A software engineer at Salesforce shares the résumé hack that helped him land his first job out of his master’s program

Anup Ghatage used custom QR codes at a career fair during his masters.

Anup Ghatage was in his first year of a master’s degree when he came up with a unique strategy to make the most of a university career fair.

He had only been at Carnegie Mellon University for three months and knew the career fair was not meant for non-graduating students.

Still, he created custom résumés for each employer. While the text remained the same, each résumé included a unique QR code that led to his personal portfolio website.

The idea was to give them out and then track which recruiters took enough interest in his profile to scan the code.

“I was just handing out resumes and seeing who was actually hitting me back,” Ghatage said. “When the time came after nine months for my actual career fair, I focused on those companies a bit more.”

He doubled down on custom résumés and talked to recruiters at those companies instead of only visiting marquee names like Google and Meta, which had long queues.

“That really helped because right out of the first career fair I attended properly, I had six or seven calls,” he said.

Cisco, where Ghatage landed a full-time offer, was one of them.

Over the next three years, he worked at Cisco and SAP. In 2019, he moved over to Salesforce, where he is currently a software engineer at the company’s Bay Area office.

This is the résumé that Ghatage used to attend job fairs in 2016:

Ghatage’s résumé in 2016 during his master’s program.

Looking back on the résumé he created eight years ago, there are three things Ghatage would keep the same:

One page: Now on the other side of interview panels, Ghatage recommends sticking to a one-page résumé, even if it means trimming down the skills and education sections.

“Honestly, interviewing is a very boring job,” he said, and most technical reviewers want to get back to their more urgent tasks. “I try to keep my résumé short and one page, no matter what I achieve.”

Don’t over-customize: Ghatage said that he was mindful to not include small projects that he undertook many years ago just to seem in line with the role on hand.

“I would rather speak confidently about something tangential or something maybe unrelated but still in the tech field” instead of over-customizing and then fumbling at the interview stage.

Include links: He also liked that his résumé included links to his personal website and project work on GitHub. Instead of sending a long résumé, the links can provide more information if a hiring manager is interested. Adding backlinks, like he did during his career fair, is also a good way to track who is taking an interest in your application, he said.

What he would change

There are also a couple of things Ghatage would change on the document:

Open source contributions: Projects on open source communities like Apache have been a career boost for Ghatage since he started working on them.

“Open source contributions are akin to actual job experience which is validated by industry experts,” he said, about adding them below his education details. “This would serve as a great signal to potential employers that my knowledge and skills have been peer reviewed by industry experts and are already making impact.”

Tweaking work experience: Writing about early work experience is tough because it often had limited impact, Ghatage said.

Still, “I would perhaps research more about how it is more relevant to the jobs that I’m applying to.” He also said he would move work experience above the skills section since it is seen as a bigger value add.

B-17 has verified his work history.