This week you'll find an excerpt from my e-book, Upshift Now! The Executive's Guide to Winning a Higher Position. Despite the title, it's a book for anyone seeking help in a job search, not just executives. If you have comments on the book, please post them here at the blog. I'm interested in your suggestions. Today's excerpt: You on a Pedestal: The Art of the Resume (Part 2)
Highlight Your Achievements
To have impact, your resume must vividly state your accomplishments, not just restate your job description. Here are a few tips:
• Stress achievements that increased revenues or saved money or time.
• Underscore your most vital tasks, even if they weren't your main ones.
• Think in terms of larger meaning. State a problem, your solution, and the results.
• If you enhanced processes or products, show how your contributions improved the company.
• Quantify. “Supervised 50-person department” is better than “Supervised a large department.”
• Don’t offer negative information.
• Drop phrases like “responsible for.”
• Check job performance reviews for comments on your value.
Stress your abilities. If you want to emphasize clever problem-solving skills, think of a knotty problem that arose and spell out how you resolved it. If you are strong on leadership, show how you provided a vision or developed and spurred a team to reach unusual heights.
Emphasize recent accomplishments. They are the most important, and you should omit or briefly sketch achievements from longer than 15 years ago. A resume is not a curriculum vitae, which lists everything you’ve ever done. It’s a pitch.
Don’t omit accomplishments. You probably won’t recall all your achievements at first, since you may take them for granted. This fact repeatedly surprises job applicants, who often send out resumes thinking they have included all their successes. So go over the ground again and again. Especially look for significant contributions you may have made toward company goals without the sense that they were your own. If you omit important achievements, such as your role in increasing EBITDA, the employer will naturally assume they never occurred. So accumulate a full roster of your deeds. At first, sit down at the computer and spill out everything you may have played a role in, without editing or second thought. You may also take certain skills for granted, such as fluency in Spanish, so itemize them in a separate list. Then go over both and weed out any that really don’t belong. Look at these lists the next day, and the day after that. Check your job evaluations for further clues. You may find that it takes time to put all your accomplishments in one place, especially if you have worked for the company for a long time. Then prioritize them, in order of importance to the company. The most important will be the takeaway items for the employer.
Be sure the key points jump out at a glance. Why? A glance may be all you’ll get. Screeners give an average of less than 20 seconds to each resume. But even if you get more, highlighting the most important points eases comprehension for the screener. As a result, your key points sink in deeper. One of the most common errors is the gray resume, the flat blur of text with no emphasized points. It doesn’t look professional or businesslike. It just looks dull.
Write it crisply. The prose of a resume suggests the caliber of your mind. At the very least, it shows what you will tolerate in an important document. A poorly worded resume implies you’d approve weak reports and sloppy letters to prospective clients. It suggests you are a bad communicator and worst of all, perhaps, it fails to drive home your points. Overall, a clumsy resume suggests that you operate at a lower level. This conclusion can be unfair, since many great executives are not great writers, but your resume is your speaking voice. It can’t sound awkward.