Salesforce engineer shares a resume hack that helped them land their first job

The idea was to reveal them and then track which recruiters were interested enough in his profile to scan the code.

“I was just passing out resumes and seeing who was actually hitting on me,” Ghatage said. “When it came time after nine months for my career fair, I focused a little more on those companies.”

He doubled down on custom resumes and talked to recruiters at those companies, instead of just visiting big names like Google and Meta, which had long queues.

“That really helped because just from the first career fair I attended properly, I had six or seven calls,” he said.

Cisco, where Ghatage got a full-time offer, was one of them.

For the next three years, he worked at Cisco and SAP. In 2019, he moved to Salesforce, where he is currently a software engineer in the company’s Bay Area office.

This is the resume Ghatage took to job fairs in 2016:

Looking back at the resume he built eight years ago, there are three things Ghatage would keep the same:

One page: Now, on the other side of the interview boards, Ghatage recommends sticking to a one-page resume, even if it means cutting back on the skills and education sections.

“Honestly, interviewing is a very boring job,” he said, and most technical reviewers want to get back to their more pressing tasks. “I try to keep my resume short and one page no matter what I get.”

Don’t over-customize: Ghatage said he was careful not to include small projects he undertook many years ago just to seem in keeping with the role at hand.

“I’d rather talk confidently about something tangential or something maybe unrelated but still in the tech field” rather than overly personalizing and then fumbling at the interview stage.

Include links: He also liked that his resume included links to his personal website and project work on GitHub. Instead of sending a long resume, links can provide more information if a hiring manager is interested. Adding backlinks, like he did during the career fair, is also a good way to track who’s interested in your app, he said.

What would he change?

There are also a few things Ghatage would change about the document:

Open source contributions: Projects on open source communities like Apache have been a career boost for Ghatage since he started working on them.

“Open source contributions are akin to real work experience that is validated by industry experts,” he said of adding them under his education details. “This would serve as an excellent signal to potential employers that my knowledge and skills have been assessed by industry experts and are already making an impact.”

Change of work experience: Writing about early work experience is difficult because it often had limited impact, Ghatage said.

Still, “Maybe I’d do more research on how it’s more relevant to the jobs I’m applying to.” He also said he would move work experience above the skills section as it is seen as a greater value add.

Business Insider checked his work history.

Do you work in technology, consulting or finance and have a story to share about your personal resume journey? Please contact at [email protected].