Back in the days before COVID, I had a client who wanted to apply for a first-level management job in a niche field in a somewhat out-of-the-way location. I prepared her resume, she sent it off, and it was no surprise when she was quickly called in for an interview. But when my client called me afterwards, she told me that the interviewer had told her that “her resume was so impressive, she was being interviewed first from a field of more than a thousand applicants!” (Since then, I have told this story to hundreds of hiring managers and almost all of them agreed that they had also seen applicant pools of similar sizes.)
What happened to this client raised an acute question: how do I make my clients’ resumes stand out in the face of such competition? Here are some of the methods I have adopted over the years to make sure my clients receive interviews for the jobs they want.
Before doing anything else, it is necessary to remember exactly what a resume is. It is not just a summary of your career; instead, it is an advertising document specifically designed to make you appear to be one of the most, if not the most, capable applicants for the positions you apply for. Such a document must differentiate you from every other applicant in seven very important ways.
The most important change you can make to your resume is to minimize descriptions of your job responsibilities and maximize statements showing how well you carried those responsibilities out, quantifying them wherever possible. Here’s what I mean. Instead of saying that a Production Manager will “oversee factory operations and hire and train workers,” I note that my client has “devised process improvements that cut costs by 20%” and “mentored staff into a 30% productivity jump and a 25% improvement in engagement scores.” Instead of recording that a Salesperson “managed a territory and resolved customer issues” my client announced that she had “doubled territory revenues in one year by increasing the client base by 50% and transforming 60 inactive clients to active status.” By being specific about the results you achieved, you are giving hiring managers the information they would most like to have since your results tell potential employers how well you will do the jobs they need to fill.
A second thing you must do is to ask yourself questions that uncover key accomplishments of a type that job ads will not ask for. Nobody wants to state in public that crises happen in their company, so almost no job ad asks about crisis management skills. If you’ve ever managed a crisis, (as an electrical engineer client of mine did when he built a junction box connecting two different signalling systems for a major subway system at very short notice when the subcontractor gave up), adding the story of how you managed that crisis to your resume can make all the difference — as that client found out when he got three VP or Director level interviews within one week of receiving his resume.
Another hurdle that must be addressed is presentation order: how do I present my accomplishments in the most persuasive way? This question gains additional urgency when we remember that many Human Resources studies have told us that a hiring manager receiving a hundred or more resumes will tend to read only the first third of the first page before making the “circular file/interview pile“ decision. If that’s the case, the question becomes: how do we get our most persuasive accomplishments into that space so that they can inform the hiring manager’s decision?
The first step is to change the positioning of your Education section. Move it from under the summary section to after your job history/professional experience section. This change will do you no harm: if you are more than five years into your career, your education details are of far lesser importance than your experience. This change allows your Professional Experience section to follow your Summary section.
Mention of the Summary section of your resume brings up a couple of points. First, it is a selling tool that must be designed to show how you can solve the hiring manager’s problems, so remove all mention of your goals and expectations from the job from the Summary and save them until late in the interview after it is clear that the prospective employer is seriously interested in hiring you. Second, think of your summary as your personal ROI statement. If they invest in you, what returns will this organization receive and what problems will they avoid? Be sure that your Summary statements address these benefits and problems by selecting them from the job ad you are applying to. Finally, support each of your claims in this section by including accomplishment statements showing your effectiveness in each area in your work history.
With your Professional Experience section now following your Summary section, use an emphasis element (Bold, Italic fonts, bullets etc.) to emphasize your job successes and make them stand out from pure job description and responsibility statements in a plain paragraph form. There are many emphasis elements available; choose the one that suits you. (Except one: don’t use ALL CAPS — some people will think you are shouting at them.)
This brings me to my final point. These days, the average duration of a job search runs between fifteen to twenty-one weeks, or even more depending on your state or province. That means too many people are chasing too few jobs, which explains why applicant piles of 500 or more are now common. Faced with these numbers, many hiring managers no longer use a basic requirements list. Instead, they add items from their “nice to have” and “once in a blue moon” wish lists to their job ads. The result is that the resume that got the interview at company A cannot be expected to open the door at company B. So you can’t use the same resume for every company on your target list. Instead, you must customize each resume to make it the best possible match for each job ad you apply to.
To your success!