gcapone, Author at Palladian Career Resources

Resume Writing Lessons from Airplane Designs

In college, I majored in Mechanical Engineering and my senior design project was to design and build a remote controlled airplane for a competition. Our project team had six students and a number of advisors, some were professors and others were designers at Bell Helicopter. Early in the process, we meeting at the Bell Helicopter facility with the designers. Discussion was about airplane design, but the basic premise is applicable to resume writing too.

In college, I majored in Mechanical Engineering, and my senior design project was to design and build a remote controlled airplane for a competition. Our project team had six students and a number of advisors, some were professors and others were designers at Bell Helicopter. Early in the process, the team met at the Bell Helicopter facility to plan the project. Discussion was about airplane design.

We reached a point in the discussion where were we trying to decide what type of plane to build. We considered a traditional design, swept-wings, T-tails, Delta wings, canards and other variations. The more unusual the design, the more excited and interested “we” were… the we being the students and some of the professors. We wanted a winning design for the competition, but also wanted the plane to be cool.

After a lengthy discussion, the senior engineer from Bell Helicopter, who had been quiet during the debate, spoke up. This guy had been designing airplanes and helicopters for more than forty years and had seen it all. He broke into the conversation and said, “What you need to do is ride over to Philadelphia International Airport. Take a look at the planes. They all look alike. Build one that looks like what you see there.”

The discussion was over. We didn’t need to visit the airport. All of us knew what we would see. The designer was right. The basic design of an airplane has been refined over decades and works well for almost all applications, even our senior design project. The key to a successful design was not being radically different from every other design. The key was to optimize every detail and get the little things right.

When you write your resume, keep this lesson in mind. There are conventions and design elements to resumes that are very common and recur. These conventions continue to be repeated because they work. You are not going to discover some new resume writing design completely different from has been tried in the past.

You also need to satisfy the expectations of the reader. Our design project didn’t have to persuade customers to buy a ticket and get on our plane, but commercial aircraft manufacturers need to consider how a plan looks. A great airplane design that doesn’t look “right” will not inspire confidence, and ticket sales. If you resume doesn’t meet the expectations of the reader, you may be rejected before the content of your resume is adequately considered.

It may be boring building a design that is standard and ordinary. What is important is not how innovative your resume is. The important thing is to get results. This requires a design that can be easily understood and read quickly. A standard design will do this. Your focus needs to be on optimizing each element of your resume to create a consistent, easy to read message selling your potential.

So, go to your local resume database. Look at the resumes sitting on the runway and build one like those. Then focus on the little details throughout your resume and build a winner.

Sales Accomplishments on a Resume Part 2

Continuing from yesterday, I have four more sales accomplishments from resumes showing how some job seekers attempt to demonstrate their success.

Opening Accounts

Successfully expanded account base from 75 to over 90 accounts.

This bullet is ok. It’s better than nothing but doesn’t make a strong impression. The job seekers fails to provide sufficient context. I can’t tell if adding 15 accounts was good or terrible. Knowing the goals for the position would help. Providing an indication of the change in total sales would give the scope. I would also like to know how this sales performance compared with the performance of others at the company. For example, in a booming industry, where most sales people are doubling their sales, an increase of 20% would be a dismal failure. Finally, I would want to know what the margin of the new sales compared to the old sales. Anyone can win new business by cutting margins or selling at a loss – this would not be an accomplishment.

New Division

Established a customer base of 25+ accounts for newly created division.

This is bullet is similar to the preceding bullet – the scope of the performance is omitted. To improve this, the job seeker should include the budget goals, in customers and dollars and how the performance compared to the goals.

Turnaround

Spearheading a remarkable “worst-to-first” transformation, leading an extremely low-performing sales team to become the only one in the region to exceed 1st quarter objectives, and leading this same team to grow revenue from $3.7M to $8M in 3 years.

I like this accomplishment. It starts with some hype… “remarkable worst-to-first transformation.” Hype is usually a mistake in a resume. The pitfall you need to avoid is making very general, broad boasts that can’t be assessed. Additionally, if you don’t back up your claims, boasting will hurt more than help.

In this case, the job seeker makes a very specific claim about turning around a team, and follows up the hype with a clear demonstration of why they made the claim. They define the starting point – bottom performing with revenues of $3.7m. The job seeker then shows the results… 1^st in the region with $8m in sales. Further emphasizing the success, the job seeker adds that their team was the only one to beat expectations.

I would want to know what the job seeker did to achieve the results. Often, explaining the “how” is difficult in a resume. If the approach could be summarized in a sentence or two, it would make a good addition. If the approach was more complicated, it probably is better to leave it out and explain the situation in an interview.

Strategic Planning

Defined and implemented 5 year strategy to triple sales within 3 years to more $20 million.

This bullet sounds good but doesn’t really say anything. The job seeker planned to triple sales. Planning sales growth is easy… achieving the plan is what counts. Compare this to the NFL. Your now the owner of a team and have to select a coach. You receive two resumes. One lists a bullet that says the coach developed a plan to win the Superbowl within 3 years in their last job. The other one has a bullet like the previous Turnaround example, “Spearheaded a remarkable worst-to-first transformation, leading a team with the worst record in the league to the Super Bowl in three years.” Who do you want to interview? It’s no contest… every coach has a plan to win. It’s what you do with your plan, and what you achieve that will make a difference in an interview.

Sales Accomplishments on a Resume Part 1

Your accomplishments provide the sizzle that will get a hiring manager excited about your resume. They demonstrate your performance and your potential. The stories of your successes often are the most remembered details in an interview. This makes it essential to present strong accomplishments in your resume and talk about them in an interview.

I selected accomplishments from the resumes of sales professionals to show some good and bad examples.

Turnaround

Went from “underdog” to winning bidder for a multi-million dollar automation project involving two Target Accounts. Sale required last-minute business trips to Europe and western U.S. and overcoming several commercial and political issues.

This accomplishment is very good. It gives enough context to peak the reader’s interest. The job seeker frames his position as the underdog. He gives some scope to the situation by describing it as multi-million dollar, with multiple accounts and international. He also gives a glimpse of how he succeeded: repeated trips to the customer to resolve complicated issues.

There are a number of questions about this that are left unanswered. I would want to know why the job seeker’s firm was the underdog. I would like to know how the size of this project fit with the typical sales at this firm. I would like to understand the issues that were overcome and how the job seeker did this. Answering these questions in a resume could be difficult. I expect that the text would be long… too long to be effective. Leaving this information out was a good call. The accomplishment peaks the interest to learn more. This is the goal of a resume: get the reader to want to talk to the job seeker.

New Concept

Presented and sold this new concept technology to gain substantial acceptance with <list of six customers>. I worked intimately with nearly 100 <end-users of the product> throughout <metro area>.

This bullet was a stand-alone accomplishment. The presentation did not make it clear what the “new concept” was. The confusion resulted from the order of the information. There wasn’t a specific line defining the “new concept technology” and the descriptions of technologies were not immediate preceding the bullet.

The second problem with the bullet results from the lack of scope. I don’t know what the job seeker considers substantial acceptance. The bullet doesn’t show the sales volume, the performance relative to goals or if the rollout was considered successful. Without more detail, this accomplishment is unlikely to make much of an impression.

Got Hired

One of five consultants hired from over 500 applicants for the marketing team.

This is a waste of space on a resume. It is very common that a company will screen in excess of 100 people for each hire. Even worse, this bullet says nothing about the success of the job seeker. The only thing it indicates is that the job seeker was hired in the past… not exactly earth shattering information. Focus on specific performance results, not getting hired.

Ranking

Currently ranked 12 out of 90 representatives in the Western region

I like rankings on a resume. They give a context for the job seeker’s performance. To rank 12^th out of 90, it is likely the job seeker performed well. It isn’t guaranteed, though. There may be variations between territories or other factors that cause comparisons to be unreliable. Despite this, a bullet with your rank relative to peers is good to have on a resume.

Make sure you include other accomplishments in addition to rankings. A resume that just lists sales rankings, with no details of how the rankings were achieved is very forgettable. A good tactic is to provide ranking bullets with a couple bullets that show specific examples of your success. Including both types of accomplishments can make an impressive presentation.

No Sales Metrics to Discuss

What do you do if your employer does not have established sales metrics you can discuss in a job interview or put on your resume?

Goals, metrics, performance measures and results are extremely common in sales. Companies track sales performance closely and the data is easily quantifiable. When you interview for a sales position, you can expect to be asked about your performance, and the interviewer will expect specific answers.

In some cases, this can pose a challenge. Although rare, some companies do not provide specific goals and metrics for every sales position. Without specific metrics provided, job seekers struggle with discussing their past performance. They just don’t have the data.

If you are this situation, it is likely you will be passed over for most sales positions. It isn’t the lack of information that is the biggest problem. Companies that measure sales performance closely develop a culture that reflects this. One of the management axioms I’ve heard throughout my career is, “if you measure it, it will improve.” This philosophy focuses on the motivation that develops from publicizing performance measures… No one wants to be last and no one wants see their performance below expectations.

If you have not worked in a culture with detailed metrics, adjusting can be difficult. A hiring manager may select another candidate that has demonstrated success in this type of environment.

Your chances in this situation are not dead, though. There are ways you can demonstrate you ability to adapt to this type of culture.

Start by looking at your performance reviews. Your annual reviews will tell you your expectations and performance relative to these expectations. Hopefully, these are specific. If they are not, look at the activities that were required to be successful. For example, one of your expectations may have been “provide excellent customer service,” and had the rating “meets expectations.” This really doesn’t tell us much. We don’t know what “excellent customer service” looks like in the mind of the reviewer, how “meets expectations” falls into the continuum of performance, or how significant this was to the position.

If you develop specific examples of your performance in each review area, you will interview much better. These examples should show clearly what the goal of the activity was, what you did and what your results were. Quantifiable examples are good, but if you don’t have metrics, qualitative examples will have to do.

Without an annual review to use as a starting point, you have a greater challenge. If you did not have clear expectations set for you, what expectations did you set for yourself? If the answer was none, you have a problem. A hiring manager looking for a candidate that is self-motivated and very goal oriented is not going to favor someone that does not set goals. If you never set goals, a metric driven position might be a bad fit. If you do set goals and assess your performance, prepare to discuss examples. A job seeker that individually sets and measures goals for themselves in a culture that does not promote goal setting could make a very strong impression.

Another approach to consider is to discuss the organization’s performance. Your company or department may have goals collectively, but not measure these for individuals. If this is the case, discuss the collective goal. To make this effective be very specific about your activity contributing to the collective goal. For example, you could be part of a sales team that prepares large proposals for government contracts. Your efforts contribute to the winning of the contract, but winning is a collective effort. Discussing the success of your team lays the foundation. The question that goes unanswered when you focus on team performance is whether you were a strong contributor, the weak link on the team or somewhere in between. Giving specific examples of your activity and work you did can create a picture of your individual contributions.

As with all sales, you need to show the value you will provide if the hiring manager “buys.” The more specific you are about the activity and contribution you have provided, the easier it will be for the interviewer to picture how you will perform for them.

Interviewing for Sales Positions

A sales interview will typically focus on your sales experience and performance. Sales is a field where performance is measured closely at most companies. If you want to land the job, you will need to create a picture of how you will perform within the mind of the hiring manager

The first step is to review your bottom line performance. Be prepared to answer questions like:

What were your sales goals?
How was your performance relative to these goals?
What did you do to reach this performance level?

This is basic stuff, and answering these questions is just the starting point. You will need to prepare for more specific questions.

Activity

Prepare to discuss your goals for activity and the resulting activity level. Sales activity will vary wildly between fields. For example, a telemarketer might set a goal of 100 dials per day, while a sales person at a large construction company might focus on a specific number or dollar value of proposes submit per quarter. Prepare an outline of your typical activity in the key tasks for your past positions. With your activity, review how you organize your tasks and stay on schedule. Organization and follow up are essential in many sales roles. Presenting to an interviewer a clear picture of how you structure your activity, maintain your activity level and stay focused on revenue producing tasks will help you stand out.

Approach

Prepare to discuss your approach to sales. This approach usually develops from a combination of your personality, the expectations of your customers, the system at your employer and the training you have received. Discussing your approach, how it has evolved over you career and how it is successful will make a strong impression. One caution to consider is presenting your approach as set in stone. Your sales approach needs to be flexible and adaptable. What works effectively in one industry many not be as effective in another.

Performance

The three questions at the start of the article are important, but you need to be prepared to go into more detail. For your performance results to make the best impression, you need to provide some context. Did you grow sales by 15% at a time when your industry grew by 25%, losing market share in the process? Did your sales stay flat at a time when your industry declined substantially?

With the context you provide, you should include details of how you achieved this performance. What sales activities worked? What did you change in your approach? What would you have done differently?

Questions

Hopefully, the interviewer will ask questions that address your sales activity, approach and performance. This isn’t guaranteed, though. Every interviewer has a different style. If an interviewer does not ask specifically about a sales quality that you have identified as essential for the position, work this quality into one of your answers.

This is no different from any sales presentation. For example, you are selling a product that is competitive in the marketplace. Your company has an excellent quality control system and the resulting quality of the product is exceptional. Your prospect asks about the cost, delivery and specifications of the product, but avoids asking about quality. Are you going to mention this topic in case this is an important issue for the prospect? Definitely. The same goes for your strengths and accomplishments.

Conclusion

Your presentation of your sales background focus on three key areas:

Demonstrate how you will do the job.
Demonstrate your skill level in performing your job.
Demonstrate your ability to persevere over significant challenges and deliver results.

All three of these serve to show the hiring manager your potential – what you will achieve working for them. If you create a strong, positive image of these three elements, you will have much more success than your competition.

Resume Writing for Sales Positions

A resume targeted for sales positions needs to address one critical performance goal – your ability to contribute to the sales growth of the company. This goes for business development, account management, customer service, agent/broker, or management positions. Being responsible for sales is not sufficient. To get attention and get hired, you need to show how you will add to top line revenues, and in turn, bottom line profits.

Sales positions typically have very specific, quantified goals and performance measures. This makes gathering the data of your past contributions easier than in some fields. If your company doesn’t measure you performance, you will need to gather this information yourself.

The first time your resume is read by an employer, the bar is set low. You need to show you have experience in the areas they want and indicate you were successful. This is pretty straightforward but is not a slam dunk. Part of the challenge is emphasizing your experience in each areas critical to the company. To do this, you need to customize your resume for each position.

The first step is to review the job description closely. Identify the sales activities that are important to the position. Drill down in detail. You need to be more specific than just saying you open new accounts and service existing accounts. Unfortunately, most sales professionals focus on just bottom line performance only and list a bullet under each job like this: “grew sales by 15% per year for 6 consecutive years.” This is good, but does not give enough information. You should provide some context to the situation. What challenges did you face, how did you achieve this performance and how did this compare to your goals?

There are a number of common activities that make a sales professional successful. Each position will require a different mix of these activities. Once you identify the important activities to the employer, detail them on your resume. Some elements to consider include:

Lead generation
Cold calling
Opening new accounts
Writing proposals
Estimating
Up-selling customers
Growing existing accounts
Providing customer service
Retaining customers
Rolling out new products

Each employer will have a different needs. Most have goals for growth – prospects they are targeting, markets they want to enter, growth with existing customers. In all likelihood, the company has goals in multiple areas.

You need to demonstrate your ability to succeed in these key areas. To do this, provide quantifiable performance measures. This requires going beyond the basic bullet “grew sales 15%.” How much cold calling did you do? How many leads did this generate? How many new customers did you add? What was the revenue of these new customers?

The story behind your answers to a set of questions like this can make an extremely impressive presentation. It will also set you apart from your competition.

Job Search Advice for Sales Professions

I started an article this weekend about resume writing for sales positions. When I finished, it was too long to post as a single article. Breaking it up resulted in five articles produced a series I'm going to post this week.

The series turned out well and I hope the focused approach of a series of articles is helpful. I'm thinking of writing additional series targeted to other careers.

Although the series is focused on sales positions, the advice is applicable well beyond this career field.

If you have any suggestions or comments on the series, I would appreciate any comments I can use to make future articles better or suggestions you would like me to profile.

Gary

Organizing Your Job Search: HappyJob Search

I ran into a tool today that could be helpful in a job search. The tool, HappyJobSearch, allows a job seeker to create an online account to track their job search activity. What I like about this tool is how it organizes your job search. It is very easy in a job search to forget where you have sent resumes.

I ran into a tool today that could be helpful in a job search. The tool, HappyJobSearch, allows a job seeker to create an online account to track their job search activity.

What I like about this tool is how it organizes your job search. It is very easy in a job search to forget where you have sent resumes. In my job searches earlier in my career, I organized organized everything with lots of paper. I printed each job description, information from the company’s website and news on the company, and kept it all in a file folder with notes. This was effective, but tedious.

Using an online database should make the process more efficient. Additionally, the tracking system at Happy Job Search allows you to set the next action for each opportunity. The display of the opportunity is sorted by the next action, so it’s very easy to go to your top priorities.

The website does have some limitations. For example, it doesn’t allow any type of scheduling. Knowing your next action is helpful, it’s also important to know when to complete this action. Additionally, the database stores the link to the job description – not the actual posting. Many job descriptions are only posted for a specific time – typically 30 days. After this, the link won’t work. Printing or saving the description is important if you want to ensure you can go back to it.

I’m interested in how useful this is for an active job seeker. If you decide to try this out, let me know your experience with it.

The Jigsaw Puzzle Resume

Your resume should convey information quickly and efficiently. To do this, organize information in a simple, easy to follow format. Don’t make is confusing and don’t break up the information into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle.

This may seem obvious, but it wasn’t for the person that wrote the resume I read recently. Below is an outline of the resume:

Professional Summary

Summary of background

Professional Experience

Listing of Job Titles with dates, not in chronological order. No descriptions or employer names included here.

Listing of Employers with dates, not in chronological order but in a different order from the job titles. Detailed descriptions of each job provided under each employer, no job titles in this section.

Education

Listing of degrees

I’m not sure why the job seeker put all the job titles in a single list apart from the employers and job descriptions. The order of the information made it more difficult to understand. If there was a reason for the order, it wasn’t clear to me – it looked random. The employers and job descriptions were in another order that also appeared random.

This organization requires a reader to pick a job title, look at the employment dates and find the same dates in the employer list in order to read the description of the position. It’s like putting together a puzzle, but far less fun.

When presenting a list of positions, you should keep the job title, employer, dates and description together. The order needs to be in reverse chronological order. This order starts with your most recent position and lists each in order to the oldest. It’s a very simple structure and is very easy for the reader follow. The more the reader of your resume has to concentrate on the structure of your resume, the less they will focus on the content.

I only have one guess for why the job seeker chose the order of the information they used. He may have tried to put the information in order of how impressive it would be to a hiring manager. The advice, that you should prioritize information and place the most important at the top, is good to follow. It can be taken too far, as it was here. The sequence you use for information should draw the reader from one section to the next. In this case, the order was confusing and a detriment to the resume’s effectiveness.

On a plus note, the resume didn’t require a decoder ring to read it.

Interview Questions: Company Mission Statements

Many interviewers ask what a job seeker has learned about the company. This question is designed to uncover two primary pieces of information. First, determine if the job seeker took the time to do some research. Many job seekers skip this step and hurt their chances. Second, learn what is important to the job seeker based on the topics they research.

When you do your research, you should learn about the company’s history, their financial performance, their operations and products/services. Another element to research is the company’s mission statement. A mission statement provides the fundamental basis of the company’s strategy, goals and values. It can give you an idea of the culture of the company and the qualities that will be important in a hiring decision.

Let’s look the mission statements from three vastly different restaurant firms:

Morton’s The Steakhouse – Attract, Value, Retain and Develop the best talent in the industry, serve the best food (anytime, anywhere at any cost) and execute unparalleled hospitality – the best dining experience – 365 days a year.
Starbucks – To inspire and nurture the human spirit— one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.
YUM Brands – At Yum! we’re building a vibrant global business by focusing on four key business strategies:
- Build leading brands across China in every significant category
- Drive aggressive international expansion and build strong brands everywhere
- Dramatically improve U.S. brand positions, consistency and returns
- Drive industry-leading, long-term shareholder and franchisee value

What do these three mission statements say? Morton’s prioritizes exception quality in its employees, food and service.. Starbucks values the impression made on their customers… Yum Brands focuses on growth, brand position and shareholder value. In reality, all of these qualities are important to all three organizations, and to all restaurants. No one wants to have a restaurant with low quality, poor environment, bad service, terrible value, non-growing business or declining shareholder value. The difference is how each organization prioritizes these values.

The three mission statements are excellent goals, but vastly different. A job seeker interviewing at each company will need to emphasize different skills and abilities. Understanding the expectations and goals of the company will help you tailor your presentation. Be prepared to discuss situations from your experience that demonstrate success in meeting the objective of the company.

The mission statement of a company is a starting point. It is not an all inclusive statement of company’s priorities. Different jobs within a company may also have different priorities. The important thing to understand is the individual priorities of each position within the company need to support and promote the overall priorities of the company.

One final aspect of a mission statement to consider is the purpose of the statement and its intended audience. A mission statement should represent the entire company, but each firm will use and market their mission differently. Morton’s placed their mission statement on the Careers page on their website. If they wrote the mission statement with the intention of using it in the hiring process, this may have influenced the content emphasizing employees. The Starbucks mission statement appears in their About Us section of the website. It is much more general, giving a theme for the company and is used in an overall description of the company. Yum! Brands placed their mission statement in their investor section. It appears to be intended as a guide for the direction management is driving the company. Each mission statement has a different goal and the content reflects this.

Bottom line: Learn what you can about the values, goals and expectations of a company and be prepared to discuss these in an interview.