- Ankit Virmani made a career switch from consulting to tech.
- After a full day of work at Deloitte, he would spend hours every night teaching himself how to code.
- The résumé that landed Virmani a job at Google is two pages long — a decision he defends today.
Ankit Virmani had spent five years in consulting when he began eyeing a shift to tech.
“I always thought in my heart that I wanted more technical depth. I wanted to build things rather than sell them too much,” said Virmani, who first moved to the US from India to pursue a master’s degree.
In the first half of 2020, he dove right in.
After wrapping up a day at his full-time job at Deloitte, Virmani would spend three to four hours practicing coding every night, and another two hours reading up about the industry. He also began spending time with people in the field, asking them about real-time scenarios and what challenges they face in their jobs.
“I didn’t want answers from them. I wanted their thought process —how do they navigate through these complex challenges at scale,” he told Business Insider.
It didn’t pay off right away. He was rejected by Microsoft and Amazon at different stages of their application processes.
Six months after deciding to switch careers, he landed a role as a data and machine learning specialist at Google’s Seattle office.
Here’s the résumé he used to apply for his job at Google, which pays more than $300,000 a year. BI has verified his employment and compensation.
Ankit Virmani
Sacrificing the ‘one-page only’ résumé rule
Looking back on his résumé four years later, Virmani said he would make some formatting changes.
“This résumé is giving importance to everything equally, which is what I don’t like,” he said. “I would have a gradient of importance, like executive summary on top, achievements so far, and then I would go to professional experience, education, and technical skills.”
But with more insight into what employers like Google appreciate, Virmani said he would keep several things the same — including the length of the document.
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Sacrificing the “one-page only” rule to improve readability: Virmani broke the “one-page only” rule and prioritized having an uncluttered résumé. “It has very neatly structured sections and high-level themes,” he said about using subheadings like “data architecture” and “cloud strategy.” His manager at Google later told him that style helped them pick up on his responsibilities without having to decipher the lines below.
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Highlighting team effort: Virmani said some people overly highlight individual contributions on their résumé: “It’s never that way, at least in my experience — it’s always teamwork.” That’s why he focused parts of his résumé on his teams’ accomplishments. “Google highly, highly appreciates honesty and humility. That’s the culture of the company — we know that nothing great gets achieved by an individual,” he said.
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Saving some details for the interview: Virmani said he was careful not to over-explain his past projects so that he could build curiosity and have a good conversation during the interview: “If you put everything in the résumé, you’ll run out of points to talk about in the interview.”
Virmani is not alone in choosing to sacrifice “typical” résumé decisions. For Shola West, that came in the shape of breaking the “no résumé gap” idea.
West is part of a growing group of Gen Zs who are trying to destigmatize the résumé gap — a period of unemployment between jobs or between education and work.
West previously told BI she took a yearlong break at the start of her career to understand what she really wanted to pursue. She embraced her résumé gap and now works at an advertising agency and runs a career advice side hustle.
For Mariana Kobayashi, breaking from the résumé norms meant abandoning the written format altogether.
Kobayashi landed a role as an account executive at Google after she curated a video about why she should get the role.
She sent her video résumé, which took her 10 hours to create, to the hiring manager directly, Kobayashi previously told BI. A Google recruiter saw the video and reached out to her, and she eventually landed a role at the tech giant.
Do you work in finance or consulting, and have a story to share about your personal résumé journey? Email this reporter at shubhangigoel@insider.com.
On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider’s parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company’s advertising practices.
