“I have received a lot of advice on how to write it, mainly from my staff. It seems they really know about these things. They tell me that I have to use the active voice for the resume. You know, things like” He commanded the Armed Forces of the States United “,” Ordered airstrikes “,” Served three terms as president. “All beautify a little.”
-President Bill Clinton, White House Correspondents Dinner, April 29, 2000
As a professional who reviews resumes frequently, I see a flood of resumes from different people with different backgrounds every week.
In general, the undergraduate / recent grad resumes that I see fall into 1 of 2 categories – they are either very impressive and don’t need a lot of work other than minor formatting issues, or they are good but have some common issues.
Common problems
The two most common problems I’ve seen are not being specific enough and not focusing on results. If your resume says “Information Compiled and Research”, those who review it might rightly think that you yourself don’t know exactly what your responsibilities were.
Focusing on results is equally important – why would someone hire you if they can’t get results?
Example of resume improvement
Here is a good example of what NOT to write on your resume, if you are applying for financial services jobs:
“-Procurement objectives investigated in the construction and homebuilding industries”.
This is not specific enough and doesn’t give me any idea how he did it, what his process was, or what the results of his work were.
What resources did you use to research these? Did you speak to experts? Reference the Wall Street Journal? What criteria did you use to make the final selections? Comes back? Cost effectiveness? Scale? Management teams?
Those are all crucial details that were left out of this example.
Here is an improved version:
“-Researched over 100 acquisition targets in the construction and homebuilding industries using Capital IQ and Factset and narrowed the list down to the top 10 companies. Used financial selection criteria such as revenue growth and profit margins. EBITDA. He also used qualitative criteria such as market dynamics in construction subsegments, strength of management teams and exposure to subprime mortgages. “
This is much better than the first version, but could still need some improvement: the results of your work. What did you spend all those hours doing, if it weren’t for the results?
Sometimes people say they don’t know what the results were or that they can’t link anything directly to their work. If this is the case, get creative and get results.
I’m not suggesting that you lie, but as Bill Clinton points out earlier, sometimes you have to exaggerate a bit. Don’t suggest that your beautiful Excel chart generated an additional $ 1 million in revenue, but claiming greater efficiency or time / money savings is fine.
Here’s an example of how we could add a focus on results to this example:
“-Researched over 100 acquisition targets in the construction and homebuilding industries using Capital IQ and Factset and narrowed the list down to the top 10 companies. Used financial selection criteria such as revenue growth and profit margins. EBITDA. It also used qualitative criteria such as market dynamics in construction subsegments, strength of management teams, and exposure to subprime mortgages. As a result, the private equity firm conducted additional due diligence on 3 of the companies. “
I admit this is a bit of an exaggeration; in this particular case, it would be quite difficult to say what the true results were.
And sometimes, in fact, you may not be able to determine the results. But if your resume doesn’t have a single mention of results anywhere, you can definitely find some cases where you have tangible results and expand on them.