Pandey’s Résumé Lands Him $500K Job at Meta, Offers on TikTok, LinkedIn

Hemant Pandey shared the resume format that assisted him in obtaining a number of software engineering roles

Pandey ensures the brevity of job descriptions while incorporating elements that engender compelling anecdotes. He underscored the increasing significance of personal branding in the labor market.

In 2018, following an apprenticeship at Amazon during his graduate studies, he was offered a permanent software position at Tesla. The compensation was “exemplary,” and the organization was a romantic haven. 

That summer, Pandey, born and raised in India, invited his family to visit him in California.

“It was my first job, and getting laid off meant having to build rapport all over again in just six months,” he indicated to Insider. I needed to prove myself again.” 

He was apprehensive about how to inform individuals of his dismissal and was concerned that potential employers would perceive him negatively and reject him before interviews. 

However, due to his proactive approach in seeking new opportunities, he secured employment at SAP within a month. 

Pandey transitioned to Salesforce one year later and remained there for two years. He applied to Meta in 2021 after discovering the company’s “insane” compensation arrangements on tech forums. 

Since college, Pandey has utilized the following Rsum format. It earned him a senior software engineer position at Meta for $500,000, along with job offers from TikTok and LinkedIn. BI has verified his employment history and compensation, which included both cash and stock. 

He lost his job two weeks following their visit.

Performing deliberate Rsum decisions 

Two years into his tenure at Meta, Pandey reflects on his resume and identifies a few practical elements he intends to maintain. 

“I prefer to keep it very ambiguous” is Pandey’s guiding principle when summarizing work experiences. During a conversation, “If people ask me what I did at Salesforce, I can help them know more by explaining rather than writing a paragraph.” For each role, he employs one to three concise points. 

Although Pandey’s master’s GPA may not be particularly “impressive,” he elects to incorporate it into the interview to narrate a personal story. “I frequently relate how intimidated I was and how I blew my first semester,” he said of his low GPA and near-loss of an internship offer.

He describes how he had to exert more effort to keep up with more seasoned classmates and ultimately achieve higher grades in subsequent semesters. “This makes a good growth and learning-from-failures story.”

Proficiency in fundamental tasks: According to Pandey, as engineers advance to higher-level positions, their responsibilities shift from coding to overseeing teams and completing projects.

“But if I still interview for a startup, they don’t care about how I’m leading or shipping products,” said the executive. “They care about whether I can write code or be tech-savvy enough.” Pandey enumerates projects and provides hyperlinks to his previous coding endeavors to demonstrate his technical prowess. 

If he were to revise his resume today, he would only contemplate one modification: 

Personal brand initiatives: “Your brand is becoming increasingly vital,” Pandey advised. I am an active LinkedIn contributor with an approximately 4,000-subscriber newsletter,” he indicated in the projects section of his resume.

Furthermore, he asserted that he advises students. Those additional competencies “will matter more than my tech skills and certificates.” 

Personal branding is being embraced by increasing business proprietors and employees, including Pandey, to advance their careers. 

Personal branding became a priority for Quynh Mai, the proprietor of a digital creative agency, approximately ten years after she established her company. She previously told BI that prospective clients had more faith in her expertise after she began delivering speeches and promoting herself on LinkedIn and other media platforms.

According to her, “Building a personal brand connected to your business is more important than ever because people won’t do business with anyone they don’t trust.” 

There are those with 9-to-5 jobs who have adapted comparable practices. 

Sahil Dua, a senior machine-learning engineer at Google in Zurich, told BI that his career has advanced, and he has gained an advantage in job interviews through personal branding initiatives. 

“Tech-speaking experience helped quite a lot in advancing my career and came up a lot in interview processes that I was going through at the time,” Dua indicated. 

He stated that if he were to update his resume today, he would include his conference speaking experience and a book he authored in 2020.

“I would change that section to highlight that I’ve given these TED Talks to increase my credibility and say, ‘Yeah, I know some stuff,'” Dua pointed out.