There is one thing you should always remember when writing your resume. That is, the absolute necessity of emphasizing accomplishments rather than duties. This single trick is the one most valuable concept I can teach you to maximize the number of interviews you get. Ignoring this concept will devastate your resume, resulting in a neutered product guaranteed not to excite the employer who is reading it.
It is an unfortunate fact that most people when writing their resumes expect the employer to primarily be interested in hearing of their duties. In the real world however, this is not in the forefront of the average manager’s mind. His priorities are different, and if we want to keep his attention focused on our resume, we must align our resumes words with his priorities. He is undoubtedly a busy person, and his attention when reading resumes can easily wander.
Amongst all the personnel directors and managers I have interviewed over the last 19 years, certain common themes regarding preferred resume content has become apparent to me. If you are serious about getting a quality job, you would do well to put aside any unfounded assumptions or stereotypes about what you should or should not put on your resume. The expectations of today’s personnel directors for resume content are different today than they were 20 years ago when I started writing resumes.
There is a gulf of difference between the response on the part of the employer reading a resume which exclusively focuses on administrative tasks and duties, rather than accomplishments. For example, if you write, “I achieved 17% revenue growth within the first 12 months,” you will end up with many more interviews than if you wrote, “I went to meetings and prepared reports.” In the first instance, we focus on achievements, and the second merely lists duties.
Or, you can write: “Achieved $900K annual sales (2009).” That’s a pretty short sentence, isn’t it? Yet, a powerful bottom-line type of resume statement such as this will get you more interviews than writing paragraphs about boring job duties. You can see that the focus of this statement is on results, rather than on duties, and this sort of resume statement is what you want. Employer wants to know what you can do for him in a concrete, tangible way, and this must be reflected in your resume it is to get results which you want.
Most employers are what I like to call “bottom-line” oriented. This means that they are vastly more interested in the ways you can impact their bottom line, especially in terms of dollars or percentages, then they are in your administrative skills. They are running a business, and your potential value to them lies in your ability to contribute to their market share, profit margins, or total sales. Even the ever-elusive customer satisfaction objective is a bottom-line, measurable quality, in the employer’s eyes.
The primary lesson I am trying to convey about resume preparation here, is that we want to emphasize percentages, dollar signs, awards and other measures of productivity. The time to elaborate upon duties in your previous job descriptions will be at the interview, at the discretion and prompting of the interviewer. However, we do not want to saturate your resume with a barrage of boring duties at this stage.
The lesson, therefore, is when writing your resume to perpetually emphasize results, achievements, and measurements of performance, instead of mundane tasks and administrative duties. This does not mean you do not include any responsibilities, but merely that you emphasize accomplishments over those. To the extent that you emphasize accomplishments and achievements, you will reap the benefits of a much higher interview is one. And the more interviews you succeed in obtaining, the greater the chances you will land your dream job