Misc2: Refining Your Resume

Most people just list their responsibilities, or play buzzword bingo on their resume. Here's you you actually refine it to bypass HR, and go straight to the hiring manager & win them over

Table of Contents:

1. Who actually makes the posting

2. HR Mindset

3. Hiring Manager Mindset

4. How to Win Them Both

5. Conclusion

1 - Who actually makes the posting

Remember, typically most Data Scientists (DS) make around 100k to 200k per year with about 3 years worth of experience. If you are a businesses owner, paying someone 150k average per year and then having them do a completely boring mundane task of doing something like creating a job posting is just not good business sense. It’s better to use the DS to figure out ways to either increase the conversion rate on your website for sales. Or you can use the DS to spot anomalies with your products and fix them before the customer gets a chance to see the problem themselves.

So, if you are not going to get the expensive DS to create the job posting, then who is typically responsible for creating the job posting in most businesses?

Enter the Human Resources (HR) department…

2 - HR Mindset

HR is the place where the talentless people in society go. Those who couldn’t get a real job with real skills end up working at HR. HR people are typically just diversity hires that have to be there to meet some sort of a quota (not a joke), or the company needed someone to do a bunch of menial work. Typically, for most companies, these are the people responsible for actually creating & publishing the job posts that you see on Indeed, LinkedIn, Monster, etc…

So, how do you get people who have 0 technical knowledge to create the job postings that will decide who gets hired and who doesn’t? Obviously, you can guess that this doesn’t end too well…

HR can’t even tell the difference between JavaScript (Web Dev), and Java (Software Engineer), and this information is easy to google. So, now we come to an obvious question. How do we bypass the HR filter that basically has 0 talent?

Keywords for HR

Here’s a simple example:
Don’t do this: Used the KNN algorithm to clean some traffic data.
Do this instead: Machine Learning: Used the KNN algorithm to clean some traffic data

Remember, HR is only going to look at your resume for about 3 seconds to see if it’s worth passing on. If you have the keywords they are looking for, and it’s easy for them to find it (that’s why we bold it), they are more likely to pass it on to the next guy.

Buzzword Bingo at the Bottom

A lot of people will tell you to list some of your volunteering activities, or some of your hobbies at the bottom. I’ve tried it out, and it was awful, my interview rate fell off a cliff. I promise you, the only time they legitimately care about your hobbies/activities is as a simple icebreaker during an interview, other than that they really don’t care. So instead, here’s what we’ll do at the bottom:

Create a section called Skills:
In this section, you are going to list the programming languages that you’ve worked with, some of the libraries that you used with them, and also the number of years you’ve worked with them as your experience.

Here’s what it would look like:

Doing this makes it super clear to the HR person who knows they are looking for something called a pandas, but they themselves have no idea what it is. Also, if the company is just using an algorithm that just scrapes the keywords from the resume, this will also let you bypass that super easily.

NEVER LISTEN TO HR ADVICE

HR will constantly tell you completely idiotic stuff like “We are looking for a guy whose has got great communication skills”, “We are looking for a guy who shows us he’s fun by showing his super cool hobbies”. I wasted several years early on in my career trying to show I’m balanced, fun, good communication etc… Literally not even a single interview in 6 months. Learn from my mistake, so that you don’t repeat it.

3 - Hiring Manager Mindset

Let’s be real, practically very few people care about your degree for a general Data Science career. Unless you are going for a super niche PhD researcher type of role, practically very few people care about it. As long as you have some exposure to: Linear Algebra, Statistics, or Computer programming you’ll be fine.

Now, what does a Hiring Manager care about? At the end of the day you are hired by the manager to make his life easier. In other words, there is a lot of work that needs to get done by him, and he’s under pressure, so he’s hiring a new guy so that it will make his life easier.

Also, don’t forget that this is a business, it could be super cool that you took a model from 90% accuracy, all the way up to 99% accuracy, but if the business can only understand & use the 90% one, that’s the one they’ll go with.

In other words, a hiring manager only cares about 2 things:

1. Will hiring you make my life easier, and can I delegate some of my tasks to you and not be forced to constantly clean your stuff up

2. Will hiring you actually help the business make more money (more money means a bigger salary and bonus for the manager)

Making His Life Easier

We’ve all had to do boring responsibilities in our DS career, that we know will translate super well at showing the hiring manager our level of competence.

The keywords you are looking for in this case are: Created & Maintained, Responsible for maintaining …. that was used for weekly meetings, Created & Preserved a new…, Worked with … to automate … freeing up his time for more revenue generating activities.
The … are just filler, feel free to use them for whatever it was that you were doing in your role.

What the above keywords show is that you took on some sort of a new responsibility, and kept that process running properly. This freed up the time for one of the guys higher up than you, who used this free time to explore further ways to make even more money, or do some sort of a research activity that was needed.

Generating Money For The Business

This one is pretty simple, just show how some of the stuff you did actually helped the business make more money, or reduce expenses. The preference is towards making more money, as this shows the business the DS team is super valuable which means bigger bonuses for your manager (boss), which means a more likely chance to be called in for an interview.

Since, I work as a Quant (specializing in DS), I work at a simple hedge fund. How does a hedge fund make money? By betting on stocks which will go up, and betting against stocks that will go down.

What Quants can do is monitor a simple passive Exchange Traded Fund (ETF), and predict which stock is going to go in the ETF, and which stock will leave the ETF. Being correct on this can earn your firm several hundred thousands in just a few months. So, in other words, the hit rate for this is extremely important, as the better the hit rate, the better the revenue. But, how would you convey this to other hiring managers

Here’s what I did:

For those that are in the industry, they immediately know what I did, and know 73% is pretty solid, especially since the data isn’t stationary. For those that are outside of the industry, it makes it clear I used some sort of a ML model to solve a problem, and solving this problem helped the firm make money. Which means if the new manager were to hire me, I could do something similar and have the DS team earn bigger bonuses by solving problems.

Remember: your hiring manager also wants more money

4 - How to Win Them Both

So, at the end of the day, in the experience section of the resume, we need to do 2 major things:

1. Win the Buzzword Bingo from HR

2. Show the Hiring Manager that we are the real deal

Here’s what I recommend doing in the experience section of your resume:

When I was actively trying to get a role, the above resume was able to get me 2 interviews per day, on average. Feel free to copy paste the above template and use it on yours.

5 - Conclusion

Now that you know what the HR, and the manager is looking for, in the next post we’ll talk about how you actually find the DS roles.

Hint: It isn’t as simple as just typing in Data Science in Indeed, and calling it a day.

Once you have your resume ready, it’ll be time to prep up on those interview skills.