There’s one thing that can make the difference between a good resume and a bad one, and can help you turn a good resume into a great one. It’s relatively simple, but it means thinking about your resume in a different way than you may be accustomed to.
The shift is this: if your resume were a person, it should be more like a salesperson than a biographer.
I’ll explain what this means for writing your resume in just a moment. But first – for those people who have no experience in sales – let me give you a quick lesson in sales theory. (If you do have some sales experience, keep reading. The most challenging product to sell is yourself, and this will help you do that.)
A salesperson can try to sell a product or service by focusing on its features or its benefits. In simple terms, features are the attributes of a product. The benefits are how it helps the buyer. In sales, it’s not either/or; features and benefits are both important. It’s just that the features are only important because they give the buyer the benefit they’re looking for.
Think about how you make decisions about a major purchase. When buying or renting a home, the layout and size of the rooms are important, but only because they allow you to live the life that you want to live in that home. You check out and compare the specs of the phone or tablet models you’re considering buying, but mostly because those specs determine whether you’ll be able to do the things you want to do with that device. You may look at the picture and sound quality specs of a big screen TV that you’re thinking of buying, but what you’re really thinking about is the quality of the movie-night experiences you’ll have with friends and family.
Far too many resumes are written like a spec sheet for one of these purchases. Your work experiences, the tasks you did, the responsibilities you’ve held in your jobs … those are your ‘features’. It’s not that they’re not important – they are. But they’re only important to the extent that they demonstrate the benefits you’ll bring to a prospective employer.
When writing or updating your resume, think like a salesperson. Your ‘customer’ is a potential employer. What are they really looking for? What value are they hoping to get from bringing on someone new? What benefits will they be looking for you to provide? The answers to these questions will depend on the kind of work you do, but generally speaking, they’re usually about improving the company somehow. The information you include in your resume should show that you can increase revenue for the company, or lower their costs, or make things run more smoothly and efficiently.
A resume that really sells you focuses less on what you did, and more on how that work created value for your previous employers. That’s what’s most relevant to your next employer. Every part of your resume can be viewed through that lens.
Your summary statement – if you have one – should paint a picture about how the experience you bring with you will allow you to create value as an employee in the specific position you’re applying for. (This is why a summary is preferable to an objective, which is less about what your prospective employer wants and more about what you want.)
The skills you choose to highlight on your resume should validate and support the specific benefits that you want the reader to see in you. Same with the training and certifications you choose to list. Each of these adds a level of objective credibility to the experience you’re outlining.
When you describe your work experience in each of your previous jobs, don’t just list all the things you did in that role; the tasks you were responsible for. Most of the lines of content in this section of your resume should focus instead on the impact that your work created for the company.
This shift to a sales mindset is also why keeping track of specific achievements, and including them on your resume, is so important. Accomplishments – particularly those that are quantifiable, expressed in percentages and monetary amounts – underscore how you benefited your previous employers. This, in turn, helps your ‘customer’ – a prospective employer reading your resume – more clearly envision how you’d benefit them.
When you strip away the ‘features’, refining the content in your resume to leave the most valuable benefit-related content, you may end up with a document that has fewer words (more white space) and fewer pages. That’s fine: quality is what counts in a resume, not quantity. The more text there is to read, the less likely that a reader will notice what you really want them to see. Decluttering is good, because the reader is left with the content that really shows what you can do for them.