How to customize your resume to actually get PM interviews

The #1 mistake people make in trying to get interviews? Sharing a generic resume or customizing poorly

The Problem with Dropping Your Resume

It’s so tempting to see a new job and just drop your resume. It’s just one-click right?

The only problem? It doesn’t work. You’re most likely to end up with results that look this:

This is the actual performance of a Senior PM who hadn’t been reading this newsletter and booked time with me last week.

Tech companies keep dumping fresh PM talent on the market, while job postings remain depressed.

The result? Just applying online with your generic resume just doesn’t cut it anymore.

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The Solution: Customizing Your Resume

The PM that had the 3.4% interview rate?

We worked together over the last week. Here were her results:

• 5 applications

• 5 interviews

I kid you not.

Her problem has gone from getting interviews after getting laid off 4 months ago, to preparing for her 5 upcoming interview cycles.

And, you know the solution. We started customizing her resume.

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Where is the Content?

I was marinating on this. I’ve written about customizing your resume regularly—for a long time.

But no one seems to do it. Even when I was hiring at Apollo 3 months ago, 95% of resumes were clearly not customized for the position.

What’s the cause?

For one—there’s very little content.

Everything on google for ‘pm resume’ is just templates encouraging a single base-resume.

On top of that: even if people are aware they should customize their resume, there’s no practical content on how to do it well.

That’s where today’s post comes in.

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Today’s Deep Dive

Words: 3,364 | Est. Reading Time: 16 Minutes

1. Key principles of customization

2. Examples of customizing resumes

   Including:

   • An aspiring PM resume

   • A product leader resume (15 years of experience)

3. How to handle a layoff on the resume

4. Most common mistakes

5. Beyond the resume

6. Depth vs breadth

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1. Key principles of customization

There’s 6 key things we want to do in customizing our resume to catch the eye of recruiters.

And make it past AI Applicant Tracking System (ATS) screeners:

Understanding each of these will help elucidate the why behind some of the changes I’ll model in section 2.

Principle 1 - Recast our experience to become ideal

The first thing you’ll want to do when reading a job description is ask:

“What archetypes of person would the hiring manager be ecstatic to hire?”

Then you need to figure out the archetype that’s closest to you.

And re-cast as many details as possible to become that person.

Principle 2 - Re-tell our story to be a straight line

The easiest way to match into an archetype is to have a “straight line” path.

Humans don’t deal very well with winding paths, even though most of us have one.

You want to make your winding path seem like a straight line to the job:

• Had a 2-year stint outside PM? → Consider removing it entirely.

• Have a job that doesn’t fit the archetype? → Minimize it.

• Did something else for years? → Recast it.

The goal is not to represent all of yourself. The goal is represent the best parts of yourself for that job.

Principle 3 - Customize every bullet for the job

It’s tempting to have bullet points about highly impactful features — but if they aren’t positioning you for the job, the space can be better used.

You might believe that a 15% activation lift is more important than a 7.5% increase in developer experience.

But, if the job is focused on internal tools, developer experience is a much more exciting metric to move.

Principle 4 - Use the keywords the ATS seeks

You’ve seen how well ChatGPT works. And so have the architects behind the Applicant Tracking Systems every job goes through.

Example from CVViz

But, these systems aren’t able to really understand the meaning behind the words on the screen. Instead, they’re just looking for their existence.

They much prefer resumes that cover all of the bases to one’s that only partially do. So you can just engineer your resume to do that.

Principle 5 - Drop examples to intrigue

One of the hidden agendas of the resume is to create a compelling reason to interview you.

Even if you tick all the boxes, the best candidates also elicit a feeling that, “I just have to know more about this person.”

You need to drop enough storytelling in so they want to follow-up.

Principle 6 - Flip your weaknesses

Once you’ve done all of the above, you should ask yourself: what are the most common reasons you are going to get disqualified from the job?

The rest of your resume customization efforts should be targeted to flipping those into strengths.

Via narrative, bullet points, and everything else, you should erase any remaining doubt.

So: how do you actually do this in practice? Let’s go through actual word docx files.