Tips For Writing A Resume For Mechanical Engineering Roles

Perfecting a resume is exhausting. Stop rewriting it a million times. Do these 5 things to secure more interviews. 1) Focus on what you ACCOMPLISHED, not what you DID. The most common mistake I see on resumes is that they are task-oriented instead of impact-oriented. If you're up against 200+ other applicants for the role, you can bet that 100+ of them are going to have similar backgrounds to you. Explaining your day-to-day won't grab attention. Showcasing your achievements will. 2) Quantify everything! Everything? Everything! Okay, I know that sounds hard to do, but numbers help your resume POP more than anything else. Some places you can add numbers: -Team sizes you managed or led. -Costs you saved. -Revenue you generated. -Time you saved by improving a process. -New customers you gained. -Customers you retained. -Accuracy you improved. 3) Ditch the "fancy" format. Complex layouts with text boxes, columns, colors, icons, images, etc. only make your resume more complicated to parse from ATS platforms and harder to read by a human pair of recruiter eyeballs. KISS (keep it super simple). If the focus is on great content & impact, you don't need a "fancy" layout anyways (unless you're in a creative field). 4) Most relevant information first. Graduated 10 years ago? Education section goes to the bottom. Arrange your bullets in order from most impressive to least impressive. Most recruiters have 20 seconds or less to spend on your resume. If the good stuff is buried, they won't see it. 5) Stop with the large blocks of text. Ever read a book and turned the page to see that the next page is a single paragraph and the text is one huge rectangle? Pretty overwhelming. The same goes for recruiters reading your resume. Your career or positional summaries don't need to be half a page. Get good at describing yourself in as few words as possible. Apply this technique to your resume. Apply these tips and start getting more interviews!

Are you a student or early-career professional struggling to get callbacks after submitting your resume? I’ve been there. During my first year of grad school, I blamed the job market when I didn’t get a single interview for nearly seven months. I started applying for Summer 2024 internships in August 2023, but didn’t receive my first callback until March 2024. Over time, I began refining my resume based on what the industry values and what it takes to stand out. That made all the difference. Here are some of the most important lessons I’ve learned: 1. Keep the Format Simple Avoid horizontal lines, text-heavy formatting, or excessive bolding. They clutter your resume and make it harder to read. Could you stick to one page? If you can’t explain your work clearly and concisely, you’re not ready to present it. 2. Don’t Just List Tools or Describe the Problem, Explain What You Did Many students focus too much on the business problem (“Built a dashboard for retail analytics”) and gloss over the engineering behind it. Even worse, some just list the tools used: “Used Python, Flask, and AWS to build a service that did X.” Instead, go deeper. What did your Flask service do, exactly? What challenges did you face? What decisions did you make? As engineers, we’re expected to show technical depth. If your resume can’t reflect that, you’ll struggle to stand out, especially for technical roles. 3. Be Realistic with Metrics Many resumes include lines like: “Improved model accuracy from 12% to 95%.” This kind of stat, usually influenced by generic advice from career centers or the internet, raises red flags. It often signals that the project wasn’t technically complex to begin with. Instead of inflating numbers, focus on what you improved, how you improved it, and why your work mattered. Strong technical framing > flashy percentages. 4. Clarity > Buzzwords You might write something like: “Leveraged CUDA for token-level optimization of transformer inference under real-time constraints.” It sounds cool, but what does it mean? This happens when people assume the reader will be as familiar with the project as they are. But if someone in your field has to guess what you did, you’ve already lost them. Don’t rely on buzzwords to do the talking; let clarity drive the message. 5. Your Resume Isn’t for You Your resume isn’t meant to impress you. It’s intended to communicate what you’ve done to people who don’t share your background. Most first-round reviewers aren’t ML engineers or CUDA developers. They often rely on keyword checklists and rubrics to decide which resumes move forward. The one thing that matters is: Can you clearly explain what you did and why it mattered? That’s it. Feel free to put your thoughts in the comments. Follow me for more advice!

Recently I am reviewing a lot of resumes to help my unfortunate friends that are laid off. The most common mistakes I see are; 1) Talking about what you did more than your accomplishments and impact Statements like these: “developed an application in Java, implemented features, project managed, was a scrum master” etc…, makes HMs get curious about these questions: “But were you successful? How did you measure success? How did you do according to this measurement? With that work what kind of value your company gained?” etc… HMs care about measurable accomplishments more so than just doing things blindly. Accomplishments make the resume standout more and a lot more impactful. I’m not saying every statement needs to be an accomplishment, but you need some accomplishments mentioned. There are many articles online about this, “X-Y-Z formula” is a common technique to use. 2) Not tailoring your resume to position you are applying The first step in recruitment process is almost always a resume review, which involves someone, potentially not in your craft, to compare the resume to the position requirements. So make sure your resume showcases all the things they are looking for very clearly. Relevant experiences with technologies and skills they care should be mentioned. If this requires you to have multiple resumes, even one per job, so be it. You want to standout among the competition. 3) Using big paragraphs instead of bullet points Bullet points might sound a bit mechanical but they make the resumes very easy to read. Big paragraphs just frustrate the resume reviewers. 4) Not keeping things simple and readable I don’t remember a single case where an applicant was preferred due to a fancy resume. Content and readability are a lot more important. 5) Lots of typos and grammar mistakes Gives an impression of lack of attention to detail and sloppiness. There are many online tools to check typos and grammar. 6) Too long resume No resume reviewer will be happy to go through a 10 page resume. Focus on recent and relevant experience more. HMs don’t care that much the details of your job or school projects from 10+ years ago. For folks that are fairly new in the industry (5- years) I would say a single page resume is enough. For more experienced folks, don’t pass 2 pages. What do you all think? Am I missing anything?