OpenAI's hiring lead reviewed thousands of résumés and landed on four criteria

Wulfie Bain, who leads Applied AI Engineering at OpenAI, posted a set of résumé tips on X. He leads an applied AI engineering team focused on startups, has been CTO at a startup, graduated from Oxford, and did recruiting at BCG early in his career. By his account, he has reviewed thousands of résumés over time. This is the third post in a series about applying to OpenAI, and the team has more roles opening.

Before laying out the four tips, Bain first made two points.

A referral is best if you can get one. If you don't know anyone, you can only apply online; Bain himself got into OpenAI through an online application. A résumé can't fully describe a person. Its role is to prove relevant experience and communicate clearly enough that the hiring team wants to invite you for a conversation.

The four tips are:

Keep it short. One page is best; relevance matters more than page count. The résumé itself demonstrates whether you can write and whether you know how to make trade-offs.
Cut irrelevant experience. Every experience should make clear how it relates to this job. Bain says he is proud of his high school grades too, but these days they usually aren't useful. A commenter said the second point is the hardest: the section you can't bear to cut is often the least useful.
Write outcomes, not just actions. If you only write “redesigned the architecture of an AI agent,” the reader doesn't know whether it was worth doing. Writing “cut response time by 2 seconds, which raised customer satisfaction” is an outcome. In sales, write how much revenue you brought in. A commenter added that AI roles are stricter: hiring teams assume you can use AI, so merely writing “did something with AI” doesn't earn you points; quantified before-and-after comparisons are what set you apart.
Make it easy to scan quickly. Bold the important content, and under each experience put the most persuasive evidence first. Hiring teams need to quickly decide, among a huge pile of résumés, whom to interview.

Some commenters' complaints are also worth including: Bain's tweet is longer than many people's résumés, and some said that was pointless bloat. Writing short and actually doing it are two different things. Others said “writing outcomes” is the hardest part: most résumés are full of what people were responsible for and what they participated in, without a single result; someone joked that writing outcomes is just burning through tokens. These reactions show that the four tips aren't complicated; the hard part is making trade-offs and providing evidence.

New roles are about to open. First get your résumé down to one page that can be scanned, then worry about the rest.

Original post: https://x.com/wulfie_bain_/status/2117600605774458880

Baoyu's repost: https://x.com/dotey/status/2117639131929129316