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Siddharth Kashiramka joined Amazon in 2022 as a product manager for AI projects.
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Looking back, he thought his resume highlighted his impact, but he wouldn’t write in the third person now.
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And he kept it to one page, the standard recommended resume length.
Siddharth Kashiramka was six years into his post-Masters career when he started considering his next step.
He worked as a product manager at Capital One and was previously a consultant at PwC. Some of his colleagues had gone to Amazon, but he didn’t want to move his life from Virginia to Seattle. He was then approached to work with artificial intelligence at Amazon – without any action.
To prepare for his interview, Kashiramka networked with contacts who had made a similar transition and spent a month practicing for interviews, doing taster sessions on a career services platform.
After several rounds of interviews, Kashiramka was offered a product management position at Amazon in 2022. The position came with approximately $300,000 in annual compensation, a mix of base salary and stock options.
As a hiring manager, Kashiramka said that while resumes are a small part of the overall hiring process, they can still be an important decision-making tool.
“I remember a case where there were two equally good candidates for a position. They both passed the final round of interviews, but the offer had to be made to only one person,” Kashiramka said. “Ultimately, the decision depended on the candidate with the most polished resume.”
Here is the resume he applied to Amazon and other Big Tech companies. It wasn’t perfect; he told Business Insider he would change three key components.
Looking back at the resume, he said three things work well:
1. Speaking of impact: He provides a high-level description of past roles, followed by his work and its impact.
2. Summary: “The summary is very unique to me,” he said. “You can’t copy and paste it to someone else.” In the future, he would also add a short section talking about his external mentorship efforts and contributions to academic journals, which he has been doing more actively since 2022.
3. Show variation: Throughout the resume, Kashiramka used a range of keywords, including “leveraged,” “delivered,” “founded” and “collaborated.” “Unintentionally, this also optimizes for the ATS systems,” he said of the applicant tracking systems that digitally parse resumes for keywords.
What he would change
While the resume landed him interviews at Meta, Amazon, and Google, there are still a few things he would change in the future:
1. One-page resume: “I think the resume should be one page,” he said of keeping the document short. “That was a big red flag for me on this resume.” Kashiramka added that his resumes for PwC and Capital One, where he worked for Amazon, were both one page, and that he would return to that length in the future.
2. Use the first person voice: Kashiramka said another mistake was writing about herself in the third person because it sounds less personal. “It seems very pompous, to be honest,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Who am I talking about here?'”
3. Attention to detail: “I made a few grammatical errors in this,” he said. He recommends using a proofreading tool and having another set of human eyes look at the document.
Kashiramka said that while there were grammatical errors, he made sure to be consistent in formatting, for example not using periods anywhere.
Kashiramka is a senior product manager at Amazon’s Crystal City, Virginia office. Business Insider has verified his employment history and salary.
Read the original article on Business Insider
