Before you can land an interview and impress your future boss in person, you’ll need to impress them on paper. The best way to do that is to showcase your individual approach.

Your resume is your first opportunity to show future employers the kind of person you are, the type of employee you’ll be, and the approach you’ll bring to the position.

To highlight this individual approach in your resume, reflect on your performance in your previous jobs. What were the challenges you tackled? What actions did you take in your role that provided a positive outcome?  How did you specifically contribute to a collective goal?

Including the answers to those questions throughout your resume is much more descriptive to a potential employer than a basic “responsible for” statement.

Responsible For Statements vs. PAR Statements

“Responsible for” statements only highlight what your former employer WANTED you to do, without focusing on what you ACTUALLY DID. Your future employer isn’t interested in simply what you were supposed to do. They want to know what you were able to accomplish and how your company benefited as a result. This is why it’s so important to use PAR statements in your resume.

As we’ve mentioned in previous blogs, PARs are Problem-Action-Result statements that explain certain problems or challenges you faced, the specific actions you took to overcome them, and the positive results (achievements) that came from your actions.

Approach your PARs as mini stories of the problems or challenges you faced in past jobs and how you overcame them to benefit both yourself and your company. Providing a future employer with the context of how and why you achieved your accomplishments is far more valuable than a simple list of your responsibilities.

It’s also important to be as specific as possible when talking about your results. Be sure to quantify your achievements with dollar amounts, percentages, or numbers if possible.

By providing future employers with concrete proof of your achievements and capabilities, you’re not only showing them what you’ve done in the past, but also what you can do for their company in the future.

Define Your Professional Brand

It’s really about defining your brand as a professional.

For example, let’s say the same company, product line, and market had two different CEOs back to back. They had the same responsibilities. However, the results of the company will be different under each leader. Why? Because each CEO brings their own personal approach to the position. They have their own proactive reasoning and their own ideas of how to best mitigate and resolve operational challenges. So, the company will see different results under each leader.

Think about professional positions the same way. Hiring the right engineer, tech manager, or operations director can impact how well that role performs in an organization. Employers know this, and they look for examples of individual approach to find the best talent.

Now you have all the tools you need to successfully define your professional brand for your future employer. If you’re applying for a new job and need additional help crafting your resume, Capstone Resume Services can help!

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Start With The Big Picture

You have mere seconds to get a recruiter’s or hiring manager’s attention and convince him or her to spend more time reviewing your resume. Your resume must make an impact from the start.

Are you still using an objective at the top? These statements generally explain what type of opportunity you are seeking and they were the resume standard for many years. Not any longer. They have since been replaced with career / executive summaries.

Why the change? Objective statements were about the candidate’s needs; today it’s all about what the candidate can do for the employer. The summary at the top of your resume provides a prospective employer with a snapshot of your most relevant skills, experience and accomplishments. If  it effectively conveys the big picture of what you can do for the company, he or she is likely to continue reading.

Tell A Relevant Story

Once you’ve captured the employer’s attention with the big picture, now’s your chance to provide additional details in the experience section. As an executive, you undoubtedly bring many years of know-how. While it’s tempting to list all the responsibilities you’ve adopted over the years,  you have only two pages to work with, and you want to make them count.

Think carefully about the employer and job to which you are applying. What prior experiences and responsibilities are most relevant for this position? What expectations can you assume the employer already has of you?  Many essential abilities need not be explicitly stated if they are implied through the descriptions of your performance.  Cut as much extraneous information as possible.

Be Crystal Clear

Clear statements imply skills and abilities while also showing accountability and outcomes. Consider your adjectives carefully, as vague words become meaningless without facts to back them up. So, you say you’ve demonstrated visionary leadership? How have you shown vision? What specifically have you done to positively impact your employer’s outcomes? How have you contributed to organizational growth? What measurable results have you achieved? Providing specific answers to these questions will result in a cleaner resume with greater selling power.

Results Sell

Your resume is a marketing document intended to spark an employer’s interest enough to invite you for an interview. Many people are uncomfortable bragging about their accomplishments, but your resume is no place to be modest.  Employers are interested in the results you generated in the past so they can predict how you might help them succeed in the future.

One effective way to demonstrate results is through P-A-R statements.  P-A-R stands for Problem-Action-Results and including these three elements in your statements illustrates abilities and outcomes. An employer can imply a great deal about your capabilities through these statements.

In a P-A-R statement, you describe a business problem, the action you took to solve it and the positive result that came from your action. Where possible, quantify your results to reveal the impact on the organization’s bottom line.

For example, consider the statement “directed a marketing department with 12 staff members.” Sure, that says you had managerial responsibility, but it says nothing about what kind of managerial skill you have.  Now, consider this. “Reenergized an underperforming 12-person marketing team [problem] by creating desirable performance incentives [action] that resulted in more creative solutions for clients and a 20% increase in department productivity [result].” Doesn’t the latter statement have much more impact than the former? The second statement implies the same managerial responsibility while also revealing creative leadership abilities and specific results.

Give Them Some Space

You can write P-A-R statements all day but they probably won’t be read if your resume looks cluttered. A clean summary section, an experience section that focuses on results and a relevant education section are all important elements, but what’s not there is important too. Leave enough white space on your pages to make the resume easier to scan. A cluttered page can be overwhelming for the eyes and the brain that plans to give this document less than a minute of time on the first go around. So make your words count and save the less important details for that interview.

Are you getting interviews? If your resume is not providing the results you want, we can help!
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