UX and Tech Resumes: 5 Ways they’re Wasting your Worth 

Why do I Care About Tech Resumes?

Resumes are unforgiving. It’s often the only impression us hiring managers have of an employee’s work history. Every word buys time or yells “pass”: the harsh, honest reality of sifting through hundreds of applications.

For resume-building applicants in tech, especially in the more competitive UX industry, this is daunting. How do I stand out? The truth is, you may already do. But, conventional resume advice is like plastic surgery: it’s making your idiosyncratic experiences generic.

Your resume is likely hampering you. After all, this job market is rough – and you’ve probably wordsmithed the thing to death. But – as product iterations have shown us – nothing is perfect, and treating your resume like a testable user experience is the first step towards making bank.

Like any experience, think about the users: the screeners, interviewers, and hiring manager.

Your resume is likely hampering you.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

That’s why we’ve compiled our 5 biggest complaints – reasons we’ve passed on resumes – and shown you what to do about each. While the below examples are catered to product-specific tech areas, this resume advice is universal.

Not all is lost. If you avoid these frustrating gaps hiring managers lament: resumes can also be the easiest value-to-dollar investment you ever make. Think about it.

Resume wordsmithing is a gold forge. Only a few days of communicative finessing could be the difference between a five-figure salary and a six-figure one. Mere word changes could make the difference between a smaller or bigger home.

Resume wordsmithing is a gold forge.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

On this note, we never encourage lying; but, we do underscore not cheapening your worth. Never change how you word the truth, but allow the truth to change how you word it.

Don’t massage a resume to make a tech bootcamp appear like a real tech company. It cheapens the lessons learned at said bootcamp.

Never change how you word the truth: allow the truth to change how you word it.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

The best applicant isn’t always the best candidate: we want to change that. It’s our hope that stronger candidates don’t get canned, but noticed. May value float to the top.

Resume Complaint 1: Emphasizing Outputs over Outcomes

Never betray process for purpose. Conventional resume advice emphasizes cold-hard numbers and metrics. While this isn’t bad advice, it isn’t helpful to hiring managers: who ask “So what?”.

Too many resumes list hours spent, epics completed, or projects delivered without emphasizing the outcome of the aforementioned processes. The numbers may be fantastic, but what did they accomplish?

Never betray process for purpose.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Unless the purpose is self-intuitive, don’t ever forget to mention the impact your deliverables or delivery had on the organization. Measuring impact may be tricky, but essential to mention.

Why? Hiring is vetting value: understanding what overall impact or net change an additional head will bring the overall headcount. Hiring may vet you, but it isn’t about you.

It’s about an unfulfilled job to be done or an unsolved problem: a value gap. That’s why communicating how you have filled this same value gap is the fastest ticket to an interview.

Bad resume example

Check out how the below user experience researcher applicant words their experiences. Imagine you are hiring to fill an unmet need for your organization to deeply understand and make decisions based on common user journeys and pain points.

Senior User Experience Researcher | Valuxr | April 2022 to May 2023

• Conducted 68 hours of user interviews with 16 enterprise customers to inform 5 product journey maps.
• Delivered 5 research readouts with results from A/B testing, analytics, and ethnographic research.
• Traveled to 12 different locations to conduct field studies and contextual inquiries.

Does this example satisfy your needs? Likely not. The candidate exhibits they can get a variety of research done, but not what said research yielded.

If trees had resumes, they wouldn’t just advertise growth rate or branch count, but rather their fruit yield and ability to feed you.

What’s more valuable in a fruit tree’s resume? Its branch count, growth rate, or its ability to feed you?

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Good resume example

Let’s give the same resume experience sample a makeover. What impact should you emphasize?

Project, platform, and process impacts are the three cornerstones of potential impact.

• Project impacts are the results of your direct collaborations.
• Platform impacts are measurable or noticeable front or back-end differences your work had on the entire product or tech stack.
• Process impacts are company or vertical-wide impacts your innovative collaboration, methodology, or ideation brought to improve the company.

A good experience has all three.

Project, platform, and process impacts are the three cornerstones.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Take a look:

Senior User Experience Researcher | Valuxr | April 2022 to May 2023

• Conducted and synthesized 68 user interview hours across 16 revenue-strategic enterprise customers to inform 5 different product roadmaps: 3 legacy and 2 net-new.
• Applied mixed-method results from A/B testing, analytics, and ethnographic research to inform product-wide information architecture improvements: increasing adoption by 25%.
• Pioneered 12 onsite user fields studies and contextual inquiries to iterate and enable new company-wide user research process accelerating PDLC analysis paralysis.

Much better, right? We see what the candidate could contribute to the projects we put them on, their platform-wide impact on meaningful metrics like user adoption, and how they can make our company better.

More than their outputs, they sell the outcomes. This is a fantastic first step, but that won’t be enough. Let’s move onto the elephant in the resume room.

Resume Complaint 2: Inappropriate or Inordinate Keywords

Don’t cheapen words. Keywords are important. This very article faces the same challenge as your resumes: how do we use the correct amount of “resume” related words to get to the front of Google’s search results?

While we must wisely consider including said word, we also don’t ever want that to be our core purpose: betraying the very value we claim to offer. We aren’t writing for bots or clicks, but to help people.

Don’t cheapen words.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

The same applies to your resume: honestly use the keywords as you exhibited them on the job. Breathe meaning into them. Just as spamming the word “resume” in this article may seem unnatural and insulting to self-respecting humans, so would dissonant name dropping of coding libraries, frameworks, methods, or business jargon.

Even if your first screener is a bot, remember: bots read like people – and a person will always read your resume at the end of the day.

A resume is already a test of your communication skills. How briefly can you surmise your qualifications for a particular role? Words carry power, and the most universal indicator of social success is our ability to accurately, clearly, and briefly convey the optimal message.

Stay tuned for Valuxr’s guide on grammar: another salary booster – where subtle distinctions like active vs passive tense can prevent your screener from snoozing.

A resume is already a test of your communication skills.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Grammar affects keyword placement. Keyword placement is affected by grammar. Let’s dive into better examples of these “make it” or “break it” subtleties below.

Bad resume example

The below example of a Software Engineering resume jam packs so many keywords, it’s awkward. Density is important – but keyword jamming gives no time to digest and raises fraudulence red flags.

Software Engineer | Valuxr | April 2021 to Current

• Engineered 12 front/back-end services; Python, mySQL, and Go processing 1,250 GC/AWS S3 buckets into Android/Apple mobile viewport-responsive React GUI via APIs.
• Applied NLP on 900 SQL dbs towards patent-pending recursive genAI search ql optimization.

This is tragic. The resume represents a robust engineer: one with people skills and front and back-end engineering experience with the ability to handle a multi-cloud backend feeding into an effective multi-platform front-end.

But, their ability is indigestible and uncommunicated. They are a business’ dream developer, if only the business could recognize this.

Don’t let your ability be indigestible and uncommunicated.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Good resume example

Contrast this with the balance of the example below, which takes time to explain each experience. It’s ok to speak more about a role – especially when there’s incredible depth to be found. Breathe life into why you earned each keyword like a badge.

No room? Consider two-page resumes – if you have 5+ years of experience – or emphasizing recent experience and truncating previous roles.

Let’s take a look at the same resume, enlivened.

Software Engineer | Valuxr | April 2021 to Current

• Optimized retail company inventory and cost by $2.5M developing a patent-pending fullstack internal physical storage location Android and Apple mobile application featuring generative AI.
• Accomplished this by developing 12 back-end services leveraging Python, mySQL, and Go to convert cloud storage data across 1,250 Google and AWS buckets into a React UI front-end.
• Collaboratively reduced latency building a post and rest API model.
• Applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) on 900 SQL databases towards a recursive search query optimization.

This is still keyword-laden and technical, yet focuses more on the business objectives and process behind the impressive keywords. Moreover, it takes the space to define less-well known acronyms and speak naturally.

I move from doubting their ability to use Go to appreciating the engineering ingenuity of optimizing an inventory system. There’s purpose behind the prowess. The keywords stick.

Now, we dive into an even more important pitfall: our biggest resume pet-peeve yet.

Resume Complaint 3: Favoring Metrics over Mankind

A company denotes collaboration. Companies rarely hire one-man bands. In fact, performance evaluations, hiring, and firing are all peer sports. Hate it or love it, if you don’t give evidence you work well with others – no matter how difficult the others are – you aren’t hireable material.

Companies rarely hire one-man bands.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Write about the people’s roles – not necessarily job titles – you collaborated with, and the people your deliverables impacted. Even if your project was isolated or you had a handful of presentations: who were these people?

Navigating bureaucracy and the intricacies of corporate politics is a profession in itself. Showcasing your ability to do so to get your job done is absolutely the sign of resume maturity.

Too many resumes enumerate fantastic accomplishments without a hint that the project entailed more people. Don’t favor metrics over mankind.

The key to making an impression – to showcasing impact – isn’t to flaunt your solo contributions, but how your piece affected the outcomes of your team. As a result, the outcomes measured will be far more impressive.

Bad resume example

It’s easy and often necessary to boast, “I did X, Y, and Z!” According to our first flaw: “So what?” Outcomes trump output.

But – if we’re honest – the true outcomes likely don’t come from your fingertips, but from others. Recognize these collaborators. Name their function and state how you collaborated like a well-oiled machine.

Take the below product manager resume, who seems to have single handedly started a revolution:

Product Manager | Valuxr | December 2020 to May 2023

• Executed decision-making towards key product milestones in competitive product portfolio by closely aligning with user needs.
• Oversaw 2 strategic, successive product launches: one failure informing another success based on OKR driven KPI realignment.
• Transitioned monolithic to agile development process: writing 15 PRDs culminating in 8 completed epics over three years.

What a pity! This Product Manager clearly collaborated with researchers, designers, engineering, and market teams – yet forces us to read in-between the lines to recognize this teamwork.

Good resume example

Let’s try again, and focus on the team:

Product Manager | Valuxr | December 2020 to May 2023

• Executed decision-making across product and platform engineering, market and competitive research, UX and UXR, marketing, and sales towards key product milestones in competitive product portfolio by closely aligning with user needs.
• Oversaw 2 strategic, successive product launches: one failure informed by sales leads and UX research informing another massive $2M success launch based on collaborative OKR driven KPI realignment.
• Cross-functionally collaborated with engineering leads to transition from monolithic to agile development process: writing 15 PRDs culminating by co-leading sprints across 8 completed epics over three years.

Voila! Just a few added acknowledgements reframe an almost narcissistic perspective into a team player that can cooperate with and plug into any vertical for shared success.

Our first point advised favoring outcomes over outputs. Here, we showed how to amplify outcomes with the collaborative blast radii of others.

Read on to examine how to truly get ahead of the curve and make a life-changing impression.

Amplify outcomes with the collaborative blast radii of others.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Resume Complaint 4: Ignoring Job-Posting Questions

Resumes are FAQs. People lament how so little can summarize so much – yet they fail to understand the hiring manager’s situation. Managers hire to delegate work they can’t do alone. Thus – their time is limited.

How, then, do they have the time to screen college-application-sized packages for denizens while still fulfilling duties beyond their bandwidth?

Resumes are your FAQs.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Job postings can be notoriously inaccurate: from requesting unrealistic qualifications to being haphazardly. It is your job to interpret and empathize with the questions behind them. Start by deducing universal truths: everyone wants to improve profit.

How? Everyone wants to augment value. How? Now you specialize: understanding the unfilled position’s role in the organization’s physiology to accomplish these goals. The below questions are far more useful than the self-absorbed: Am I qualified? Ignore qualifications for now, and ask.

Is this a pioneer position?

Or, is it to scale current talent into project gaps?

What are the projects?

Why are they being funded?

What underlying business risks are there to them not filling this vacancy?

What overall industry is the company in? Is it B2B? Is it B2C?

What does the job posting claim you’ll be doing and what you need to be doing what you’re doing? Why?

Are there bizarre or outlier skills requested?

Questions build empathy. Now, you are far more equipped to make the decision to apply and also cater your resume to answer the questions in the job post.

Here’s another captain-obvious secret: hiring managers often rely on or outsource HR screeners to find resumes directly addressing the job post they are assigned to write.

Each unanswered question in the above mental exercise leads to an excellent interview question: not only helping you vet them, but helping them vet you. Let’s dive into job posting tone-deaf vs calibrated resumes.

Job Posting Prompt

First, let’s reference a few points in MadeUpCompany’s job Technical Program Manager posting:

• Agile metrics proficiency and data calculation like capacity planning, project dashboards, and stakeholder reporting.
• 6+ years’ experience in expert stakeholder communication, standup facilitation, note-taking, and leadership reporting demonstrating expert verbal and written English skills.
• Ability to manage multiple concurrent projects and understand cross functional needs – informing engineering gaps for optimal business outcomes.

We get it. Reading these ad nauseam becomes repetitive and boring. Catering your resume to each underlying desire will pay off. Just imagine you wrote it.

Of all the many skills a Technical Program Manager has, did you notice a pattern of desperation here? Did you notice a particular value void that needs filling? They clearly have engineering capacity planning, reporting, and likely business prioritization communication gaps.

Catering your resume to the each underlying job posting’s desire will pay off.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Let’s look at an example ignoring what this posting asks for.

Bad resume example

Imagine you wrote the above job posting, and the below resume was one of hundreds passing by your desk.

Technical Program Manager | Valuxr | January 2021 to Current

• Orchestrated product cadence and value realization in core feature – participated in cloud $800k engineering cost optimization project alongside key leadership stakeholders.
• Led standups and facilitated roadmapping discussions across 3 fiscal years.

This isn’t a bad resume, but misses the mark when it comes to answering the underlying questions. As a technical program manager’s role ranges from sprint planning, to overseeing roadmapping, to reducing cloud operation costs; it’s important to flesh out the experiences the job calls for.

Order also matters. The second point would be a stronger first impression, based on the hiring criteria. This candidate is qualified, but a likely pass. Time to rewrite their resume.

Order also matters.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Good resume example

Let’s try to rephrase the same candidate’s experiences. The below resume would get the interview and move onto an offer.

Technical Program Manager | Valuxr | January 2021 to Current

• Conducted 3 fiscal years’ worth of engineering daily capacity planning: facilitating 1200+ agile standups with 25 engineers, data scientists, and product teammates across 5 key features, with verbal and written timely project estimate reporting.
• Applied other metrics towards operational cost efficiency towards $800k annual engineering cost reduction in collaboratively suggested optimization project alongside key leadership stakeholders.

See the difference? This resume answers questions, evidences collaboration, has the right keywords, and shows outcomes – but there is one resume masterstroke tying everything together.

This final tip is so obvious it rarely shows up – but is at the heart of every business.

Resume Complaint 5: Lacking Financial Impact

Money. Money. Money. Money. A job application is your justification for people to spend money on you.

Are you a black hole, a return of investment, or a value tree?

Do you demonstrate, based on previous behavior, financial gains?

Are you a black hole, a return of investment or a value tree? Can you prove it?

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

At the end of the day, the job poster needs to justify their hire – appearing before their manager and an executive council to petition for the new position and vouch for their candidate to fill it. Do you give them enough to financially justify you? This extends beyond the hiring decision.

This may seem harsh, but it’s completely understandable. Money is a mere symbol of value. If you followed the prior points – tying your contributions outcomes to the organization – then showing financial impact is as simple as paying attention during previous company all-hands: knowing the right numbers to share or keep confidential. It’s not always clear cut how to do this, but here are some suggestions.

If your project had a target market, what was the Total Addressable Market in dollar amount? If your individual output played a larger role in profit, what was the estimate of said profit?

If the process you introduced increased efficiency, what overall revenue gains versus the previous year can healthily tie back to operational efficiency boost? While only the Chief Revenue Officer has complete accuracy, most will appreciate a fact-based estimate.

Most will appreciate a fact-based estimate.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Let’s dive into how your resume can get this chef’s kiss.

Bad examples

Below is a product designer candidate struggling against hundreds in a saturated market after an unexpected layoff.

UX Designer | Valuxr | February 2023 to March 2024

• Built and established visual design system and standardized platform library and processes for product release efficiency across multiple products.
• Collaborated with Product, Market, Branding teams to apply customer/user research towards redesigned and rebranded experience for 3 legacy products – rapidly testing and iterating low-to-high fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes in short notice.

This candidate shows promise! They built a design library, work well with people, and can procure brand-friendly, user-valued designs in short notice. But, against hundreds, they will quickly get lost in the noise of others.

How can we help?

Good examples

Regardless of a company’s performance, contributions will always tie to some financial metric – even if unreleased. Say the candidate did some research: referencing legally shareable metrics or reaching out to remaining colleagues to procure an accurate estimate of their impact.

Take a look at the same candidate’s now top-of-the-line resume:

UX Designer | Valuxr | February 2023 to March 2024

• Impacted the entire $45M enterprise product portfolio by accelerating product pipeline efficiency 60%: worked with Eng, Go-to-Market, and Prod to rebrand, standardize, and launch platform design library and design processes across 24+ features.
• Improved legacy product profit by $1.2M by working with Product, Market, Branding teams to apply customer/user research and churn data towards redesigned and rebranded experience – rapidly testing and iterating low-to-high fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes in short notice towards a 45% reduction in product churn in 5 months.

This not only maintains the core design strengths, it also saves effort translating their skills into business cost justifications. “They took only five months to contribute to a $1.2M product profit change,” speaks far more to cross functional leaders than merely saying, “They aren’t a jerk and have skills”.

Ensure your resume saves effort translating skills into business cost justifications.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

If the above designer was laid off, it was likely due to Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) missing the mark. Notice how they didn’t lie about missed company performance, but rather still painted the financial impact of their design collaborations.

This is another misconception about financial metrics: it is possible to separate your own team’s contributions from your company’s bad performance. Just be sure to underscore what you did about it rather than what they failed to. In this candidate’s case, they brilliantly used churn data to inform the next steps.

Most companies are struggling and looking for individual contributors and managers understanding the heavy lifting needed towards organizational tenacity.

It is possible to separate your own team’s contributions from your company’s bad performance.

https://valuxr.com/ux-tech-resumes-wasting-worth/

Congratulations, you now have the five keys to proving value. This isn’t just resume advice, but the ability to set goals and forge gold. The ability to show purpose over process – which resumes are merely a part of.

If you make it clear you care about outcomes, breathe life into important keywords, know how to work well with others, address each job posting’s core concerns, and have the financial metrics to back you up – you not only are among the most hireable material on the market; but also have the value standards to thrive in every next opportunity.