Drive-thru Resume

3 min readAug 19, 2021

250! Yes that’s the average number of resumes received by HR for any corporate position as per statistics. If you are lucky , the recruiter might spend 6 seconds to just look at your resume ! By chance they look at your resume, what are the chances , the hundred other resumes look similar/ belong to people with similar experience/ background?

So how do you get noticed?

Back to my favourite Toyota principle, ‘Customer 1st!’ . The person at the receiving end of your product ( in this case your resume) is your customer. If you put them first and try to think from their perspective , you might find some answers which will give you the result you desire.

I try to answer these three simple questions when I am writing my resume:

Which aspect about me/ my career will appeal most to the recruiter?
Which skill of mine should I showcase, that aligns with the goal of the position in question?
How do I ensure I get noticed and also get more than 6 seconds?

This resume is an example of how I answered these questions. Let me walk you through it.

Firstly, why do I call it Drive thru resume?

The role I was aplying to, was related to operational excellence. I thought which is the best example of operational efficiency which everyone can relate to ? ( Keep in mind the recruiter might not be a technical person, I had to keep it generic) Drive thru restaurants is the first thing that came to mind. I absolutely love the concept of drive thrus and the efficiency with which they operate. Another reason was I wanted to ensure the recruiter spends as little time in understanding my skills as he/ she would spend in a drive thru experience. Therefore I modelled my resume in drive thru concept.

The job description mentioned that the candidate should be aware of emotional, motivational and perceptual aspect of learning. I was applying to a trainer position in operational excellence.

This is how my resume looked: