Summary

Attention spans are short, and you have only seconds to get your reader’s attention. Convince an employer to continue reading your resume by including a compelling summary section at the top of it. This section directly below your name and contact information provides a synopsis of your professional background and gets the reader interested enough to go on. Important items to include are: core skills and strengths, noteworthy accomplishments, and significant past job functions and experience. Most importantly, make it concise. Generally your summary section will occupy one quarter to one third of the first page of your resume, dependent upon your level of experience and line of work.

Keywords

Including appropriate resume keywords can unlock interview opportunities. Generally a recruiter or HR manager will scan resumes rather than read them, so including relevant keywords can help catch their eyes. Additionally, many large employers use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to collect and store resumes and candidate information. These systems allow the employer to search for candidates with specific skills or experience and they can also rule out those who are unqualified by leaving them out of the search results. Ensure that you stay in the applicant pool by including keywords that are applicable to the job and industry. Job descriptions can be a great source of ideas for keywords.

Evidence

Job seekers commonly include a laundry list of job duties and skills on their resumes while omitting evidence of successful performance. On your resume, it’s better to show than tell. Substantiate your abilities and job responsibilities by describing not only what you did but how you did your work. One way to demonstrate your abilities is to use PAR statements, where PAR stands for Problem-Action-Result. Your statements describe the business problems/challenges/situations you tackled, the actions you took to resolve them, and the positive business results that stemmed from your actions. These results-action oriented statements show the employer the value you have brought to past positions and that you have the potential to do the same for them.

Results

Speaking of results, we’re giving them their own section here because they’re that important for your resume. When describing results in your PAR statements, quantify them in the form of general numbers, dollars or percentages. How many more leads did the company sales team get from your online marketing campaign? How much money did the company save due to a process you streamlined? By what percentage did complaints decrease after your customer service idea was implemented? It’s important to be honest here and determine accurate numbers to the best of your ability. Keeping track of your results as you go through your career is a good professional habit as it not only can help when it’s time to write your resume or look for a job, but it can also help you demonstrate your value in your current position when it’s time for your performance review.

Story

When preparing your resume, it’s essential to approach it from the employer’s perspective. Your resume should tell a clear story of your career rather than present a puzzle that the employer must put together (they won’t). Instead, convince the employer that you are the missing piece to their puzzle and use your resume to guide them toward envisioning a picture of how you could fit the position they‘re offering. In addition to your summary section at the top of your resume, a job narrative, or summary statements describing each position in your experience section, can assist the employer in understanding your story. Your cover letter assists here, but your resume should be able to stand on its own. By focusing on what the employer needs and writing your resume from that perspective, you increase your chances of being invited for an interview.

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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.

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