Ankit Virmani had spent five years in consulting when he began considering a move into technology.
“I always thought in my heart that I wanted more technical depth. I wanted to build things rather than over-sell them,” said Virmani, who initially moved to the United States from India. United to pursue a master’s degree.
In the first half of 2020, he dove into it.
After finishing a day of full-time work at Deloitte, Virmani would spend three to four hours practicing coding each evening, and another two hours learning about the industry. He also began spending time with people in the field, asking them about real-time scenarios and the challenges they face in their work.
“I didn’t want answers from them. I wanted their thought process: how to deal with these complex, large-scale challenges,” he told Business Insider.
It didn’t pay off right away. He was rejected by Microsoft and Amazon at different stages of their application process.
Six months after deciding to change careers, he landed a job as a data and machine learning specialist in Google’s Seattle office.
This is the resume he used to apply for his job at Google, which pays more than $300,000 a year. BI verified his employment and compensation.
The two-page resume Virmani used to apply to Google in 2020. Ankit Virmani
Sacrifice the “one page only” CV rule
Looking back on his resume four years later, Virmani said he would make some formatting changes.
“This CV makes everything equally important, and that’s what I don’t like,” he said. “I would have a gradient of importance, like summary at the top, accomplishments so far, and then I would go to work experience, education, and technical skills.”
But with more information about what employers like Google value, Virmani said he would keep several things the same, including document length.
Sacrifice the “one page only” rule to improve readability: Virmani broke the “one page only” rule and prioritized a clean resume. “It has very well-structured sections and high-level themes,” he said of the use of subheadings like “data architecture” and “cloud strategy.” His manager at Google later told him that the style helped them fulfill responsibilities without having to decipher the lines below.
Highlight team effort: Virmani said some people put too much emphasis on individual contributions in their CV: “It’s never that way, at least in my experience – it’s always a team effort.” That’s why he focused parts of his resume on the accomplishments of his teams. “Google highly values honesty and humility. It’s the company culture: we know that nothing great is achieved by an individual,” he said.
Record some details for the interview: Virmani said he is careful not to over-explain his past projects so that he can spark curiosity and have a good conversation during the interview: “If you put everything in the CV, you will run out of points to cover during the interview. ‘interview. “.
Virmani isn’t the only one who chooses to sacrifice “typical” resume decisions. For Shola West, it was about breaking the “no gap on resume” idea.
West is part of a growing group of Gen Zers who are trying to destigmatize the resume gap — a period of unemployment between jobs or between school and work.
West previously told BI that she took a year off early in her career to figure out what she really wanted to pursue. She made up for her CV gap and now works at an advertising agency and runs a career advice side business.
For Mariana Kobayashi, breaking away from resume norms meant abandoning the written format altogether.
Kobayashi landed a job as an account manager at Google after hosting a video explaining why she should get the role.
She sent her video resume, which took her 10 hours to create, directly to the hiring manager, Kobayashi previously told BI. A Google recruiter saw the video and contacted her, and she eventually landed a position with the tech giant.
Do you work in finance or consulting and have a story to share about your personal CV journey? Email this reporter at shubhangigoel@insider.com.
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