Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume

The "idiot" quoted in the epigraph, whose Amazon application announced an objective of "Obtain a position at IBM," turns out to be Steve himself, and the typo cost him a pre-IPO fortune in stock options. That million-dollar blunder is his license to lecture, and the numbers behind it are real: well over five thousand resumes screened and twelve hundred candidates interviewed across an eighteen-year career. The tips themselves are mostly subtraction. Hobbies, cover letters, objective statements, certifications, and any skill you couldn't survive being quizzed on all get deleted, and the middle stretch builds a working taxonomy of resume verbs — Weasel Words, Wank Words, and the Productivity Words screeners actually trust — illustrated by the story of how Steve earned a Gulf War medal by "participating" from in front of a CNN broadcast.

The advice has aged unevenly, mostly in Steve's favor. Tip #2, "use plain text," with its scenes of Word bullets mangled into question marks, is written for a 2007 submission pipeline that no longer exists. The opening claim that resume screening is pure pattern matching, though, has only come truer, since the pattern matcher no longer needs to be human. What dates the piece is the comedy: consultants, Scrum Masters, and the certified take sustained fire, and one tip runs on a metaphorical measuring-stick joke that was standard-issue blog humor at the time. Under all of it the operating rule stays blunt: everything on a resume is a claim somebody may test, so the only safe words are the ones describing work you actually did.