Acing the Interview: Make Your Resume Reflect the Real You

Let's get the elephant out of the room.

Dealing with resumes sucks.

Whether you are writing your own resume, reading somebody else's, or have to give somebody uncomfortable feedback that maybe their resume isn't really up to scratch.

And for neurodivergent people like us, dealing with your resume and having to stare at it might be akin to watching paint dry.

And I'm not making that up.

I feel like I can stare at a resume for hours and feel like I just get hung up.

You get hung up on words.

hung up on sentences, trying to make any improvement and wonder, what was it about my resume that this recruiter just didn't like?

What didn't catch their eye?

Did I not use enough buzzwords, not enough numbers, not enough facts?

Your mind can spin in circles over and over and over, and you may agonize and try to figure out what went wrong and how could I improve my resume?

I want to talk about resumes specifically as they pertain to neurodivergent job seekers.

There's millions upon billions of guides and other podcast episodes about how to make a resume generally better that are pretty agnostic to how a neurodivergent person goes about

their resume.

I've come across more than a handful of things that have caused me issues with my resume, how I write it, how I read it, and how I synthesize it, that are a function of my

neurodiversity.

And there are tons of ADHD, dyslexic, autistic folks out there whose resumes I've helped and noticed, hey, there's a couple of trends here that are common amongst lots of ADHDers,

people who are autistic.

And I thought that it was worthy of doing a whole podcast episode just about how you can really tailor your resume.

as a neurodivergent person to overcome some hurdles that you may or may not know that you faced in writing your own.

I've been a hiring manager and I've also been a job applicant.

So I have two different perspectives that I'm gonna share here as far as this resume review.

It's gonna really come into a couple of different categories of things that I have seen from not just neurodivergent people, but also neuro-typical people too.

I want to be clear that these are also my opinions.

So you might ask someone else for an opinion and they might totally disagree with me and that's totally okay.

I'm here to share my opinions and my perspectives having been a hiring manager for a few years, having been a job seeker for a few years, being a tech lead, helping other people

with their resumes.

So take everything that I'm saying with a grain of salt.

But when you're looking at other people's guides or their episodes or their videos, you should be mindful of where they are coming from.

and the type of feedback and the type of suggestions that they are giving you as it might not realize who you are, you may be akin to info dumping and really getting very detailed

and verbose.

And that's the first category of issues or resumes that I wanna talk about, being too detailed or not being detailed enough.

I as an autistic person am a huge info dumper.

I will talk your ear off about my special interest if I don't shut up about it.

In a resume, you don't have the kind of space for that.

So you've got to be really short and sweet with what you want to talk about.

Otherwise, recruiter is going to throw your resume away and move on to the next person.

You want to give them just the right amount of information, not too little and not too much, to be able to get a clear idea of who you are, what you did in certain jobs or roles

or clubs, and give them a very strong and clear idea of what you actually accomplished.

Depending on your employer, might be limitations to exactly what you're actually able to say on your resume.

So please don't violate any NDAs or that you're not allowed to share.

But you want to be truthful about what actually happened.

And if you don't actually have the information, it's okay to embellish it a little bit.

Here's a resume hack for neurodivergent job seekers working on their resumes.

Recruiters don't know if you're embellishing or stretching the truth a little bit.

If you don't know exact numbers behind the impact of a project you had, the number of people who used it, process improvements, percentages, you can try to make your best guess

and embellish a little bit based on those numbers.

I am not encouraging you to outright lie or distort things that do not conform to reality.

But if you have a good guess or can make a good estimation,

That is something that recruiters want to see to be able to see the type of impact that you had, the scale of it.

If you're a software engineer who worked on performance improvements for an application and you have a good idea that it improved the load speed for your users by about a second

or so, you could put that on your resume.

Even if you don't have an exact number behind it, it's helpful to have a good estimation and eyeball it.

Recruiters from other employers are not going to know exactly that number is true or false.

What they want to know is that you actually care about this as a statistic, include it, and that you are actually sure that you made a difference for your project, whatever that

difference was.

And that is an important part about info dumping as a neurodivergent person.

You want to have the right balance of information.

Not too much.

You don't want to include every single statistic that's in there, but not nothing either.

And if you don't have the exact information in front of you or if you can't find it, it's appropriate to make a guess.

Do not lie, do not distort reality, do not actually look up the number and say it was one second and in reality it was actually 0.2 of a second, 0.2 seconds.

If the numbers behind what you're talking about don't really paint a good picture for the project,

then don't include it and actually include a project that did move the needle in some meaningful way.

Whether that's a change in the number of users, making a process more efficient, bringing people together, whatever it is, the thing you have to ask yourself and reflect on

internally is, what did I actually do?

What did I actually accomplish?

My being autistic means I can often zero in really, really hard on the trees and not see the entire forest.

I'm working on a component of a project

and I sometimes might fail to see the bigger picture.

And in my past, my resume would reflect that.

I would be working in a really small component of something, but forget to celebrate what was actually happening.

Now having been pretty tenured and experienced, I can look at the bigger picture and see, okay, what I am doing is a smaller piece of a greater whole and being able to articulate

that on my resume and explain that and express it is huge, not just for your resume.

but for your confidence, for you getting promoted internally, for you being able to express to other people, this was the contribution that I made onto this project.

It could not have happened without me because I did something or some things.

Not just being able to qualify it, to talk about it with words, but being able to quantify it, to put a number to it, to say, I made this difference, I made this numeric change.

Numbers don't lie.

If you made a change that resulted in a one second improvement to load time for an app or a website, that one second cannot be argued with.

It should be celebrated.

You should pop a champagne bottle if it's that big of a deal.

You gotta celebrate it.

And then you gotta put it somewhere in a brag book and save it and don't lose track of it.

Maybe your work experience is untraditional.

Maybe you don't have just a written resume or don't have enough to put on one page or two pages and you want to do something a little bit extra.

I know tons of neurodivergent people who have a hybrid format resume where they have a traditional page or so of a resume and then they have a portfolio.

That brings me to the second subject of this episode is having a portfolio and having some sort of non-resume artifact to be able to talk to recruiters with.

A portfolio can take lots of different shapes for people, but the point is it's something that you can curate.

You can really show off your skills, show off your talent, your work history, and things that you have done to exhibit really strong skills that you have.

Your ability to detail, your commitment, your focus, really steep expertise on certain subjects or topics.

For software engineers, this could be a GitHub portfolio or a website or an app.

or something that you can point to and have a strong amount of confidence talking about because you own it, this is yours.

And you can really understand what's actually happening here because you worked on it end to end, or maybe it was you and like one or two or three other people.

When I was in school, I did a startup with one of my best friends.

It was a really awesome thing to talk about that to recruiters.

It was something that I was able to work on outside of my classes.

It was a full blown startup.

We were in LLC and everything.

And this was such an amazing thing for me to talk to recruiters and say, this is a project that I have done.

I'm going to show you a little bit of it.

When I talked about this project on my resume and had a link out to it, about half of the recruiters who I actually got on the call with, on a phone with, would ask me about this

project that I had done and were really interested in learning it, learning a little bit more about it, and trying to get a feel for what I actually learned and did with it.

For other types of roles for a designer, maybe you'd have a portfolio, you'd have some case studies for product managers, business analysts might have some business reviews or

does data reports.

The point is not necessarily that you have to have a high quantity of projects, but you should be creating some type of non-resume artifact that can go hand in hand with a

resume.

If you're going to talk about a personal project on your resume, it should be very easy to go to that project from your resume.

For my case, if it was a resume from school, I would link out to the project and I would link out to a case study that I had done to help inform the development of the project.

If you are a user experience designer, you want to make sure that your portfolio is very easy for recruiters to access, whether that is a thing that gets attached to your resume

itself, maybe export as a PDF and have it in the same document, or alternatively, just have it on the web somewhere and link out to it.

You don't wanna just have every single little project that you ever did on this portfolio.

You wanna have the right things, the best things that are the best exhibits of your skill, of your expertise, of your talent.

And you wanna be able to express and explain that in an interview.

In a previous episode, I talked about the star method.

What I'm going to talk about next is a similar format where you can express your achievements and accomplishments for a very simple framework.

I did X and I accomplished Y, which improved Z.

What did you do?

You did X.

You did a thing.

You may have improved the performance of a certain build pipeline within your engineering systems.

What was the actual accomplishment that you did?

What part of that system did you improve?

Did you make requests in parallel?

Did you remove things from the process that weren't important?

Could you defer things to later and not have it be blocking something that was synchronous?

And what did it improve?

Did you improve the time that it took?

Did you improve how much memory it consumed?

The number of parallel jobs?

What was the actual nugget, the result of this improvement that you made?

Just saying that you improved the system describes the work that you did.

It describes the input.

into the system, it describes your work.

But what was the output?

When you combine your work with the time and energy it took for you to do, what was the actual change?

And you have to articulate that on a resume very clear and objective terms.

You could frame a previous example like, I did improvements to our build pipeline system by making certain requests in parallel.

which reduced the time that these pipelines took by 30 seconds.

And quantifying that even further helps as well.

Maybe this pipeline runs thousands of times a day.

So you're not just improving it by 30 seconds.

You're improving it 30 seconds per every time that that pipeline was ran.

You improved it by 30 seconds over a thousand pipeline instantiations over the course of a day.

That's 30,000 seconds.

That's 500 minutes.

That's less than 10 hours.

That's a lot.

That's the business impact.

That's what you did.

There's no lying about it.

There's no saying that you didn't have this impact.

You have to be able to express that on your resume.

The last thing I'll talk about here is the attention to detail and formatting.

This sounds like it overlaps the problems that everybody faces, but me being an autistic person means sometimes I notice every little individual detail about something, and other

times it goes completely by me and I'm blind to issues that I've made until long after I've sent a resume with a glaring issue or a glaring typo inside of it.

your ADHD brain might be tempted to just slap parts of your resume together and ship it off and call it a day.

But when the fonts don't match, there's different bolding and colors and sizes, that could actually tick your ADHD off a little bit more than just taking the time to format it

properly.

AI tools these days like Claude ChatGPT, and Gemini are doing a pretty good job of being able to identify formatting issues with resumes.

You can upload your resume to these services or take a picture of it and submit it to them and say, please tell me what formatting errors are on my resume and what I should do to

actually fix them.

Some AI tools will do the fixing for you.

I would be a lot more cautious about downloading the resume from these services and using them as is.

It would be much easier and much safer to tell it to tell you what's wrong and just ask it rather than having it fixed it for you because who knows what other things have changed.

It might be hallucinating and might try to do other unrelated things for you.

If you're going to use an AI tool to help with the formatting, just be super duper clear about what you actually need help with and what the expected output of it is.

An example a problem could be, here is my resume in a PDF format.

Please tell me what formatting issues you see here that might be problematic, color, font, italics, size, et cetera, to really help with the consistency.

And you can even ask if the grammar helped too.

My grammar sucks.

My autistic brain forgets grammar all the time and I have to go up and look at something.

And typically things like a spell check or Google Docs will catch a lot of these issues for me.

But oftentimes that doesn't happen.

And sometimes things will slip by me.

And that's why I actually use things like Grammarly that are more focused on grammar and word tense and prose to help specifically with the actual writing of the resume itself.

and Gemini are pretty good at this, but I tend to use Grammarly for this purpose because it's what it's really good at and really focused on.

I'll admit too that the idea of staring at my resume and looking for that little out of place color or size doesn't exactly excite me either.

This is a thing where AI tools come in handy to really help you focus on the specifics, on the formatting, on the color, and look for details that sometimes you might not be able to

do.

It's a great way to lean on them without being worried about what else they're hallucinating.

You just gotta be really clear with what you're giving in, what you're inputting, your resume, and what you're getting out of it.

And if you are worried about these tools training themselves on your resume, most of them have settings which will disable the actual ability for your content to be shared with the

model itself.

So your actual data will stay with you in a kind of private and incognito mode.

So if you're worried about this data leaking out elsewhere, there are options to safeguard your privacy so you don't have to worry about that.

And a last best tip that I'll leave you with, ask your friends to help roast your resumes.

My friends have called me to professional resume roaster because I give them honest, objective feedback.

I've got dozens of people who have sent them to me and said, please tell me what's wrong with it.

They don't ask me to fix it.

They just say, please tell me what I should improve and what I should change.

And your friends and your allies and peers are your best resource in this too.

They want to help you get to the next job too.

And they really want to help you see what you're made of.

And they want to be able to tell you,

You're forgetting this project that you did.

You're forgetting this achievement as accomplishment.

You should totally put this in your resume too.

They'll help remind you about things you may be forgetting about.

So don't forget to lean on your friends and your peers and your colleagues.

Remember to be good friends of other people and they'll come to help you back too.

You ask them for help, they might ask you for help.

Remember to help each other.

This whole resume thing can sound really scary and awful and evil.

It doesn't have to be.

You have to be really conscious and kind with yourself.

Spend a little bit of time focusing in on the details and also remembering to celebrate yourself.

You have made a lot of accomplishments.

You've done really awesome work.

Congratulations.

Now it's time to actually put it out there and show the world what you're made of.