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It is critical to always remember one important factor about resume writing. This issue is so absolutely important that all other resume criteria fail into insignificance beside it. If you leave this out, you will regret the oversight and wonder why your resumes are not getting any responses.
When trying to write their own resumes, many people assume the employer will mainly be interested in hearing a list of their different duties. However, that is not at all what the typical employer wants to know about your background. Most employers are very busy, and your resume should be written in a way that it does not lose their attention. Picture yourself as a busy personnel director, and honestly ask yourself how much empty fluff you can stomach reading in the resumes I come across your desk in a single day.
Throughout the 19 years I have been writing resumes for a myriad of customers in every conceivable profession, I have also enjoyed access to many personnel directors and hiring managers, those folks on the receiving end of a veritable deluge of resumes every day. You might be interested to learn what they are really interested in reading in your resume, particularly in the context of today’s highly competitive job market.
The essential thing to tell the employer about your past work history, is specific achievements, not your duties. For example, instead of saying “I went to meetings and filled-out reports,” you will get a lot more interview requests if you write: “I achieved 3% sales growth by implementing an aggressive direct marketing campaign.”
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 concept to keep in mind here, therefore, is that on your resume you should focus on measurable, specific accomplishments, and go light on the duties. Rest assured the employer will ask you to elaborate on your specific duties at the interview later. Rather than cluttering up your resume with the endless lists of daily tasks for which you are responsible at a given job, leave that sort of thing for the interview phase.
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.
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