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Farah Sharghi is a former recruiter at companies like Google, TikTok, Uber, and Lyft.
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She estimates she conducted thousands of interviews at the tech giants and now coaches people in the job search.
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One of the biggest résumé mistakes she sees is people talking about their responsibilities and not the outcomes of their work.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Farah Sharghi, a job search coach and former technical recruiter who estimates she’s conducted thousands of interviews at tech companies like Google, TikTok, Uber, and Lyft. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
The thing that I see the most, whether it’s for jobs in tech or in other industries, is that people don’t realize the system that they’re in.
If you are applying to corporate jobs, you have to understand that a corporation is there to make money. They’re not there to do you a service.
What I mean by that is people come to me and they say they want me to rewrite the résumé, which I’m happy to do. But I’ll look at their old résumé and it’s just a list of things that they’ve done without any business outcomes.
And I go, “Well, then, what did you do at work?”
“Well, I did this, I did that,” they’ll say.
OK, well, why?
If you’re exchanging your labor for money, you have to ask yourself, from the employer’s perspective, why are you doing all this stuff What is your work’s outcome for the business?
A lot of people don’t really understand that.
As I work with clients, it’s kind of an eye-opening experience for them. They start to realize their labor is worth money and if it’s worth money, they have to be able to communicate that, not only to themselves but to other companies.
They do that through their résumés and the interview process. And then when they’re working, they understand the value of their labor relative to the work they’re doing for the company that they’re working for.
That’s the resounding overarching theme across a lot of résumés I’ve seen.
When I work with people, I try to pull from them like, “Listen, in order for me to write the most effective résumé possible for you, I need additional details because if I just put someone else’s name on your résumé, anybody can say that they did your job.”
So what makes you unique to other people? And why should a business hire you? What business need are you actually solving for that? What business need do they have that needs to be solved?
If you can’t answer these questions, you’re going to be taken advantage of in the marketplace.
