Akshay Phadké, 32, has spent the last decade climbing the ranks in both Big Tech and startups.
“I aspired to work at such places alongside people who were curious to learn new things, looked at the way things were and thought they could be made better, and wanted to make a difference in people’s lives with their work,” Phadké told Business Insider.
The Seattle-based senior software engineer at Webflow started his career in tech by landing two consecutive internships at Ericsson while pursuing his master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
After graduating from his master’s program in 2016, Phadké was hired full-time at Ericsson before working at Microsoft, B2B SAAS fintech startup Vareto, and Webflow.
In addition to landing his offer from Microsoft, Phadké also secured final onsite interview rounds at Meta, Amazon, Dropbox, and Yelp, as well as job offers from 23andMe and Wayfair.
The offers didn’t come easily, though.
He said he had “countless interviews” where the outcome wasn’t in his favor, and each rejection stung, especially in cases where he’d reached the final stage of the interview loop. When Phadké got the good news of his job offers, he felt “shock mixed with half-disbelief and relief, like I’d just run a marathon.”
Four ways to make your résumé stand out
Here’s the exact résumé that helped Phadké score these victories, and the four choices he made that he feels helped him stand out from other candidates.
1. Keep a narrow focus on technical strengths
“Listing a lot of technologies — even if someone has used all of them — can hurt more than help,” he said, as it could be perceived by hiring teams as inflating your capabilities.
“New grads or early-in-career candidates may feel tempted to include more technologies to make their résumé more competitive, but it only opens them up to more scrutiny,” he said. “Tech companies are looking for engineers who’ve solved meaningful problems at scale. These opportunities require time and effort to build, so for someone with five to seven years of experience, the number of such projects will usually be in the single digits.”
Listing too many technologies can also backfire when interviewers probe the candidate’s capabilities, Phadké explained.
“A less-than-satisfactory response to a question about a technology one hasn’t used recently — even if they’re familiar with it — may mean a rejection, especially if a lot of candidates are competing for the same role,” he said.
On his résumé, Phadké mentioned only the top technologies — the ones he’d used the most and had the most technical knowledge of — with each role, and rated his own expertise with each technology with a graphic showing his self-assessed skill level between one and five.
“This was an attempt to show my confidence in certain skills rated higher by me, and acknowledge that I had more learning left in other skills rated lower,” he said. “I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t claiming expert-level competence in all the skills listed on my resume.”
Phadké highlighted his Apache Spark expertise prominently in the description of his last role, which he feels helped him stand out in his Microsoft application, as it was one of the technologies the team was investing in.
When the hiring team asked him deep probing questions about technologies that he had less experience with, Phadké was upfront and honest if he didn’t know the answer. “It isn’t possible to be an expert in everything, and being honest about not knowing the answer is better, in my opinion, than guesswork,” he said.
2. Be concise in all résumé elements
This same “less is more” strategy served Phadké in his overall résumé, which he kept to a lean one-pager.
“Hiring managers dedicate 30 seconds to a minute to review each résumé,” Phadké said. “I wanted to ensure that my résumé communicated the most important pieces of information in that timeframe, while also creating a strong hook.”
To achieve these goals, in addition to ensuring he didn’t add too many technical details, he served up a hook by dedicating two to three lines to describe each of his key projects.
“Because of this, I was able to create a sense of curiosity, and I was consistently able to secure a hiring manager technical screening interview in which the hiring manager wanted to know more about my work,” Phadké said.
3. Stand out visually
Even for people without graphic design skills, you can still take steps to make your résumé visually pleasing.
Phadké included company and university logos from his past roles and schools on his résumé to create a strong brand association. He also used a custom sans-serif font over a serif font to create a polished and professional feel and adopted a grayscale color palette instead of a black one for a softer reading experience.
“I’ve never used Microsoft Word or text editing software to create my résumés,” Phadké said. “I feel résumés created this way end up looking generic — especially if you use templates, which almost everyone else does too.”
Instead, he’s experimented with a few software programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, LaTeX, and Figma to create his résumé.
4. Clearly communicate responsibilities and outcomes
Candidates sometimes blend their own achievements with team achievements on their résumés, which can make it harder for recruiters and hiring teams to determine what work they really did.
To avoid this, Phadké listed only the work he did as an individual — not what his team did collectively — and did so in simple terms without jargon.
“Hiring managers are looking for engineers who can communicate their achievements objectively and clearly understand how their work adds value,” he said.
To reveal the full scope of his project areas, Phadké ensured that his résumé emphasized projects in different areas of software engineering, spanning systems engineering, backend web development, and data engineering.
Phadké stressed that demonstrating the ability to adapt to new paradigms and technologies gives hiring managers confidence that they can trust you with projects that are out of your comfort zone.
“The takeaway for the hiring manager was my ability to pick up new technologies and be successful with them,” Phadké said.
If you landed a job in Big Tech and would like to share your story, email Jane Zhang at [email protected].
The post A software engineer shares the résumé that got him onsite interviews at Meta, Amazon, and Dropbox — and hired at Microsoft appeared first on Business Insider.
