Resume Write & Wrong

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The Right Stuff, or Just Fluff?

Strengthen your resume with solid evidence
Employers won't be impressed by long list of your talents. Get yourself noticed...in a good way.

Virtually every resume, the good ones and bad ones, contain certain resume words and phrases. You know the ones I mean. Looking over a client's old resume on my desk right now, I see:

Goal-oriented

Leadership

Detail-oriented

Problem-solver

Good communication skills

These are all good qualities and all in demand by discriminating employers. You could be handicapped without them. However, you should not simply tack a list of buzz words onto your resume. Imagine the hiring officer who has to look at dozens, perhaps hundreds, of resumes. To him or her, such verbiage is about as meaningful as a grocery list. It's just about that exciting, too.

What's the fix?

How else can you communicate the fact that you possess these important skills and abilities to a prospective employer? The process requires only two steps:

(1) Take time to really think about your key strengths and list four or five of them.

(2) For each of your strengths, come up with a real-world situation in which you used that attribute to achieve a positive result for an employer (or in school, or in another situation, if you have little, or no work history).

What you are doing is giving evidence, turning unsupported words from fluff into a powerful statement of your qualifications. To illustrate, we'll use the five examples I lifted from the real resume:

Goal-oriented: Met all assigned sales quotas at the Cool Sales Company from 2001 to 2003.

Leadership:Organized a group that met after work hours to brainstorm solutions to Cool Company’s customer service issues and presented best ideas to the department manger.

Detail-oriented:Implemented a fix for a software glitch that eliminated hours of calls to Cool Company’s technical support department.

Problem-solver: Noticed and corrected a discrepancy in the invoicing for a Cool Company client that resulted in an additional $300 in monthly revenue.

Good communication skills: Selected by the Cool Company sales support group to make a customer presentation that resulted in a contract valued at $300,000.

Notice this strategy keeps the buzz words and phrases, but follows each with a concrete accomplishment. Furthermore, it is important to quantify each accomplishment by using exact figures in money, time or other measurement. Also, identify the company where you made your contribution, and dates, if they are relevant and recent (within the last 10 years).

Employers know

Which is more impressive to you, the list of words and phrases, or these five statements? Which is going to be more impressive to a prospective employer?

Let's face it, employers knows any job seeker can claim they possess any number of skills and abilities. In and of itself, this adds little to the power of your resume. It is inconsequential fluff.

It is the weighty stuff that matters to the hiring officer. It's not just anyone who can say they re-designed a business process that reduced costs and labor requirements, - or whatever it is that you, with your unique talents, did to distinguish yourself from your peers.

When you support every claim on your resume, you stand out from the rest and establish credibility with a prospective employer. Just remember to provide evidence for every statement, - and your resume will win its case for you.

For a FREE Assessment of your resume, send it here.

 

 

Copyright ©  2004-2006 Christine M. Roane

For permission to reproduce content, contact cmroane@cool-universe.com.