4 Tips to Write a Product Manager Resume Recruiters Will Notice + Examples

Your resume is your first point of contact with a potential employer. For a desirable position at a big-name company, they’ll see anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand resumes. It is important that yours proves that you are ready for a product management job.

How can you build a dedicated Product Manager resume? Not just by presenting valuable experiences, but also by applying Product Manager skills when writing your resume.

Tips to write a Product Manager Resume

Recruiter Search Optimization

First, according to experienced recruiters and hiring managers, you only have a few seconds to capture their interest or be put aside. Think of them as Google’s crawler looking for relevance in your resume.

Therefore, it is important that you find out what keywords they’re looking for in a PM resume. This way, you can find and optimize your content accordingly. Scan the job description for major keywords like ‘data-driven’ and ‘collaboration.’

Look at the responsibilities of the job, and describe how your experience matches them. For example if your dream job requires that you ‘support the Product Design team by conducting user research’ your experience should say that you ‘Worked with the Product Design team by conducting user research.’

This does mean that you’ll have to tailor your resume for every job you apply for, but it’s worth it!

Show that you’re data-driven

As a Product Manager, you are expected to make decisions based on data. You can display your capabilities by quantifying the accomplishments that you decide to put in your PM resume. Additionally, this will help the reader understand the impact of your accomplishments.

For example, don’t just put that you worked on a new feature for an existing product. Include how that feature performed compared with your estimates. That’ll show that you were data-driven in your targets, and how well you met them.

Numbers are easy for recruiters to scan and understand, and will be a real boost for your Product Management resume.

Be lean

In Product Management, if it does not generate a quantifiable value it might as well be considered waste. The same goes for Product Manager resumes. Avoid using buzzwords to make yourself or your statements seem more impressive, recruiters can see right through that and won’t hesitate to discard your resume if there’s ambiguity about your capabilities to perform.

The design of the resume is also incredibly important. If it looks like a sloppy mess, they’ll question your judgement and the level of care you take over your work. A great Product Management skill is being able to say in a few words what others need paragraphs for. Be as succinct as possible — no more than two sides of A4 paper. One is even better.

Use influencers

Customers put more trust in recommendations by acquaintances than those by brands. Send your PM resume through a current employee of the company you’re applying to. That way, you won’t be just an anonymous applicant. They will associated you with the person you used as a messenger. They might even put up a good word for you!

This is one of the reasons why networking is so important. You’ll never meet the people who could be the keys to the job you want if you don’t get out there and look for them.

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Product Manager Resume Examples

It can be tough to know where to start! So we created a Product Manager resume template to give you a helping hand. You can download it here. We also recommend using flowcv.io if you’re in need of a resume builder.

When re-using examples and templates, it’s important to personalize as much as possible. If you’ve found a template, chances are other PMs have found it too, and some of them may be applying for the same position as you. That’s no way to stand out from the crowd!

It seems counter-intuitive that a document that receives such limited attention from recruiters requires so much work from your part. Yet, think about it as giving hiring managers’ the best possible customer experience with your resume. Everybody wins: they easily find what they want and you get a called for an interview.

Be sure to prepare for the next step by reading our series about Product Manager interview questions: 7 Steps to Ace Quantitative Questions and 5 Steps to Tackle the Product Question.

I’m Carlos González, CEO at Product School, and I enjoy sharing weekly tips for Product leaders!

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This article was also published on The Product Management Blog.