"I've always felt a desire for deeper technical depth. "I wanted to build things rather than sell them too much," said Virmani, who came to the United States from India to seek a master's degree.In the early half of 2020, he jumped in.
After finishing a day at his full-time work at Deloitte, Virmani would spend three to four hours every night practicing coding and another two hours researching the sector. He also started spending time with people in the field, asking them about real-life scenarios and the difficulties they confront in their employment.
"I didn't want any answers from them. "I wanted to know how they think about these complex challenges on a large scale," he told Business Insider.
It didn't pay off immediately. He was turned down by Microsoft and Amazon at various phases of their application process.
Six months after deciding to change occupations, he was hired as a data and machine learning specialist at Google's Seattle branch.
Here's the resume he used to apply for a job at Google, which pays more than $300,000 annually. BI validated his employment and compensation.
Sacrificing the 'one-page only' resume rule
Looking back at his resume four years later, Virmani stated that he would make certain formatting adjustments.
"This rsum is giving importance to everything equally, which is what I don't like," he went on to say. "I would have a gradient of importance, like executive summary on top, achievements so far, and then I would go to professional experience, education, and technical skills."
However, with a better understanding of what employers like Google value, Virmani stated that he would keep several aspects of the document unchanged, including the length.
To improve readability, Virmani disregarded the "one-page only" restriction in favor of having an uncluttered resume. "It has very neatly structured sections and high-level themes," he said, referring to subheadings such as "data architecture" and "cloud strategy." His manager at Google later told him that his manner allowed them to understand his responsibilities without having to decode the lines below.
Highlighting team effort: According to Virmani, some people overemphasize individual accomplishments on their resumes: "It's never that way, at least in my experience—it's always teamwork." That's why he concentrated parts of his resume on his team's achievements. "In my experience, Google values honesty and humility. That's the company culture; we realize that no one person can accomplish anything extraordinary," he remarked.
Saving certain facts for the interview:
Virmani stated that he was careful not to over-explain his previous efforts in order to generate curiosity and have a pleasant conversation during the interview. "If you put everything in the rsum, you'll run out of points to talk about in the interview."
Virmani is not alone in deciding to forego "typical" rsum decisions. For Shola West, that meant violating the "no rsum gap" notion.
West is one of an increasing number of Generation Zs working to de-stigmatize the resume gap, which is a period of unemployed between jobs or between education and work.
West previously told Business Insider that she took a year off at the beginning of her career to figure out what she truly wanted to do. She accepted her resume gap and now works at an advertising agency while also running a career coaching business.
For Mariana Kobayashi, deviating from the rsum conventions meant forsaking the textual format entirely.
Kobayashi was hired as an account executive at Google after creating a video explaining why she was qualified for the position.
Kobayashi previously told BI that she delivered her video resume, which she created in 10 hours, directly to the hiring manager. A Google recruiter saw the video and contacted her, and she eventually got a job at the computer giant.
Do you work in finance or consulting and have a tale to tell about your own resume journey? Contact this reporter at shubhangigoel@insider.com.