You need a great resume. That you know. But when you sit down to create it, you struggle. You get stumped trying to figure out the answers to “what does the employer want to know so that they call me in for an interview? What should I stress? What’s the secret sauce that might be missing?”
As a career counselor who has written a few thousand resumes, I recognize the challenge people have in writing their own resumes. They make a critical mistake that prevents them from producing an outstanding, attention-getting resume. What is that mistake? Their resumes don’t highlight their results and accomplishments.
Let’s consider what an employer cares most about. It’s not reading generic job descriptions. No, they respond to the results you produce on the job. These accomplishments and outcomes demonstrate past success and convince the employer of your ability to deliver similar results for them. For your resume to grab attention and be successful, it must be loaded with the results you’ve achieved on the job.
Sounds easy? It’s not.
What to Stress
The key to a great resume is to quantify those outcomes whenever possible. As I help my career counseling clients write their resumes, most of them lack these critical outcomes. When I ask the client what was your greatest accomplishment, I’m quite specific. I want an answer with details. If you say you saved money, I ask how much? The typical responses I hear are “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember,” or they simply respond by saying, “a lot.”
That vague answer—“a lot”—makes it hard for the employer to see the significance of what you’ve done. To impress them, you must quantify the accomplishment. It is more impactful to say, “developed and implemented process improvements that generated a $300K cost savings.” Now that gets noticed.
Think “actions = results” as you write your resume bullet statements for each job’s work description. Always list the biggest accomplishment first. You created something new, and your actions improved productivity. Instead of leaving it at that, add in the percentage. Say, “Results improved productivity by 10%.” By adding this important detail, your statement is much more impressive.
Be specific to illustrate your results, noting money made, time or money saved, mentioning how much or how many. Use numbers, exact figures, and percentages. For example, instead of just saying “supervised team,” it is much stronger to note “managed a team of six direct and 13 indirect reports.”
Are employers responding to your resume?
Biggest Obstacle to Overcome
The big challenge that is blocking you from creating this results-focused resume is you don’t know the answer when asked to quantify the results of your actions. You have forgotten those details. You don’t recall, didn’t record it, or it’s been long ago and you can’t access that info anymore.
Nothing is worse than writing a resume for a sales executive who isn’t able to specify their results in terms of dollars and cents. In their case, all the employer cares about are your sales results. That means highlighting your actions by putting it this way: “Grew the territory by 22% adding $5 million dollars in new revenue in the first 10 months.” This will get a response.
Easy Way to Quantify Results
This monthly task only takes a few minutes. Start an ongoing list of the accomplishments you made in your current job. On the last day of each month, briefly outline what you worked on, noting the details and any results. Quantifying numbers will be readily available or easier to get. This process ensures you have the details you need when it is time to update that resume.
Do This
In early January, sit down and write a current updated resume, adding the past year’s accomplishments. You have your monthly list of the actions you performed and the results you achieved. These will all be fresh in your mind. This is an essential career management strategy, so don’t ignore it. Do it annually. The added bonus is your attention-getting resume will be close at hand whenever you need to use it.
Avoid This Fatal Mistake
Too many people save important career files using the company’s laptop and cloud, including their updated resume and monthly accomplishments list. They forget to save a copy to their own computer or don’t keep a copy on a thumb drive. Critical error. I have heard numerous horror stories where the company instantaneously cut off access when it laid a person off, so these essential documents are lost forever. Don’t let that happen to you.
This article was originally published in Forbes.
