Level up your resume, and track your accomplishments better with a Career Doc
By: Udara W
Tags: Career Advice, Resume, Career Growth, Career Development, Careers

Level Up Your Resume: Why You Should Start a Career Doc

Photo by Gia Oris on Unsplash

Deciding which projects to put on your resume? Searching for evidence to prove you deserve that raise or promotion? Need talking points from past projects for an interview? Want to reminisce about all the great things you’ve done in your career?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, you need a career doc.

What is a career doc?

It is a living document with a detailed track record of your career. It’s like a journal for your job. It has more depth and detail than a resume, and it’s frequently updated.

Unlike a resume, your career doc is for future-you to read, rather than for potential employers or recruiters.

At Square, career docs are called hype docs and are a central part of our culture.

Why do you need a career doc?

Our memories suck, and we forget things all the time. It’s impossible to remember everything important that happens at work. Your career doc will remember so that you don't have to.

It helps future-you have a detailed record of your past accomplishments.

Here are a few reasons your future self will be thankful you started a career doc…

1. You’ll need projects and their details to add to your resume

Most of us only update our resumes when we are looking for a job. If you’re lucky enough to be in a stable industry, this is probably every few years. And when you do, you’ll have to recall years worth of projects and details to decide which ones to put on your resume.

Our resumes are too important to be based solely on our memory. A resume is usually the first impression we give to potential employers, so we need to be selective about what we put on it.

With a career doc, you have all the projects you worked on at your fingertips, you can pluck whatever sounds most impressive, edit it to fit your resume, and you’re done.

Bonus: Using a career document, you can create variations of your resume that are custom-tailored to the company you’re applying to.

2. You’ll need evidence for why you deserve a raise or promotion

If you google “how to ask for a promotion”, the top three results tell you to prepare a case with supporting evidence to prove you deserve it. If you have an up to date track record of your accomplishments, this is simple. You can extract projects and details that support your case the best.

With a career document, you can show how your responsibilities have increased, and how the work you’ve been doing has changed over the months or years.

Managers will also appreciate your initiative. Thanks to you, they have hard proof they can show any higher-ups in case they need to get approval. Everybody wins.

Bonus: The career document can even nudge you into realizing that you’re ready for a promotion. If you see a trend of increased responsibilities and scope in your projects, it might be a sign that you’re ready to be promoted.

3. You’ll need talking points for interviews

“Tell me about a time when” questions are common in every industry. Amazon is notorious for quizzing candidates with these during their leadership principle interviews. You are sure to questions like:

Tell me about a recent project you worked on

Tell me about a time you had to fix a bug in production

Tell me about a time when you mentored someone

Coming up with examples for these questions on the spot can be difficult, but with your career document, you will have plenty of projects and scenarios that you can use to answer these types of questions with a level of detail that very few candidates achieve.

4. You’ll build a habit of reviewing and reflecting on your work

Review and reflection are key processes for both personal and career growth. These habits are built into the career document process, as you’ll need to update it regularly. Each time you update the doc, you’ll need to review your most recent work and reflect on your most important contributions.