🎧 Smarter Career And Business Moves Podcast

How To Create Resume Content That Gets Results - Developing Achievement Statements

June 06, 2020 Annette Richmond, MA, Executive Resume Writer Season 1 Episode 8
🎧 Smarter Career And Business Moves Podcast
How To Create Resume Content That Gets Results - Developing Achievement Statements
Show Notes Transcript

There are a several elements that make one resume more effective than another. First, a resume needs to grab the reader’s attention. It needs to present what the candidate has to offer right up front. It also needs to sell the candidate to the recruiter and hiring manager.

One of the reasons DIY resumes fail is because people focus on what they do on a day-to-day basis. They think that talking about their duties and responsibilities is enough. Its not. 

Today’s resumes are more like marketing documents that employment histories. Yes, you need to include your professional experience. But you need to do it in a way that demonstrates what you can do for the employer. You need to show results. 

And you need to do it fast. A 2018 study by The Ladders found recruiters take 7.4 seconds to decide if a candidate is qualified. A 2014 CareerBuilder survey found employers take 2 minutes.  

In this episode, you’ll learn:

— Why resume writers and other career professionals say you need an achievement-based or results-driven resume.

—  The secret to getting a recruiters’ and employers’ attention enough to make them contact you. Hint: you need to do it fast. 

—  How long recruiters and hiring managers look at your resume before making a decision, and where they look first on your resume. 

—  The simple formula resume writers use with their clients to draw out achievement statements, Challenge, Action, Result.

—  How to develop metrics for your achievements, even if you’re not in sales or marketing. Its just a matter of thinking a little differently. 

— The basics you need to include for each position over the last 10 to 15 years.

 

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(Previously recorded, Live Show)

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Annette (00:08):

[Inaudible] hi, welcome to the smarter career moves podcast. I'm an at Richmond executive resume writer and principal of career intelligence, resume writing career services. [inaudible].

Annette (00:31):

Hi, thanks so much for joining me again today. Today, I want to talk to you about creating achievements for your resume. If you've talked to a resume writer or any career professional, or even read the numerous articles on how to write a resume online, you've heard about creating achievements. People talk about achievement based resumes or results driven resumes, and they're all talking about pretty much the same thing. So what's the big deal about achievements? The bottom line is that people in similar positions are doing similar things. So if you're a marketing director or VP of sales at ABC company, what you're doing is pretty much the same thing as the marketing director or VP of sales is doing it XYZ company. What really makes you stand out, sets you apart from other candidates, applying for the same position are the results, the contributions you've made to your employers.

Annette (01:33):

The things that you've done that have had an impact on the employer, it might be your department. It might be the entire company. It might just be something that's had an impact for your team, but it's something that sets you apart that is going to be on your resume and not on someone else's resume. So when you're thinking about achievements, what you need to do is go back. Think about your career. What were your biggest wins? What were the things that you've done, that if you were sitting down with your boss asking for a raise and you wanted to talk about all the great things you've done, or if you were sitting in an interview with a potential employer the stories that you would want to tell, the reason that employers are interested in, what you've done is because like all of us, they're listening to station w I F M what's in it for me.

Annette (02:36):

So when they're looking at a resume or interviewing candidates for a job, they want to know what can the candidate do for them. And that's where you get back to those achievements. Your biggest wins, the things that you have done that have had an impact on your employer. It might be just your team. It might be your department. It might be something that had an impact on the company, but those are the things that really make you stand out from other candidates applying for the same position. So how do you create these achievements statements? Spend some time thinking about your positions, your career over the last 10 to 15 years, because on your resume, you only want to go back in detail 10 to 15 years. So some of the questions that you can think about are what challenges did you overcome? What problem did you uncover and fix?

Annette (03:33):

Maybe it was something that you did that generated revenue for the company. What did you do that saved time or saved money? What were the things you did that had a positive impact on your employer? So what you want to do to get started with your achievement statements is write down a few stories. Using the very simple car formula. That's C a R formula that most resume writers, including me use with their clients. The C stands for challenge. What was the problem? The issue, the concern. It might've been something that was there when you were hired something that you might've been hired to fix. It might be something that popped up while you were there. Maybe employee morale fell off because there was a change in leadership at the company. You just have to spend some time and think about the challenges you faced a stands for action.

Annette (04:37):

So what did you do? What did you do to solve this problem? What did you do to increase employee morale? Or what did you do to increase sales? If they, you know, if you went into a company and they were kind of struggling, a lot of people work on teams, and if you were working on a team, of course, you don't want to take all the credit for yourself. You don't want to say, you know, well, I did this and I do that. You want to credit the team, but you also want to make sure to point out your specific contribution. It might be that you were choosing new vendors for the company and your specific part was negotiating the deals with them. It might be that you stepped into the leadership role. It might be that you brought a specific type of knowledge or expertise to the team that the other members didn't have.

Annette (05:35):

The last part are, is the result. So what was the results and think of, think of the results in terms of metrics, money, percentages, et cetera. Now, one of the things that people often have a problem with, if they don't give it enough thought is coming up with the metrics. People tell me it's easy to come up with metrics. If you're in sales, you can talk about the money that you generated, or the quotas that you met, or the quotas that you beat. But the thing is, even if you're an operations position, which many of my clients are in, there are things that you do for the company that has had an impact on them. It might be that you're the controller or finance director of a company. And you redesigned the process for doing the expense reports. So now the person in accounts payable only spends three days a month instead of five or six days a month processing the expense reports.

Annette (06:44):

You save time. The time the person is not doing expense reports, they can be doing something else. You might've changed processes that improved employee morale or customer satisfaction. So if you're improving employee morale, you might talk about retention rates, employee retention rates increasing, or you might talk about customer satisfaction, increasing. Maybe you did a survey. Maybe it's just that your sales increased because of the customers are happier. There's always something there. You just have to take time and uncover it. So when you're thinking about those achievement statements, the stories you want to tell you should choose some that are most relevant to your target position. So if you're a VP of sales, of course you want to talk about generating income. However, you might also want to show leadership skills, particularly if you're looking for a higher position. So in that case, you can think of times that maybe you trained employees or mentored staff who became sort of rock stars in their own, right?

Annette (07:58):

There are always things to think about. So when you are creating bullets, obviously I can't show you examples on a podcast, but one of the things you want to do is think of the bullets, like a magazine article. Whenever you read a magazine article or a newspaper article, you find the punch right up in the beginning. So the punch for your achievement might be achieving 65% of year over year profit. So if that's the metric and that's the punch, you want to start the bullet with that and follow by explaining how you did that. It might be that you eliminated redundant meetings, but still maintain that high touch service. So that's how you want to talk about that. So maybe reduce turnover by 25%. So you want to put that number, reduce turnover, 25% at the beginning of the bullet. And then you want to talk about how you boosted employee morale.

Annette (09:03):

Maybe you met with the staff individual leaders set goals, which hadn't been done before. Maybe you were very intent on giving the staff stretch assignments so they could grow in their careers. So just think about it. One thing that you do want to remember always when you're writing your resume is that you want to connect with your readers as quickly as possible. The ladders that of study originally back in 2012, I think, and the big number that came out of that study that was touted by all resume writers and many career professionals is that recruiters spend six seconds looking at resumes before they make a decision. Now, the ladders conducted this study by putting ice scanning goggles on recruiters, presenting them with resumes, having them look over the resumes and monitoring where their eyes went. And that's how they determine this number. They did the study again in 2018.

Annette (10:07):

And the number they came up with then was 7.4 seconds. Now, when I was a recruiter myself, I spent more than seven or eight seconds, but you have to remember that recruiters are, you know, in a hurry they're, they're contingency, they're working on commission. And if they're working at corporate, they still want to fill as many positions as possible. Career builder did a study in 2014, where they asked employers how long they spent looking at resumes. And the number that came out of that was two minutes. Now, two minutes is not a long time. Again, they may spend a little bit more time than that, but one of the things that came out of that study was that more than one person was looking at a resume before any kind of decision was made. Now, one thing I do want to mention before moving on is that people think that resumes are picked up by recruiters or hiring managers or HR directors and read from top to bottom.

Annette (11:12):

And the truth is they are not the most important thing to me that came out of the ladder study was where the recruiters looked. They looked at the person's name and where they were, they scroll down and they looked at the current or most recent position. They looked that over, they went along the right hand to look at the dates of employment. Then they flipped down and went to the bottom of the resume to look at the education. Particularly if they were looking for someone and they wanted someone with an MBA after that all looked good. Then they went back and scan the resume for keywords to see if this person was qualified. And if that looked good, then people go on and read it from top to bottom. So you want to make it easy for recruiters, employers, HR directors, even HR assistants who may be going through resumes to choose some candidates to be called in for interviews, always remember to package your content in a modern scannable resume that will make you stand out.

Annette (12:24):

So again, I can't show you an example, but as I mentioned before, go back 10, 15 years include a few lines about each employer to provide context. This is, you know, the size of the employer, the offices, the number of employees might be the annual budget. If you're not working for our company like Priceline or Diageo or Facebook, then a potential recruiters and employers may not be familiar with your current employer. So you want to provide some context. You also want to provide a brief summary of your daily duties. You know, what you are doing day to day, that's similar to others in similar positions for each of your positions, short paragraphs, maybe three, four lines at the most w two, maybe three, depending on how long you've been there. And then you want to follow that by three to five bullets that begin with the results and end with the story.

Annette (13:28):

Those are your achievement statements or your results. So that's really the basic of creating achievement statements for your resume. Use that very simple car formula challenge, action, and result. Always remember that employers are looking at your resume with an attitude of what's in it for me. What can this person do for me? You also have to remember that people will be scanning your resume. So you want to make it easy to scan and easy to read as you're putting together your resume and editing it down to two pages. When you look at the content, think about what the employer will think. If you say that you've done something particularly in those achievements, think about it. So what if you created the marketing campaign? So what, what was the result? So thank you again for joining me today and good luck with your job search.

Annette 1 (14:42):

Thank you for joining us for the smarter career moves podcast. Hope you enjoy today's show. If you did, please subscribe. Thank you.