Google & Big Tech CV: How to Write One That Gets Interviews

Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Salesforce recruit differently from investment banks and law firms. The academic filters are less rigid, the culture is less formal, and the roles span far more disciplines — product management, operations, legal, policy, sales, and engineering all sit under the same tech umbrella. But the CV standards, if anything, are higher.

Big tech companies receive millions of applications globally. Google alone reportedly receives around three million applications per year for roughly 20,000 hires. The ratio alone tells you what you are dealing with. This guide focuses on non-technical roles — business, operations, legal, policy, people, and programme management — and what gets CVs through the first screen at the major tech firms.

The Core Difference From Finance and Law CVs

Finance and law CVs are highly structured and convention-bound. Deviating from the format signals inexperience. Tech CVs follow a similar structure but care far more about demonstrated impact at scale. The question every tech recruiter is asking as they read your CV is: did this person make something meaningfully better, and can I see the evidence?

This manifests differently by company. Google's internal hiring culture is famously data-driven — they want numbers in every bullet if at all possible. Amazon uses its Leadership Principles as an explicit evaluation framework, and strong candidates map their experience to those principles even in the CV stage. Meta prioritises speed, impact, and the ability to move quickly in ambiguous situations.

The Google Standard: XYZ Bullets

Google's own hiring guidance recommends a bullet format it calls XYZ: Accomplished X, as measured by Y, by doing Z. It is the most rigorous bullet structure in any industry. Most candidates cannot write like this naturally — but the ones who can get through faster.

Not every bullet will have a number. But the exercise of trying to quantify forces you to think about outcomes — and that shift in thinking is exactly what separates candidates who get interviews from those who do not.

Amazon's Leadership Principles — Use Them

Amazon publishes 16 Leadership Principles on its careers page. These are not window dressing — they are the actual framework Amazon uses to evaluate candidates at every stage, including CV screening. Before you apply to Amazon for any role, read all 16. Then ask yourself which principles your CV currently demonstrates, and which it does not.

You do not need to mention the principles by name on your CV. But if your CV has no evidence of "Bias for Action", "Customer Obsession", or "Ownership" — the three most commonly assessed — you will be filtered out by someone who knows what they are looking for.

What Goes on a Big Tech CV

• Education — degree, classification, relevant modules. Tech firms care less about institution prestige than finance, more about what you actually studied and built during it
• Work experience — reverse chronological, impact-led bullets. Even non-tech roles are valid if you frame them through the lens of problem-solving and outcome
• Projects — this section matters more at tech firms than anywhere else. Side projects, hackathons, apps built, research conducted, anything you built or shipped independently signals the initiative they want to see
• Skills — tools you know, languages you speak, software relevant to the role. Tech firms use ATS systems that keyword-match against job descriptions — include the tools mentioned in the job listing if you genuinely know them
• Activities — leadership positions, not just memberships

The ATS Problem at Big Tech

Large tech companies use Applicant Tracking Systems to pre-filter CVs before a human sees them. This means your CV needs to be readable by software as well as people. Practically:

• Use a single-column layout — two columns and tables confuse most ATS systems
• Avoid headers, footers, text boxes, and graphics — they often get stripped out entirely
• Use standard section headings — "Experience" not "Where I Have Been"
• Include keywords from the job description — if the listing says "cross-functional stakeholder management", use that phrase somewhere
• Save as PDF with standard fonts — avoid anything that might not parse correctly

What Tech Companies Do Not Care About

University prestige matters less than at law or finance. A candidate from a non-Russell Group university who has built something impressive, quantified their impact clearly, and demonstrated the relevant competencies will outperform an Oxbridge candidate who cannot write a decent bullet point. Tech firms are genuinely more meritocratic at the CV stage than most industries.

They also do not care about photos, references, personal statements, or job objective summaries. Remove all of these. A clean, impact-first one-page CV is the correct format for any big tech application at graduate level.

The Projects Section Is Not Optional

If you have no professional tech experience, the projects section is where you prove you belong. This does not require technical skills for non-technical roles. A policy analysis you published, a campaign you ran, an event you organised with measurable results, a report you produced for a society — all of these qualify. The point is to show that you create things, not just participate in them.

For technical roles, a GitHub link with active repositories is expected. Recruiters look at it.