that it is at the top of your resume

• Do not include confidential information about your company, project, and client. Give a glimpse of the work with numbers and industry while maintaining the client’s anonymity

• Do not include references as this is generally assumed.

• Do not include irrelevant experiences. However, if you do not have any relevant experience, then irrelevant might be relevant

• While this is A Resume Not-To-Do List, include on-going projects

• Finally, never lie on your resume. However, market yourself favorably

Experience 

• Do not include responsibilities. Focus on including quantifiable accomplishments and take the extra mile to show the size of the impact you made

• Do not include many lines/texts for jobs that you had five years ago. The more recent the job is, the more lines/texts it should have. To put it differently, do not include too much of the past

Education 

• Do not include your courses within your undergraduate or graduate program as all students from the same program take the same courses. There is an exception, which is if you are taking different courses than most students or your potential employer may be unfamiliar with your program – then it should be fine. Also, if there are a number of tracks within your program, including courses relevant to the track 

• Do not include your GPA if it is under 3.0 out of 4.0 or under 3.8 out of 5.0. 

Extracurricular, Leadership experience, Interests, and Hobbies

• Do not add an interest or hobby that does not show a positive side of you

Final Note

Always remember that there is no such thing as the right resume. There are wrong resumes that lack the fundamentals sections and method of writing. Also, there will always be some controversial points that will be taken subjectively based on the reader. So, when in doubt, ask yourself: will this add value to me or create suspense that might reflect badly on me? Based on that, decide whether to include or not. 

Appendix 

About the job

GitLab’s DevOps platform empowers 100,000+ organizations to deliver software faster and more efficiently. We are one of the world’s largest all-remote companies with 1,400+ team members and values that guide a culture where people embrace the belief that everyone can contribute.

This position is remote based. Please note that the openings listed in this posting will be updated periodically as roles are opened or closed.

We’re looking for Product Managers that can help us work on the future of developer tools. This post is our general inquiry post and will result in a resume review and if appropriate a follow up conversation to help target your application to a specific role.

We believe developers deserve an intuitive, single application that covers the entire DevOps lifecycle. We believe running tests is just the beginning of automation. We believe deploying your code should be automated and repeatable, and most of all, easy. We believe in pushing the boundaries of best-practices, and bringing these to every developer, so that doing the right thing is also the easy, default way of working.

We know there are a million things we can and want to improve about GitLab’s support for DevOps workflows. It’ll be your job to work out what we are going to do and how.

We work in quite a unique way at GitLab, where lots of flexibility and independence is mixed with a high paced, pragmatic way of working. And everything we do is in the open.

We recommend looking at our company page , the product handbook , and our product categories to get started.

Responsibilities

• Drive the product in the right direction

• Build an effective roadmap to prioritize important features properly

• Take high-level feature proposals and customer problems and break them into small iterations that engineering can work on

• Balance new features, improvements, and bugfixes to ensure a high velocity and a stable product

• Consider the business impact, ROI , and other implications when taking important decisions

• Take an active role in defining the future

• Contribute to the product vision , together with the Head of Product and VP of Product

• Create and maintain a vision for your product area

• Create and maintain the vision for each product category

• Innovate within your product area by proposing ambitious features

• Follow innovation in your product area

• Communicate and evangelize your product vision internally and among the wider community

• Manage the product lifecycle end-to-end

• Follow feature development end-to-end; provide guidance and feedback to engineers and designers; ensure everyone is aligned

• Be the voice of the customer and the subject-matter expert for your group

• Contribute to documentation, blog posts, demos, and marketing materials for product features

• Collaborate with other Product Managers, UX, and engineers in cross-area features to build a single application

• Manage the uncertainty in an efficient way, adjusting plans to new working conditions

• Engage with stakeholders in two-way communication

• Assist Sales, Support, Customer Success, and Marketing as the subject-matter expert for your area

• Talk to customers and engage with the community regularly

• Engage with analysts on briefings and product evaluations

• Work with the entire Product team to share improvements and best practices

You Are Not (solely) Responsible For

• A team of engineers: you will take the lead in decisions about the product, but not manage the people implementing it

• Capacity planning: you will define priorities, but the Engineering Manager evaluates the amount of work possible

• Shipping in time: you will work in a group, but the group is responsible for shipping in time, not you

General Requirements

• Experience in Product Management

• Understanding of Git and Git workflows

• Knowledge of the DevOps tool market

• Strong technically: you understand how software is built, packaged, deployed and operated

• Passion for design and usability

• Highly independent and pragmatic

• Excellent proficiency in English

• You enjoy working all-remote

• You share our values , and work in accordance with those values

• Strong understanding of DevOps and cloud-native application architectures, deployment and operations

• Bonus points: significant experience building successful DevOps tools

• Bonus points: experience with GitLab

• Bonus points: experience in working with open source projects