How to Craft a Perfect FAANG Resume For Experienced Professionals

Getting hired at FAANG companies as an experienced professional isn’t easy. With an acceptance rate between 0.5-2%, your resume is often the first thing that a recruiter sees and has to do some serious heavy lifting.

Many experienced professionals treat the resume as a simple formality and a box to check. It’s your one real shot to convince the recruiter that you are worth a 45-minute call. The difference between a senior-level FAANG resume and an entry-level one isn’t just about the difference in experience and number of projects. As an experienced professional, your resume must reflect the impact of your work.

Many experienced FAANG resumes make the mistake of using vague buzzwords or underselling with a list of tasks. This guide will help you understand how to craft the perfect experienced FAANG resume. Whether you are applying for FAANG companies or any other top-tier tech company, the playbook is the same.

Understanding FAANG Hiring Standards

Before you start crafting your FAANG resume, it is important to understand what’s happening on the other side of the process. FAANG hiring is structured, and if your resume doesn’t fit the pattern that the system expects, your resume won’t even make it to a “human” reviewer.

Each company has its own flavor of what “great” looks like:

• Amazon focuses a lot on its leadership principles. They want to see how you make judgment calls without perfect data, how you’ve raised the bar for your team, and how you’ve earned trust across functions.
• Google focuses on scale and your technical depth. They’re looking for engineers and professionals who have solved hard, complex problems that touched millions of users or shaped core infrastructure.
• Meta rewards speed and product instinct. If you iterate fast, take ownership, and know how to measure real-world impact, you’re speaking their language.

As an experienced professional, you’re not just competing against junior engineers anymore. You’re up against other veterans with big titles and recognizable logos on their resumes. What separates the “call them” pile from the “pass” pile is clarity of impact. The reviewer should instantly see that you’ve led, delivered, and scaled results that mattered.

Your FAANG resume has a tough battle to fight. Here’s roughly how the screening pipeline works:

1. ATS Filter: Software screens for keyword matches and basic fit.
2. Recruiter Review: A recruiter does a 5–10 second skim for relevance and progression.
3. Hiring Manager: Someone on the team takes a deeper look to decide if you’re interview-worthy.

Your resume needs to survive all three gates.

A common mistake among experienced professionals is leaning too hard on brand names or job titles. What gets you that callback are specifics: how you improved system reliability by 28%, drove $3M in revenue lift, mentored a team through an architectural migration, or shipped a feature that improved daily active users by 12%.

That’s what recruiters notice. That’s what earns you the phone screen.

Experienced FAANG Resume Structure & Formatting Essentials

A good resume layout should be invisible at first glance. When the format is clean, recruiters focus on what actually matters, which is your story, impact, and your fit. When the format is messy or overdesigned, recruiters focus on the “visual” aspect of your resume, missing what truly matters.

Length Matters

Even if you have a lot of experience under your belt, your resume should be one to two pages long.

• One page works well if you’re in the 5–7 year range.
• Two pages make sense if you’ve got 8+ years, have led teams, or managed large-scale projects.
• Anything beyond that, and you’re testing a recruiter’s patience.

Remember: the resume isn’t your life story; it’s a highlight reel. You’re curating the best parts of your career that prove you can do this job, not cataloging every single thing you’ve done.

Reverse Chronological Format Is Your Friend

Always lead with your most recent role and work backwards. That’s what FAANG recruiters expect. It immediately shows them where you are now and how you got there.

A “hybrid” or “functional” format might seem clever, but it’s a red flag. It usually reads as: “I’m hiding something.” Stick with reverse chronological because it’s predictable, it’s professional, and it’s what hiring systems (and humans) are designed to read first.

ATS Optimization Without Losing Readability

As established earlier, your FAANG resume has a tough battle to fight, which includes both machine and human. To keep it ATS-safe, follow these rules:

• Always stick to standard fonts like Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman (10–12 pt). There is no need to include fancy fonts unless you are a Graphic Designer or UI Designer.
• Keep margins between 0.5 and 1 inch. Do not push the content to the very edge of the resume. Keep some whitespace on all 4 sides.
• Use simple bullet points (–, -, or *), not decorative icons.
• Skip text boxes, tables, and fancy headers. Most ATS systems can’t parse them properly.
• Avoid colors or graphics that might break the formatting when uploaded.

Your keywords matter. If the job description emphasizes Kubernetes, distributed systems, or microservices, and you’ve actually worked with those, make sure they appear in your bullet points. ATS software looks for exact matches.

Having said that, don’t stuff the keyword. Listing tools you can’t discuss in detail is a guaranteed way to fail the technical interview.

Build a Visual Hierarchy That Works

Structure your sections so they’re scannable and familiar:

• Contact information & headline (name, email, phone, LinkedIn, GitHub)
• Professional summary (2–3 crisp lines, and skip the “objective” statement)
• Experience (most recent role first)
• Technical skills
• Projects or contributions (optional, if relevant)
• Education & certifications

Use bold for company names and role titles, then regular text for the bullet points underneath. The visual contrast helps the recruiter’s eye track easily down the page.

Consistency Is Critical

Formatting consistency sounds minor, but it’s one of the first things recruiters notice subconsciously.

• If you bold your job title in one section, do it everywhere.
• If you write dates as “Jan 2020 – Present,” don’t switch to “1/20 – Now” later.
• If you use colons or dashes, keep them uniform.

Small inconsistencies create friction, and they make a resume feel a little off, even when the content is strong. Clean formatting shows attention to detail, which is a quality that every FAANG team values.

How To Craft Your Professional Summary for FAANG Resume

Right after your name, the first thing a recruiter’s eyes land on is your professional summary, and it’s one of the most underused parts of a resume. Many experienced professionals either skip it entirely or drop in something painfully generic like:

// “Passionate software engineer with 8 years of experience.”

That line tells a recruiter nothing. It’s wasted space. A strong professional summary on a FAANG-level resume does three things:

• It grounds your seniority, so the recruiter instantly knows what level you’re operating at.
• It hints at your impact and the scale, complexity, or reach of your work.
• It also reflects the company’s priorities, so it feels aligned and not random.

What to Include

Keep your professional summary to about two to three lines, max. Think of it as a tweet that captures your professional headline and scale of influence.

Start with your role or area of expertise, add a specific, measurable achievement, and finish with the type of problems you solve or the impact you drive. Here’s a structure that consistently works:

// [Years of experience] in [domain/technology], focused on [specific impact].

Example:

“Senior software engineer with 7 years building distributed systems at scale. Architected infrastructure changes that reduced latency by 40% and improved system reliability to 99.99% uptime, directly enabling revenue growth for 500M+ users.”

Why this works:

• Seniority: “7 years” anchors your experience level.
• Specialization: “Distributed systems” clarifies your technical focus.
• Impact: The metrics (40% latency reduction, 99.99% uptime) make it tangible and memorable.

A recruiter reading your resume knows immediately that you’re operating at a senior or staff level, not mid-level.

Mistakes to Avoid

Don’t write an objective statement. Lines like “Seeking a challenging opportunity to leverage my skills” feel outdated and self-focused. Recruiters care about what you’ve done, not what you want.

Avoid vague leadership claims. Lines like “Led multiple engineering initiatives” are filler, and they don’t say anything about scope or outcome. Instead, make the impact concrete. Something like – “Led the migration of 50+ microservices to Kubernetes, cutting deployment time by 60%.”

Skip unproven soft skills. Saying “Strong communicator” or “team player” adds no value unless there’s proof behind it. Show it through measurable outcomes with a sentence like “Mentored five junior engineers who were all promoted to senior roles within 18 months.”

Tailor It to the Company

Your summary doesn’t need a full rewrite for each job, but small tweaks make a big difference.

• Amazon: Weave in elements of operational excellence and decision-making under uncertainty. Show how you’ve “raised the bar” or improved processes.
• Google: Emphasize technical depth, scale, and innovation—projects that impacted millions or solved hard, infrastructure-level problems.
• Meta: Highlight speed, iteration, and product impact. They love builders who ship fast and learn even faster.
• Apple: Focus on craftsmanship, attention to detail, and seamless user experience. Quality and polish are the language they speak.
• Netflix: Highlight your autonomy, judgment, and context-driven decisions. They value senior professionals who can operate with minimal oversight and high accountability.

A recruiter should be able to glance at your summary and instantly think, “This person gets how we work”. Adjusting phrasing or metrics to fit what that company values most is a smart way to pass your resume through the checks.

Experience Section: Core of FAANG Resume

As an experienced professional, the experience section will make or break your FAANG resume. Recruiters and hiring managers spend most of their time here, and it’s usually what decides whether you get an interview or not.

Use the STAR Method for Every Bullet

Every line in your experience section should follow the STAR framework:

Situation → Task → Action → Result.

Most FAANG resumes stop halfway as they just describe what the job required, but never explain what they actually did or what changed because of it. The best resumes don’t just list responsibilities; they also tell the outcome and impact of the work.

Here’s how that difference looks in practice:

// Weak:

Responsible for backend infrastructure development and team management.

// Strong:

Led backend infrastructure team of six engineers. Architected migration from monolithic to microservices architecture, reducing deployment time from two hours to 15 minutes and enabling the product team to ship features five times faster. Established code review standards that cut production bugs by 35%.

In this example, the description follows the STAR framework:

• Situation: A backend team working within a monolithic system.
• Task: Lead migration and manage the team.
• Action: Architected the new system, implemented code standards.
• Result: Quantified improvements, which are indicated by faster deployments, higher velocity, and fewer bugs.

By structuring your experience this way, recruiters can clearly visualize the context, your role, and the impact you had in just one or two sentences. This level of detail and clarity is what is required in a FAANG resume for experienced professionals.

Quantifying Your Achievements

Numbers are the language of FAANG hiring. They cut through fluff, add instant credibility, and make your work memorable.

A recruiter might forget “improved system reliability,” but they’ll remember:

“Increased uptime from 98.5% to 99.99%, reducing downtime incidents by 70%.”

That’s the difference between sounding capable and sounding impactful.

What to Quantify

If you want to understand which metrics you should include in the resume, think about metrics that reveal scale, performance, or tangible business outcomes. The best way to quantify it is by combining technical and organizational impact.

1. Performance metrics: Latency reduction, throughput gains, memory efficiency, or CPU usage improvements
2. Scale: Number of users impacted, data processed, requests per second, services migrated
3. Business outcomes: Revenue growth, cost savings, time-to-market improvements, feature velocity
4. Team outcomes: Engineers mentored or managed, promotion rates, retention improvements
5. Quality metrics: Bug reduction percentages, test coverage increases, faster incident resolution

Even if you don’t have precise data, you can include an estimate responsibly. Approximate numbers are better than including no number:

“Reduced query time from ~5s to <500ms” is far stronger than “Optimized query performance.”

Just make sure your numbers are defensible. If you can’t back them up in an interview, you will lose trust with the hiring manager.

Choosing the Right Action Verbs

The first word of each point matters more than most people realize because it tells the reader your role in the story.

For senior professionals, that verb should show ownership, leadership, or influence, and not passive participation.

• For individual contribution, you cna use words like – architected, optimized, designed, implemented, developed, scaled.
• For leadership, you can use words like – led, mentored, directed, championed, spearheaded, established, transformed.
• For cross-functional impact, you can use words like – collaborated, aligned, partnered, coordinated, orchestrated, facilitated.

Avoid weak verbs like “helped,” “assisted,” or “worked on.” Those minimize your ownership.

Instead of “Helped improve performance”, say “Led performance optimization initiative that reduced latency by 45% and improved API throughput by 3x.”

Each point that you mention in your FAANG resume is a story by itself and the verb is the first thing that is noticed. Start strong.

Writing Impactful Bullet Points

Each bullet should be 1-2 lines maximum. If you need more than 2 lines, you’re either including unnecessary context or you have too many bullets (aim for 5-7 per role, depending on tenure). For senior professionals, that verb should show ownership, leadership, or influence, and not passive participation.

For individual contribution:

Architected, optimized, designed, implemented, developed, scaled

For leadership:

Led, mentored, directed, championed, spearheaded, established, transformed

For cross-functional impact:

Collaborated, aligned, partnered, coordinated, orchestrated, facilitated

Avoid weak verbs like “helped,” “assisted,” or “worked on.” Those minimize your ownership.

Instead of writing, “Helped improve performance”, say “Led performance optimization initiative that reduced latency by 45% and improved API throughput by 3x.”

Highlighting Leadership, Mentorship, and Cross-Functional Impact

FAANG companies hire engineers who elevate their work and job role. At this level, your influence matters as much as your technical ability. Recruiters and hiring managers want to see signs that you’ve improved the people, systems, and culture around you.

If you’ve mentored others, say so and back it up with outcomes. If you’ve influenced decisions across multiple teams, make it clear. If you’ve driven technical or organizational change, quantify what changed and why it mattered.

For example,

“Mentored 6 junior engineers, all of whom received promotions or internal transfers within 18 months” is much better than “Mentored junior engineers.” Here, the number and outcome shows the real impact of your work.

“Established oncall rotation for 3 teams managing critical infrastructure, reducing alert fatigue by 50% and improving incident response time from 45 minutes to 12 minutes” shows you solved organizational problems, not just technical ones.

Technical Skills Section for Experienced FAANG Resume

Your technical skills section can make or break the first 10 seconds of a recruiter’s scan. Done right, it helps you clear ATS filters and shows instant credibility. Done wrong, it either looks bloated or sends red flags that you’ve padded your experience.

Organize by Proficiency and Relevance

Don’t dump every technology you’ve ever touched into a giant wall of text. Instead, group your skills into clear categories and order them by strength. Here’s a clean, FAANG-friendly layout:

• Languages: Go, Python, Java, SQL
• Frameworks & Libraries: Spring Boot, Django, React, FastAPI
• Databases: PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda), Terraform, Docker
• Tools & Platforms: Git, Grafana, Jenkins, DataDog

For experienced professionals, subtlety beats clutter. You don’t need to label proficiency explicitly. The order you list your skills can indicate the level of proficiency. Recruiters naturally assume your strongest skills come first. If you list “Go, Python, Java,” they’ll infer Go is your primary language.

Some engineers use categories like Expert / Proficient / Familiar, and that’s fine, but it takes up precious space. Make sure, using proficiency doesn’t take too much space. For FAANG resumes, it’s better to curate than to catalog. Your goal is focus, not completeness.

Using Keywords to Pass ATS Scanners

Your theoretical skills section is also keyword gold for ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems). If a job description mentions technologies like microservices, gRPC, event driven architecture, or stream processing, and you’ve worked with them, make sure they’re in this section.

But here’s the golden rule: only list what you can defend in an interview. If you’ve barely touched Kubernetes, don’t list it. FAANG interviews are rich and theoretical. One probing question can reveal overstatement or lies. It’s far better to show a handful of technologies you’ve mastered than a laundry list you can’t back up.

How Keyword Matching Actually Works

Most ATS systems extract necessary skills true from the job description, then scan your resume for matches. The more overlaps, the higher your score and the greater your chance of a recruiter really seeing it.

However, the hiring manager will also read your resume. If your skills list doesn’t align with your experience bullets say you mention Kubernetes but never reference container orchestration anywhere else it stands out immediately. Consistency builds trust. Your theoretical skills section should reinforce the story your experience tells, not contradict it.

Avoiding Outdated Technologies

This is where many experienced professionals quietly trip themselves up. You might have deep expertise in technologies that were cutting-edge five years ago but are now considered legacy. Having said that, there’s a little bit nuance here. Experience with older systems isn’t a problem, but how you present it matters.

If you’ve spent the last few years maintaining legacy Perl code, that’s absolutely valid experience especially if it involved scaling, refactoring, or modernizing those systems. Just don’t give it top billing next to newer languages like Go or Rust.

Include legacy technologies when they’re a meaningful part of your recent work, but don’t lead with them. If you spent two years on a Java monolith and the last two building Go microservices, list Go first. Recruiters scan from left to right and top to bottom what they see first shapes how “current” you look.

When to Include and When to Exclude

Include skills that are:

• Relevant to the role or the company’s tech stack
• Demonstrative of your technical breadth or domain knowledge
• Still actively used in modern systems

For example, if you’re targeting a backend infrastructure role, keep your cloud platforms, containerization tools, and orchestration technologies front and center.

If you’re going for a frontend role, skip the backend databases and CI/CD tooling. That space can be better utilized on frameworks, performance optimization, or UX-driven metrics.

Exclude anything that’s:

• So fundamental it’s assumed (like Git, Linux, or Agile)
• Obsolete or outdated, unless it’s directly relevant to the role
• Something you’ve only tinkered with casually in side projects

Listing everything you’ve ever touched doesn’t make you look versatile—it makes you look unfocused.

Projects & Contributions

For seasoned professionals, this section of the FAANG resume can be a real differentiator, but solely if you’re deliberate and sure about what you include. It’s a chance to showcase your side project or any GitHub repo you’ve ever touched. It’s a great way to highlight initiative, technical curiosity, or thought leadership that complements your job role.

Side Projects That Actually Matter

The first question to ask yourself:

Does this project show something my professional experience doesn’t already prove?

If your full-time role is in backend systems, but you’ve built a machine learning recommendation engine on your own time, that’s worth showcasing it demonstrates breadth.

But if you’re already an iOS developer and your side project is just another iOS app, it doesn’t add new dimension. You’re better off using that space for something that expands your story.

Strong side projects usually fall into three categories:

Technical Problem-Solving

You built something that tackled a real problem or showcased architectural creativity.
For example: “Built real-time data pipeline processing 1M+ events per day using Kafka and Apache Flink, achieving sub-second latency.”

Leadership or Scale
You led something that grew beyond personal experimentation. For example: “Maintained open-source project adopted by 50K+ developers monthly while balancing full-time engineering responsibilities.”

Learning and Growth

You used the project to explore new technologies relevant to FAANG-level work. For example: “Designed and deployed serverless application using AWS Lambda and DynamoDB, handling 100K daily requests with 99.9% uptime.”

You can keep the format tight with title or project name as heading. A one-line description to clearly show what the project is about and one or two key metrics or outcomes.

Open-Source Contributions

Open-source work can carry real weight but only if it’s meaningful. Contributing a one-line fix to React is good, but maintaining a project that other engineers actually rely on? That’s a gold on your FAANG resume.

If you have significant open-source involvement, list it clearly. For example:

// Contributor to Apache Kafka. Led feature development for stream processing API, shipped in v3.2 and adopted by 500+ companies.

// Maintainer of [Project Name] (5K+ GitHub stars). Architected redesign improving performance by 50% and reducing memory footprint by 30%, attracting 200+ new monthly users.

If your open-source work is minor, don’t feel pressured to include it. At this level, it is better to omit small contributions than to clutter your resume with noise and unnecessary information.

Technical Leadership Projects

If you’ve led architectural initiatives, platform improvements, or technical transformations at work, these can appear in your projects section if they deserve special emphasis. Sometimes a major project is too important to bury in your experience bullets.

For example, if you led a company-wide migration to microservices or established an engineering culture initiative, you might give it dedicated attention:

“Led migration of monolithic platform to microservices across 15 teams over 18 months. Established frameworks for service discovery, deployment orchestration, and distributed tracing, enabling 10x faster feature velocity.”

This works especially well if the project demonstrates cross-team leadership, strategic thinking, or long-term impact.

How to Present Projects Professionally

Keep each project to 2-3 lines maximum. Include:

• Project name or title
• What you built or did (2-3 words max)
• Specific outcome or metric

Example format:

[Project Name] | [Brief description] | [Outcome/metric]

“Real-time Analytics Dashboard | Built Grafana-based observability platform | Reduced MTTR by 40%, enabling 200+ engineers to self-serve diagnostics”

GitHub and Portfolio Links

Include links to your GitHub profile or personal portfolio if you have strong projects there. But be mindful of what you are including. If your GitHub is a collection of half-finished tutorials, don’t link to it. If it showcases well-architected, documented projects with meaningful READMEs and commit histories, absolutely include it.

Format it simply in your contact info or at the end of your resume:

“GitHub: github.com/yourname | Portfolio: yourname.dev”

A recruiter might glance at your GitHub, but they won’t dig deep unless your resume already impressed them. The link is a bonus for those interested in seeing more depth.

Where Projects Fit in Your Resume

Place your projects section after your experience and technical skills. For most experienced professionals, you won’t need a dedicated projects section at all because your professional experience should speak loudly enough. If you do include projects, it should be 3-5 lines maximum, never more than quarter of a page.

Education & Certifications

For experienced FAANG resume, this section doesn’t need to be too detailed. Keep uit simple and straightforward. At this level, your work matters infinitely more than your degree.

List your undergraduate degree and graduation year. If you have an advanced degree, include it. That’s it. GPA, honors, and coursework are unnecessary and recruiters don’t care at your level.

For certifications, only include current, role-relevant ones. AWS Solutions Architect, Google Cloud Architect, or Kubernetes certifications can help if they align with the position. Skip generic online certifications or expired credentials. One or two relevant certifications is better than a list of irrelevant ones.

Format simply:

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, University of Washington, 2016

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, 2024

That’s all the space this section needs.

Resume Checklist for Final Review

Before you submit your FAANG resume for experienced professionals, run through this checklist. These are the things that stop resumes from getting interviews.

Content Checks

• Every bullet point starts with an action verb and ends with a quantified outcome
• No bullet point is longer than 2 lines
• Experience section has 5-7 bullets per role
• Most recent role is your strongest—if not, reconsider your framing
• No generic responsibilities (“Responsible for…”, “Worked on…”)
• Technical skills section lists only technologies you’ve actively used
• Professional summary is 2-3 lines and demonstrates seniority and impact
• No typos, grammar errors, or inconsistent formatting

ATS and Formatting Checks

• Resume is 1-2 pages (not longer)
• Using standard fonts (Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman)
• No graphics, tables, or special formatting that ATS might misread
• Margins are 0.5-1 inch consistently
• Dates are formatted consistently (Jan 2020 – Present, not 1/2020 – now)
• Job titles and company names are bolded consistently
• Bullet points use simple symbols (- , -, *)
• File saved as PDF to preserve formatting

Relevance Checks

• Keywords from the job description appear naturally in your resume
• Experience bullets reflect what the target company values
• No irrelevant projects or certifications cluttering the resume
• Education and certifications are appropriately weighted (not overemphasized)
• Your current trajectory aligns with the role you’re applying for

Impact Checks

• Can you defend every number on your resume in an interview?
• Does your resume answer “Why should we interview this person?”
• Are outcomes business-focused, not just technical?
• Is there clear progression in scope and impact across roles?
• Does your resume tell a coherent story of your career?

Final Polish

• Proofread at least twice, preferably with someone else reviewing
• Test your resume PDF in multiple viewers to ensure formatting holds
• Ensure your contact information is correct and up-to-date
• LinkedIn URL is customized and matches your resume content
• GitHub link (if included) showcases quality projects

Red Flags to Eliminate

• Long unexplained gaps in employment (briefly explain if present)
• Job-hopping without clear progression (explain lateral moves if they exist)
• Vague metrics or unquantified achievements
• Inconsistent or unprofessional formatting
• Outdated technologies listed prominently
• Soft skills without evidence (“great communicator”, “team player”)

Run through this checklist before hitting send. A resume that passes all these checks won’t guarantee an interview, but one that fails them definitely won’t get one.

FAANG Resume Templates for Experienced Professionals

Conclusion

Even if you are an experienced professional, it is importnat to treat your resume as opening argument. It gets you past screening and into interviews where you prove your worth.

The core principle to follow is simple: show, don’t tell.

Demonstrate leadership with measurable results, not vague claims. Describe the problems you solved and the impact they had on the business. Every line should quietly answer one question: “Why should we interview this person?”

A strong FAANG resume gets you past initial screening. Even though the technical and behavioral interview is the most important part, without a compelling resume, you’ll never get the opportunity to show what you can actually do.

Invest the time to get this right. It’s the difference between being passed over in six seconds and having a meaningful conversation with a hiring manager who’s already interested.

FAQs: FAANG Resume for Experienced Professionals

1. How long should a FAANG resume be?

One to two pages. It should be one page if you have under 8 years of experience, two if you’ve held senior or leadership roles.

2. Do FAANG recruiters read the whole resume?

No, they skim for key signals like impact, scale, and role progression in under 10 seconds.

3. Should I tailor my resume for each FAANG company?

Yes. slightly adjust keywords, metrics, and emphasis to align with each company’s culture and priorities.

4. How important are metrics on a FAANG resume?

It is really important to include quantified results (e.g., latency reduced 45%, uptime 99.99%) to make your impact tangible and memorable.

5. Do side projects help experienced professionals?

Only if they demonstrate new skills, leadership, or scale beyond your day job; otherwise, focus on professional achievements.