- Akshay Phadké has spent the last decade in technology, from Big Tech to startups.
- He faced countless refusals before four CV strategies that helped him get a job at Microsoft.
- He focused on technical forces, concise content, visual appeal and clear communication to stand out.
Akshay Phadké, 32, has spent the last decade climbing the ranks of Big Tech and startups.
“I sucked to work in such places alongside people who were curious to learn new things, looked at the way things were and thought they could be improved and wanted to make a difference in the life of people with their work, “Phadké told Business Insider.
Senior software engineer based in Seattle at Webflow began his career in technology by winning two consecutive courses in Ericsson while continuing 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, Startup Fintech B2B SaaS Varto and the webflow.
In addition to landing its Microsoft offer, Phadké also obtained end interviews on site in Meta, Amazon, Dropbox and Yelp, as well as job offers from 23andme and Wayfair.
However, the offers did not come easily.
He said he had “countless interviews” where the result was not in his favor, and each rejection stung, in particular in cases where he had reached the last stage of the interview loop. When Phadké obtained the good news of his job offers, he felt “a shock mixed with a half-idebelie and a relief, as if I had just run a marathon”.
Four ways to bring out your curriculum vitae
Here is the exact curriculum vitae that helped Phadké mark these victories, and the four choices he made which, according to him, helped him stand out from the other candidates.
With the kind authorization of Akshay Phadké
1. Keep a narrow accent on technical forces
“Enumerating many technologies – even if someone has used them all – can hurt more than help,” he said, because this could be perceived by hiring teams as inflating your capacities.
“New graduates or early candidates may feel tempted to include more technologies to make their curriculum vitae more competitive, but that only opens them to a more in-depth exam,” he said. “Technological companies are looking for engineers who have solved significant large -scale problems. These opportunities require time and efforts to build, so for a person with five to seven years of experience, the number of these projects will generally be Only figure. “
The listing of too many technologies can also turn against interviewers probe the candidate’s capacities, said Phadké.
“A less than satisfactory answer to a question on a technology that has not been used recently – even if they know it – can mean rejection, especially if many candidates are in competition for the same role”, he says .
In his curriculum vitae, Phadké only mentioned the best technologies – those he had used the most and had the most technical knowledge – with each role, and evaluated his own expertise with each technology with a graph showing his level self-evaluated competence between the two one and five.
“It was an attempt to show my confidence in certain skills better evaluated by me and to recognize that I had more learning left in other skills evaluated below,” he said. “I clearly meant that I did not claim competence at the level of experts in all the skills listed on my CV.”
Phadké highlighted his evidence expertise in the description of his last role, which, according to him, helped him stand out in his Microsoft application, because it was one of the technologies in which the team was investing.
When the job team asked him in -depth questions about the technologies with which he had less experience, Phadké was frank and honest if he did not know the answer. “It is not possible to be an expert in everything, and be honest not to know that the answer is better, in my opinion, than assumptions,” he said.
2. Be concise in all CV elements
This same strategy “less is more” served Phadké in his curriculum vitae global, which he kept to a lean pagmer.
“Hiring managers devote 30 seconds to one minute to review each curriculum vitae,” said Phadké. “I wanted to make sure that my curriculum vitae communicated the most important information in this time, while creating a strong hook.”
To achieve these objectives, in addition to ensuring that he has not added too much technical details, he served a hook by devoting two to three lines to describe each of his key projects.
“For this reason, I was able to create a feeling of curiosity, and I have always been able to obtain a technical screening interview with the person responsible for the manager of the recruitment manager wanted to know more about my work,” said Phadké.
3. Start visually
Even for people without graphic design skills, you can always take measures to make your curriculum vitae visually pleasant.
Phadké has included corporate logos and academics of his past roles and schools on his curriculum vitae to create a strong brand association. He also used a personalized home font on a serif font to create a polished and professional sensation and adopted a palette of gray levels instead of a black palette for a softer reading experience.
“I have never used Microsoft Word or text editing software to create my curriculum vitae,” said Phadké. “I think that curriculum vitae created in this way end up seeing generic – especially if you use models, which almost everyone does.”
Instead, he experienced some software, such as Adobe Photoshop, latex and Figma to create his curriculum vitae.
4. Clearly communicate responsibilities and results
The candidates sometimes mix their own achievements with team achievements on their curriculum vitae, which can make recruiters and hiring teams more difficult to determine the work they really did.
To avoid this, Phadké only listed the work he has done as an individual – not what his team did collectively – and did it in simple terms without a 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 whole scope of its project areas, Phadké assured that its curriculum vitae has emphasized projects in different areas of software engineering, systems engineering, web development and the data engineering.
Phadké stressed that demonstrating the ability to adapt to new paradigms and technologies gives hiring managers to the confidence they can trust you with projects that are outside your comfort zone.
“The point to remember for the recruitment manager was my ability to recover new technologies and succeed with them,” said Phadké.
If you get a job in Big Tech and want to share your story, send an email to Jane Zhang to janezhang@businessinsider.com.
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