My resume score is 41%, and I DGAF

Why you’re getting this: This is a friend-first newsletter. Faangboss is a weave of three essential threads: the craft of design, the art of influence, and the journey of growth in UX. I poke at connective tissues, drawing from my 20+ years of launching products and mentoring designers in tech NYC.

Amazon is having a massive layoff, about 30K people. I'm safe for now, but another round is coming in January. These types of bad news is always looming when you work in big tech. All we can do is have your resume ready.

.....and the last time I've updated was 4.5 years ago.

I got a 41% score from JobScan's ATS scanner.

The f? I must be winning in life. Reminds me of a fun article I read from Tim Denning, No one understands what the hell you do for a living.

Jobscan ingests a sample posting and compare keywords to generate a score based on frequency of the words.

The words I didn't have are: visual design and collaboration.

A human can infer words. The word "alignment" is an outcome of collaboration. But this dumb, literal AI wants the exact keyword match from patterns. Lacks interpretation and analysis.

Job descriptions describes the how. How this company want you to make the sausage. But how you make the sausage is the least important in the hierarchy of a job search. NO BODY WANTS TO HEAR about the process, UNLESS they are bought in on your value, first.

Your resume bullets are the highlighted outcomes of your achievements. It's a sell sheet. We're not selling how the sausage got made, because we don't know if you even care about it in the first place.

I wonder if job descriptions can be more honest. Just flat out and say "we want designers to help us achieve infinite growth, we want money"

At least now I can say, OK. I'LL GET CHU your money. I'll get the bag with AI, Efficiency, and time savings. You don't need to know how I do agentic ai agents, cursor or whatever else.

People should hire more assholes like me to counter their asymmetric expectations. There should be a special award for people that challenge non-methodical rigid structures and infinitely curious. #Angst 💁🏻‍♀️

Recruiters are under intense pressure to review thousands of resumes a day. I understand they may be using AI to pre-filter candidates, so we need to maximize chances to get through the first round.

We need to spoon feed it to babies. Honest truth it's ok if people don't understand what you do. Someone out there will get it. Unique people don't need to conform to mediocrity, where 100% keywords match.

I never followed any traditional resume structure. I've always conducted my own A/B testing, validated my pitch through real life interviews. No one person's content is the same, so it's hard to draw conclusions that a specific structure works for everybody.

How to create a resume in 2025

1. Write 2-3 elevator pitch about you. (Most important)
   A pitch is a concise, persuasive presentation to generate interest. You need a hook - one sentence on what to say. This part requires iteration to see if it lands, this can include:
   1. Who - What is your role, company.
   2. What problem are you solving? What's the need in the market
   3. What solution and offering do you provide?
   4. What is your unfair competitive edge?
   5. What do you want from this conversation.
2. Research target job requirements
   1. Research open/archived jobs that you are interested to pursue.
   2. Isolate the keywords from that job posting and aggregate them into themes.
3. Sell yourself through storytelling your achievements
   1. You sell the value you generated. Imagine if the project didn't have you in it, what could have happened without you.
   2. Create a storyline that threads achievements, philosophies, and personality. This creates the magic sauce of memorability.

Hope this eases your efforts a bit. Took me 4 days to rewrite a new one.

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Have a great week ahead,