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Overview of the Job Hunt

Building a Resume

Writing a Cover Letter

Interview Guide!

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Building a Resume

Overview

Resumes are another one of those opaque, annoying things you most people are kind-of sort-of okay at, but deep down hate and aren’t super proud of! While you do want to take the time to build a resume that can tell your story in a compelling way, it’s also easy to channel all of your overall stress about the job hunt (and all the uncertainty and vulnerability that comes with it) into tweaking your resume infinitely. In this guide, I’ll share some best practices to get your resume in a good place in a manageable, time-bounded way.

I spend a lot of time reviewing resumes, and a few things have stuck out to me:

Applicants usually overestimate the amount of time that recruiters and hiring managers spend looking at their resumes. Great resumes are super skimmable, relatively short, and very easy to read. The average recruiter spends

seven seconds⁠

looking at each resume they see, so long narratives and paragraph-long bullets usually dilute the important stuff––even if they’re well-crafted. If you can figure out how to make sure than anyone looking for your resume for a few seconds leaves with a sense that you’re productive, capable, and aligned with the role that you’re applying for (which usually means sharing data-driven examples that reinforce a few strengths over and over again), you will be at the top of the pack.

Great resumes are stories, not lists. Your goal shouldn’t be to simply outline every job you’ve had or to show that you’ve been employed for a long time. Instead, resumes should be a concise, clear way of telling a potential employer what skills, strengths, and experiences you’ll bring to the job. That means that they should be tailored to every job you apply for and hyper-focused on key, transferable skills. If you were a cook last summer, a campaign isn’t going to care that you “Cooked fries, flipped burgers, and cleaned kitchen daily,” but they will care if you “Cooked 400 burgers daily, increasing output by 75% by developing new ordering system.” That is a super transferable set of skills!

You can write a fantastic resume in a few focused hours. If you follow the process below, this does not have to be a particularly long or painful process. You’re already the expert on your own story and accomplishments––all we’re doing is putting them on paper.

As a final note, Progressive Pipeline staff are always more than happy to share feedback if you send us your resume. You can reach us over Slack or email (

michael@progressivepipeline.org⁠

and

danny@progressivepipeline.org⁠

Structure

Formatting

The good news is that formatting should be one of the easiest parts of your resume! Most of the shortcuts and fancy tricks you sometimes see tend to work against you: they wind up making your resume less readable and less focused on your core competencies. Instead:

Keep your resume clean and simple. Don’t include fancy fonts, colors, graphics, or headshots. These won’t help you stand out; instead, they’ll distract from the actual content of your resume and make you seem unprofessional.

This is a great, free resume template⁠

(hit file > make a copy) and

so is this one⁠

, and

resume.com⁠

also has a free, easy-to-use resume builder.

Avoid typos, misspellings and grammatical errors. This seems obvious, and you might skim past this, but it really matters. Proofread your resume many times. Read it backwards (this works!). Ask a friend (or two or three) to read it. Ask me to read it! Recruiters and hirers are shockingly good at finding typos, and, when they do, they’ll think less of you for them.

You should keep your resume to one page, unless you’re applying for a job with the federal government (these are weird,

see this guide for more info⁠

, the federal government also has its own

resume builder⁠

). You might think that giving employers more information will allow you to demonstrate more of your skills accomplishments, but employers spend so little time looking at each resume that it usually means that they’re less likely to pick up on the really important stuff.

Make sure to save your resume as a PDF, not a Word doc or other format. If you save it as a PDF, employers will consistently be able to open it without any formatting changes. If you save it as a Word doc, it’s more likely than not that the formatting will get jumbled in transmission. And if you use another format, there’s a good chance the employer won’t be able to open it at all.

Make sure the name of the document is clear and includes your name. Many employers download all the resumes at once, and will be annoyed if they can’t find yours because it’s called “Resume.pdf.” Something like “Michael Michaelson Resume.pdf” or “Michaelson Resume, Progressive Pipeline.pdf” is the way to go.

As long as your resume is short, clean, and super readable, you should be good to go! Don’t stress out about this stuff too much.

Writing

You can write in your resume in the exact same style that you’d use for a professional email: crisp, concise, and polished, but not unnecessarily circuitous or show-off-ish. Some employers are looking for exceptionally great, flowy writers, but they’ll ask you to submit a writing sample or test. Here, your goal is to convey as much information in as few words as possible. Some overall advice:

Don’t use too much jargon or any enormously fancy words. If you have any doubt that your employer won’t understand an acronym, spell it out or find a different word. For political jobs, stuff like GOTV is fine, because your employers will almost certainly know what you’re talking about. Using thesaurus words when others will do will make you seem silly. There is no need to write “Executed an operationally excellent electoral mobilization agenda to exhort low-propensity members of the populace to exercise their rights of enfranchisement” when “Led GOTV” will do. Remember that you’re always shooting for fewer words with more impact, not the other way around.

Use active voice, not passive voice. “Led a team of 30 organizers” is a lot stronger and more concise than “Was tasked with leading a team of 30 organizers.” You want people to know that you’re a doer!

Here’s a short primer on active vs passive voice⁠

, in case a refresher would be helpful.

Be thoughtful and consistent about tenses. Use common sense here: if you’re still doing the job, it should usually be in present tense, unless you’re referring to something that’s now been completed (e.g. if you are still a field organizer, your bullets should be in present tense unless it’s something like “Led precinct-wide GOTV operation on primary day”). Keep this all in mind when proofreading; it’s a really common mistake.

Keep everything consistent. There are very few firm rules for resumes except for consistency. If you include a city and state next to one job, include it next to every job. Keep date formats the same everywhere. This will make it seem like you are on top of things.

Unless you have a really good reason not to, put your jobs in reverse chronological order. This is going to make the most sense for almost everyone.

Sections

There are a few sections that you might consider having on your resume:

Professional Experience. This is where you’ll list your past roles and accomplishments (more on that later!). This should take up at least 2/3 of the page (if not more) and is by far the most important part of your resume––everyone should have one.

Education. You can keep this section very short: mainly just include the school you went to and the degree (e.g. “Bachelor of Arts in History”) that you earned. You should include an estimated graduation date if you haven’t graduated yet. I’d recommend adding your GPA if it is above a 3.5 on a 4.0 scale, along with any awards/honors (e.g. cum laude) you’ve received. Some folks will also add activities and societies: feel free to include them (just list the names, don’t add descriptions) if they feel important to you and there’s room!

Additional Experience. Not everyone will want to have one of these, but you should consider including one if you have a lot of non-work experience that could be a validator for roles in this space (especially if you have a lot of volunteer experience but not much professional experience. If you choose to go for this, you could include trainings (like ones led by Arena, Change the Game, or the National Democratic Training Committee), volunteer experience (especially on campaigns), or leadership positions in student clubs that are relevant to the role.

Skills. Most people shouldn’t include a skills section, especially if the skills you’d list are either commonly assumed (e.g. Microsoft Office) or are better explained through an accomplishment bullet on your resume (e.g. instead of saying “event planning” in the skills section, which is pretty broad and subjective, include a couple accomplishment statements in the professional skills section that describe times when you’ve planned events). The main exception here is if you are applying for technical roles, and have a set of objective, relatively uncommon skills that employers are looking for (like SQL, Figma, Python, R, HTML, etc., but not communication, conflict resolution, organizing, strategy, etc.).

You probably shouldn’t include a professional summary, objectives, or similar––this is what a

cover letter⁠

is for!

Accomplishment Statements

The hardest and most important of a resume are your accomplishment statements. These are the bullets you put under each job that you list. Again, keep these goal-oriented: what can a future employer take away from them that’ll give them faith in your ability to perform a new job? Most people just list their roles and responsibilities, which really isn’t useful. Instead, you want to focus on specific, measurable, and concrete examples of the impact you’ve had and how you’ve used your skills to excel.

Imagine you’re an employer, and you see two resumes from people who’ve held the same position. You’ve heard that one is an awesome employee and one totally sucks, but you don’t know which is which. If both of their resumes just listed their duties on the job (e.g. “Served customers nightly, Opened restaurant every morning, Bussed tables and managed cash register”), would you be able to tell who is incredible and who isn’t? Definitely not!

What if, instead, they each listed clear, measurable accomplishments? That would give you a meaningful barometer to tell who would be an amazing employee and who might not excel.

Remember, employers aren’t hiring you because of the jobs you’ve had; they’re hiring you because of how well you’ve performed. Your resume should reflect that.

Many of you have held jobs in retail or food service, with titles that might not immediately catch an employer’s eye. You definitely built skills and experiences there that you can transfer to the political world, and it’s your responsibility to use your resume to clearly articulate how those jobs qualify you to work in politics.

Before you start writing your accomplishment statements, ask yourself if you’ve ever:

Improved something? Achieved more with fewer resources or money? Reduced costs? Improved productivity? Saved time? Increased recruitment numbers? Designed, developed, or implemented a new process, program or product? Brought diverse constituents together to accomplish something? Improved morale? Solved a pressing problem? Managed or led a team? Presented complex information clearly? Successfully multitasked? Dedicated long hours of work to accomplish something within a short timeframe? Balanced extracurricular/outside commitments with coursework? Took initiative without anyone asking? Received awards or positive performance reviews?

What are you most proud of? What would others you have worked with say about your contribution? How have organizations benefited from your work? What special projects have you worked on and what was the outcome? What is the tangible evidence of your accomplishments?

(These questions were borrowed from Yale’s Office of Career Strategy). This is exactly what you want to showcase in your accomplishment statements.

There are three formats that I think work really well:

Action + Project + Result

Project: Group related tasks into a single, meaningful project or activity

Action: Choose a strong action verb (

here’s a great list⁠

) that describes what you personally did (not your team). Highlight the skills you used.

Result: Keep this super specific and quantifiable. What numbers or other evidence can show that you did an amazing job? What kind of impact did it have? Quantify either in terms of an absolute number (e.g. “served 600 customers per night) or a % increase (e.g. “increased output by 250%”)

Accomplished [x] as measured by [y] by doing [z]

This is very similar to A+P+R, but ordered slightly differently.

STAR

Situation: What was the situation, problem, or conflict you were facing?

Task: What were you tasked with? What were your responsibilities or goals?

Action: What action did you take? What did you do to solve this problem? (start with action verbs)

Result: What was the result or outcome of your action? How did it benefit the organization? Can this result be quantified?

Use 2-5 of these bullets per entry. Keep them detailed but concise. Pack as much of a punch as you can in as few words as you can.

Here’s an example of a strong set of accomplishment bullets, courtesy of the National Democratic Training Committee:

⁠

Here are two great examples of conversions from weak to strong bullets, courtesy of Yale:

⁠

This stuff matters––especially when you’re looking for your first or second job in politics––and doing it right will help you stand out from the crowd.

Process

There’s not one perfect way to write a resume, and you should stick with whatever order and flow makes the most sense for you. That said, some folks benefit from having a more clearly defined process, and I’ve seen the following work for a lot of people:

Open up the job descriptions of a few roles that you think you’ll apply for. Make a list of the skills that seem to matter most for those roles, and that you seem to have. Often, hiring managers will secretly have one or two core competencies in mind when they’re writing job descriptions, and then will fill in with other vague stuff (e.g. if they’re hiring a press secretary, they might just want someone who has a history of successfully speaking on-the-record with reporters and of writing great press releases). See if you can figure out that these are.

Choose the two or three skills that seem the most broadly applicable, and that you think you can reasonably find examples of in your own career.

For each role you’ve held, find a handful of specific examples of times when you’ve done those things. Write down a very unpolished, short description of each of those times, including as many numbers and results as you can.

Try to turn those examples into Accomplishment Statements using the formats above. For each role, see if there’s anything that feels critical that isn’t included in the examples you’ve already written, and add that if needed, too.

Throw those accomplishments statements into a

resume template⁠

and fill out the rest of the sections.

Proofread a bunch of times, checking for typos and consistency. For each bullet, see whether there’s any way to add more detail and to use fewer words.

Send the resume to one or two mentors (including potentially your current manager), tell them what sorts of roles you’re applying to, and ask for their feedback. People love giving resume feedback––it’s a relatively low lift and makes folks feel useful.

This can be so totally manageable, and does not have to be a terrible stressful process. Reach out if there’s anything I can do to help!

Accomplishment Statements

Process

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