Resume Examples Archives - Palladian Career Resources

Describing Employers on Your Resume

There are 20 million companies in the US. Although a hiring manager may recognize a few thousand of these, it is impossible to know what all 20 million do. For most job seekers, this offers a potential pitfall. Your past employers may be completely unknown to the hiring managers reading your resume.

When a hiring manager has not heard of a company, they will not do research. The hiring manager screens hundreds of resumes. Googling every unknown company would be an incredibly time consuming activity. The hiring manager will try to piece together what the company does from what you did at the company. This is difficult and often leaves a lot of ambiguity in your experience.

You want a hiring manager to understand the context of what you did. This requires giving background on the company. Despite this, few job seekers include details about their employers.

You can improve your resume by offering a few minor details on each employer. I like to get an estimate of the size of the company. For example, consider two production supervisors. One worked for a small job shop with fifteen employees. The other worked for a large Tier 1 automotive supplier with over 1,500 employees in the facility and more than 20,000 worldwide. Some of the responsibilities of the two people will be similar, but many will be different. The job shop will necessitate a wider range of challenges with the supervisor adapting to a lot of different roles on a daily or hourly basis. The auto supplier is likely to have much more structured procedures and a more limited range of responsibilities.

The differences between the two candidates do not make one candidate better than the other. They just show a difference in experience. Some companies will value one of the backgrounds more than the other. It is likely a small job shop will prefer a candidate coming from a similar type of organization, and an auto supplier will prefer a candidate from a similarly large organization.

The importance of the type of company offers you an opportunity to improve your resume. By clearly showing the type of organizations you have worked for, you can help the hiring manager screening your resume to better understand how you can fit into their company. To do this, you only need to add a sentence to each job listing.

I like to list work experience with the company name first and the job titles underneath. This highlights the time you spent with each organization and is most effective for people who held multiple positions with the same employer. With this structure, I put the details of the company right below the company name. Although it is important to describe an employer, I consider this lower priority information and will make the font size small. I want the reader to be able to learn about the company if they are interested, but will make a job seeker’s accomplishments stand out to be the first thing read.

Example

Work Experience

Widget, Inc., Capital City, State 1/2005 to Present

Tier 1 automotive supplier with $1 billion in revenues. The Capital City plant had 1,000 employees.

Production Supervisor

Bullet 1: An accomplishment
Bullet 2: An accomplishment

This structure gives an easy way to describe the employer without detracting from the most important information on your resume. It also takes up very little space as the description of the company is in a very small font.

Production Supervisor Resume Intro

I reviewed a resume from a production supervisor today with an introduction that immediately caught my attention. When I was a recruiter, I worked on a few positions where this job seeker would have been like gold. Despite this, the writing of the introduction was actually horrible, even though it was extremely effective.

It may seem odd that the intro section was both horrible and effective. The goal of a resume, after all, is to land an interview. You aren’t trying to create a Pulitzer Prize winning document. Despite this, job seekers should try to make their resume easy to read, clear, concise and well thought out, and this resume did not meet these goals.

There is one reason why this resume was effective. It led off with a skill set that is typically in demand. The skill set the job seeker led off was bilingual production supervision. In many parts of the country, finding experienced production supervisors and managers who are fluent in both English and Spanish is difficult. I’ve been in production facilities where more than 90% of the work force speaks Spanish as their first language. In fact, early in my career, I spent a year managing a production team with recent immigrants who could barely speak English. They were extremely hard working and productive, but I struggled to communicate effectively with them. I learned how important it is to have bilingual supervisors in a production facility. Later, as a recruiter, I again saw this importance from my clients who needed to hire bilingual supervisors.

A strong bilingual manufacturing professional can be difficult to find. For this reason, some recruiters will be ready to pick up the phone to call this candidate as soon they read the first line of the resume. Because of this, the job seeker produced an effective resume. Unfortunately, the job seeker misses an opportunity to write a resume that will be effective in other situations.

Most manufacturing facilities do not require a bilingual candidate. If a hiring manager is looking for a strong supervisor, they are going to focus on the leadership skills, experience and accomplishments of the candidate. This is where the resume fails. After the first line, the job seeker has a very long paragraph listing a large number of skills… a total of 27 skills over the next fifteen lines. Most of the skills are the standard run of the mill type, for example, communications skills, experience with Word and Excel, leadership, problem solving and cost reduction initiative. This will do little to impression a hiring manager. Anyone can put these phrases on their resume, and doing so doesn’t make a candidate better than another candidate. You need to have more substance.

A much better approach would be to lead with one or two short sentences, highlighting the most valuable skills and then listing a few accomplishments demonstrating the experience with the skills. The skills that should be listed first are the ones that are most in demand. For this candidate, bilingual and 15 years of production supervision should be right at the start. Buried in the resume, this candidate discussed how he was a part of Six Sigma project saving $250k annually in scrap reduction, and how the candidate was close to receiving his Black Belt. This is another significant experience that should be at the top of the resume, not buried at bottom of the first page.

The key is to emphasize a few skills and accomplishments that will motivate a hiring manager to pick up the phone and call you. You may have one skill, like being bilingual, that will help in a lot of situation, but you should have more than that. A one trick pony will be excluded from most positions that don’t require that one skill. Pick the three or four most significant skills in your background (and that are in demand) and sell those at the top of your resume. Then, move the list of every skill under the sun to the bottom of your resume. This can serve as a good keyword list so your resume shows up when hiring managers do database searches.

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Prioritizing Information on Your Resume

I reviewed a resume today that made a common mistake. The resume listed unimportant information first, and the important stuff last. When a hiring manager reviews your resume, they will scan quickly to see if you are in the ballpark of what they want. If you are, they will read in more detail. If you aren’t, you get discarded. This first decision is often made in the first 15 to 30 seconds. That’s only enough time to read a few lines. If you want to make it past this, you need to show very quickly that you are worth additional time.

The resume I reviewed failed to do this. The candidate is a Distribution Manager and has spent his entire career in inventory management and distribution management roles. Here’s how the resume was laid out:

Objective (five lines of generic text – “…a dynamic, growth oriented business… capitalize on my education and training… help realize the company’s strategic business plan…”)
Professional Profile (eight lines describing the industry and career of the job seeker – not great but much better than the Objective)
Summary of Qualifications (four lines listing a variety of skills, lacking any details on the job seeker’s skill level or amount of experience with these skills)
Computer Technology (three lines of computer programs and programming languages, with nothing detailing the skill level with each)
Professional Experience (the work experience of the job seeker)
Education (the degrees the job seeker has)

This structure is ok, it’s the content that is a problem. The objective, professional summary and summary of qualifications sections make up the top half of the first page, but they add almost no value. They are little more than a list of keywords put into sentences. There is nothing that indicates whether the job seeker is any good at any of the skills they mention, and there are no accomplishments to show the success of the job seeker.

Even worse, after the first three sections, the job seeker moves into their computer technology experience. The section is essentially a list of microsoft products, a couple proprietary software systems and a few programming languages. This is far from being high priority information. Even worse, the information listed is obviously out of date. For example, the programming languages listed have all been replaced over the last two decades. The job seeker completed a computer science associates degree in 1986, but never worked in an IT position. So, this candidate is prioritizing that they learned Cobol 24 years ago above their 24 years of distribution experience. Why would the 24 year old computer skills make a hiring manager want to hire them as a distribution manager?

Review your resume and look for information with limited value to the position you are pursuing. It can be tough to cut out details that you are proud of, or that were very significant to your career in the past. Just remember, you need to tailor your sales pitch to the job you are pursuing today – not something you did twenty years ago.

Resumes Mistakes From an NCO

I received a resume from an Air Force NCO (non-commissioned officer) who has recently transitioned from active duty into the reserves. The NCO makes a number of common military transition mistakes in his resume.

The core of the problem is the NCO writes a resume focusing entirely on his qualifications in the military. It would be a good resume if he wanted a job in the Air Force. Unfortunately, that’s not his goal. This individual is looking to do something in the commercial sector. He wants to utilize some of the skills he gained in the military, but he is targeting a civilian job.

Let’s look at the structure:

Objective: To use the training and experience I received in the military to make a significant contribution, as a civilian, in making my community a safer place to live.
Technical Training: <long list of military training classes, almost all are related to specific combat activities or Air Force equipment>

Work History: <Listing to job titles and dates in the Air Force>

Experience: <A bulleted list showing the scope of responsibility in various leadership roles held by the NCO>

Certifications: <A certification related to the career field the NCO wants to pursue>

Awards: <A list of performance awards won by the NCO>

There is some good content in this resume, but most of it is of little value to an employer. This individual wants a role using his Hazmat skills. He has taken several training classes in this field, has a certification related to the field and one year of experience.

Unfortunately, digging this detail out of the resume takes too much work. The emphasis of the resume is on his military experience. The military experience shows a pattern of success and progression of increasing responsibility. This is a good track record, but it does little to show what the job seeker would do in a completely different role. The military experience and success in the roles he held should play a supporting role on his resume. The lead role is his experience and skill in the hazmat field.

Below is how I would restructure the resume:

Professional Summary: <A summary statement and bulleted list of key skills, training, certifications and accomplishments directly related to hazmat>

Work Experience: <Job Listing with details of hazmat experience, leadership experience and other transferrable skills>

Education: <Listing of education and training received>

Awards: <Listing of awards>

This structure focuses the top half of the first page on the hazmat experience and skills. It is much more relevant to a hiring manager than the previous version that listed courses such as “USAF Airborne Battle Management Course.” Expanding the work experience section to provide significantly more detail on the job seeker’s responsibilities and accomplishments will also help.

The bottom line is the NCO needs to make a sales pitch for what he can contribute in the private sector, and more specifically, in the role he is pursuing. Showing success in the military is nice, but there is a lot of competition for jobs. The successful job seeker will demonstrate the value they can offer. Demonstrating this value comes from showing key skills and accomplishments. To maximize the effectiveness of the sales pitch, it needs to be at the top of the resume, not buried further down.

Separating Accomplishments from Responsibilities

I’ve written a lot about the importance of accomplishments on a resume. Accomplishments show what you did, while responsibilities show what you’re supposed to do. Because accomplishments are so important to make a good impression, you should separate them from the list of responsibilities. The resume I read this morning did the opposite of this.

The resume had a chronological structure, with four sections: Objective, Work Experience, Education and Certifications. The structure works pretty well. I would have added a fifth section, Technical Skills, because the job seeker is in a very technical engineering role in the telecom industry. This isn’t the big problem, though. The work experience section does little to show whether the job seeker has been successful.

In the work experience section, each listing followed the same format:

Job Title, Employment Dates
Company Name, City and State
Responsibilities:
<A bulleted list of responsibilities and accomplishments>

By titling the text under each job as Responsibilities, the job seeker creates an expectation that there won’t be any accomplishments listed. It is unnecessary to say specifically “Responsibilities,” because anyone reading the resume is going to expect some description of the role.

I turns out the job seeker did list some accomplishments. There weren’t many, but each job had at least one. In each case, it was the last bullet listed under each job. This ensures someone reading the resume will find the accomplishments as one of the last items read.

An easy way to fix this would be to summarize the responsibilities in a paragraph and put the accomplishments in a bulleted list. This will draw the reader’s attention to the accomplishments ahead of the responsibilities and make a much stronger first impression.

Are You Successful?

It continues to amaze me how common it is for job seekers to fail to include any mention of a successful contribution to an employer in their resume. This morning, I was struggling to come with a topic for today’s article. After writing more than 360 articles over the last year and a half, I often need something to get me started. I turned to my old standby… my Inbox. I receive a lot of resumes, and readying a few always produced an idea for an article.

Today’s search was just as fruitful as past searches. I didn’t have to read many resumes to find one to inspire me. It was the first I opened. This is typical. When I look at resumes, I don’t think I’ve ever had to open more than three or four to find a disaster to profile. Now, to be fair, the some of the resumes I look at for my blog are from the really active job seekers. I subscribe to some resume distribution services that send resumes to thousands of recruiters. I really don’t know if these services are effective for the job seekers, but they help me ensure I always have a lot of bad resumes in my inbox. For a job seeker to reach the point where they are broadcasting their resume in an email to as many people as possible, they would have been overlooked for a lot of jobs in the past. A big reason these people haven’t landed a job is they have a terrible a resume. So, the majority of resumes I receive this way are absolutely terrible.

So, let’s look at today’s resume. It comes from a Marking Manager for firm selling agricultural equipment. The person has been out of work for a year. Prior to that, she worked for eight years for one company. The resume has five sections:

Synopsis
Summary of Qualifications
Work Experience
Continuing Education
References

The resume didn’t contain a single accomplishment – absolutely nothing showing the job seeker was successful at any point in her career. Looking at the language used in the resume, the entire resume is focused on responsibilities. Below are the first few words from each bullet in the work experience section:

Assisted…
Prepared…
Developed and coordinated…
Planned…
Managed…
Direct supervision of…
Coordinated…
Managed…

Most of these start with verbs, which is good, but the verbs are not very strong. You can use these verbs in a resume and make a strong impact, but you need to include another verb in the bullet. For example, “managed an advertising campaign for a new line of machinery, leading to initial sales 40% above budget.” This would be a good accomplishment because of the second half of the bullet. Unfortunately, the resume only included statements similar to the first half of the example.

Another big mistake on this resume relates to the education of the job seeker. She has a continuing education section with some good educational events, but nothing about her formal education. She has an Associate’s degree, but it isn’t listed on the resume (it was in the cover letter). A lot of hiring managers skip the cover letter. Additionally, when a hiring manager distributes a resume to several other managers to review, the cover letter may not be distributed with the resume. For key information like a degree, you need to put this on the resume.

To improve this resume, it would only take a little work to make a huge difference. The Summary of Qualifications section has five bullets. Two relate to soft skills (organizational skills and teamwork), two are marketing related (creativity with graphic design and tradeshow experience) and the last lists technical skills (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, etc.). Under each bullet, the job seeker should add one line describing an accomplishment or noteworthy experience. For the soft skills and marketing experiences, an accomplishment would be best. For the technical skills, listing an accomplishment would work, but the job seeker could also summarize the continuing education she has completed.

Adding five lines in this way would help tremendously. Throw in the Associate’s degree in an Education section and the resume should be reasonably effective.

One last note… The last section of the resume, a list of references with names and phone numbers, should be eliminated. There is no need to put references on a resume (especially in an email blast to the whole world). Companies know they can ask for references throughout the hiring process. Listing a person’s contact information is actually an invitation to cold call them. The three people listed are likely to be people who are respected by the job seeker, so a recruiter may toss the resume, but keep the names of the references. Who do you think is more marketable… the job seeker who sent the resume or the Director of Marketing who is still at the company and is listed as a reference? By listing the references, all the job seeker did was distract the attention of the reader from her background.

Send Me Your Questions: I’m always looking for ideas to write about. Do you have a job search question you want answered? Send it to me and there’s a good chance I’ll write an article on it. Just send your questions to me at [email protected].

Exceeding Sales Quotas

Sales is a field where the emphasis on quantifiable metrics is extremely high within the hiring process. Hiring managers look for sales professionals who have an established track record of beating their goals. Sales goals are easily measured and are one of the most commonly published metrics in an organization. This makes it extremely easy to find sales data for your resume. Despite this many job seekers omit hard data on their sales performance.

There’s a good reason many omit the information. Sales is a field with a high failure rate. There are a lot of sales people who just aren’t that good. They may work hard and land some sales, but struggle to reach the company’s goals. Putting sales numbers on a resume would highlight this poor performance, so they leave them off.

For a hiring manager, demonstrated success in sales is critical. Most will assume the job seeker was a failure if the job seeker doesn’t specifically tell them otherwise. The resume I read today made this mistake. It didn’t give enough information to know if the job seeker was successful, or if he was a failure.

The problem started in the cover letter. It is 178 words long. That’s on the long side for a cover letter, but isn’t too long. In it, there are five paragraphs. The first explains the person is seeking a business development role. The second and fourth paragraphs make general claims about a successful track record through the career, but nothing specific. The fifth paragraph is a simple closing.

The middle paragraph has four bullet points. A bulleted list in a cover letter is like a giant magnet for attention. Most people will be drawn to the list before they read the majority of the letter. That’s what I did. I read the first sentence of the cover letter and jumped to the bullets. Here’s what I found:

Creativity in developing new business opportunities
Credibility based on previous success
Proven executive experience
Positive attitude and desire to succeed

I’m not sure how a successful sales person could write something this boring and expect to grab a person’s attention. A desire to succeed is a good quality, but I assume anyone successful has that. If that’s one of the most impressive qualities you have to market, you’re in trouble.

After reading the bullets, I skipped to the resume. The only reason I know what is in the other paragraphs of the cover letter is I read it to write this article. The bullets made it clear it was a waste of time to read, and that conclusion was proven correct when I did read it.

In the resume, the job seeker included a few performance metrics. Each job listed a few big clients he landed, some with deals in excess of $10 million. Selling multi-million dollar deals is a marketable experience, but it still doesn’t answer the question about the success of the job seeker. In sales, you have to remember the old quote, “Even a blind squirrel will find a nut every now and then.” Is this job seeker a blind squirrel occasionally tripping over a sale, or is he a superstar?

The resume covers 11 years of sales experience. In it, the job seeker lists four years where he lists his performance relative to his quota. In those four years, three are listed as meeting 100% of quota and one is listed as hitting 350% of quota. The 350% year immediately preceded the three 100% years.

So we have a sales professional, who in 11 years of selling, is telling us he met the minimum expectations for his job four times, and once had a “blind squirrel finding a nut” year blowing his targets out of the water. He wants us to hire him because he’s creative, credible, experienced, and has a desire to succeed.

Now, you’re a sales manager trying to fill a key position. Sales are down, the economy is tough, and you can add one key person. If the person comes in and is successful, you will keep your job and may even earn a bonus. If the person bombs, you’re likely to get canned. Is this candidate going to get your attention? Are you going to bet your career on his performance?

So, what could this job seeker do? He should give more detail on his performance. What were his quotas each year and how did he perform? He had a long run with the same company, so there’s a chance he was more successful than the picture I painted. The three years he listed that he met 100% of his quota, he notes he received a corporate Circle of Excellence Award. Usually, awards indicate exceeding expectations by a significant amount. If his quota was a stretch goal, he should really show what his performance was relative to his minimum expectations. Even better, listing how he performed relative to other sales people would help. He may have been the best sales person in the company, or the worst. We have no way of knowing.

The key is giving a hiring manager insight into how your boss would assess your performance. The more detail you can provide about your specific performance, the more credible and impressive your background will be.

Resume Without Job Titles

Most jobs have well established titles and easy to understand responsibilities. Some, though, are unique. What do you do if you work in a role that has little or no equivalent at other companies? Do you list your job title, change the title to something more commonly used, or skip it entirely? The resume I read today struggled with this dilemma.

Most jobs have well established titles and easy to understand responsibilities. Some, though, are unique. What do you do if you work in a role that has little or no equivalence to jobs at other companies? Do you list your job title, change the title to something more commonly used, or skip it entirely? The resume I read today struggled with this dilemma.

The resume was from a manager who had worked as a strategic planning analyst and then as an operations manager. Those are my titles – the closest I can come up with for the positions after reading the resume closely. The job seeker decided to take a short cut. He didn’t list any job titles, just the functional areas of his jobs, operations and strategic planning.

Omitting the job titles was a mistake. It makes it very difficult to understand the background of a person quickly without some indicator of the type of role. The only way to understand the positions is to read the job descriptions closely. The job seeker was thorough. He described every aspect of his employment, from core responsibilities to minor details.

The thoroughness of the job seeker’s job description had an effect opposite to what he intended. By listing anything and everything he did, it’s very difficult to understand what role he had. The job seeker left out any description of the scope of his responsibilities or some statement as to what was typical. This puts the minor aspects of his role, tasks he might work on only a few times a year, on equal footing with the core of his job. It’s impossible to know what this guy really did.

Every job will eventually touch on every aspect of a company. If you have been somewhere for ten years or more, you can talk about any functional area in your resume. For example, a staff accountant might work closely with someone in marketing or sales on a specific project for a few days. This can be good experience and may show the versatility of your skills. What you don’t want to do is include this as some vague description. For example, “supported marketing with development of new product pricing.” This description may be completely accurate, but would not be representative of a lengthy career if you only did this for a few days.

The resume I received listed so many functions and never described what the core responsibility was. It’s a guess as to whether this individual was really an operations manager and strategic planning analyst. I could be completely wrong.

As a recruiter, what do I do with a resume like this? I receive a lot of resumes. I don’t have time to spend a significant amount of time on each. I have to make a quick assessment if I can place the person and move on if I can’t. To make this decision, I look for something showing how a person stands out in their field – why they are better than their competition. If I can’t find something with some “wow factor,” I’m likely to move on. The key to this is assessing the candidate’s capability quickly and comparing them to other candidates in the field I have assessed. If I can’t determine what field the candidate is in, I can’t even start this process.

After reviewing the resume for a minute, I don’t know what job the candidate has held. I can’t assess his performance relative to his peers, because I don’t know who his peers are. I can’t even tell if he’s been successful because I have no basis for determining the scope of his role. My final assessment is to move on to the next candidate. I will be able to screen several other candidates in the time it would take me to pick up the phone, call this candidate and ask the basic questions like “what job did you hold at your last employer?”

What Should You Do?

There are a lot of job seekers who create overly vague and confusing descriptions of their experience. This forces a hiring manager or recruiter to spend a lot more time figuring out what the person is capable of doing. Every second increases the odds the resume will be discarded. To avoid this, you need a quick to read, easy to understand and impressive description of your background and potential.

Print out your resume and sit it in front of you. Take a highlighter and highlight the phrases that best summarize your experience and accomplishments. Don’t highlight more than 50 words. I’m sure there is a lot of important info on your resume and 50 words won’t capture everything. Stick with only the most important 50 words.

Where on your resume are there 50 words? They need to be at the top if want them to be read. If they are buried deep in the resume, there is a good chance you will be rejected before they are read.

Are your most important two or three skills clearly presented in these fifty words? You probably possess dozens or hundreds of different skills. They are not all equal. There are a couple that will land you a job and the rest are supporting information. Make sure the essential skills stand out.

Do you show how you were successful? It is easy to write that you are highly successful. In fact, putting “highly successful” and a job title as the first few words in at the top of a resume are a common way to start. Anyone can write this. It is nothing but hype. What matters is what comes next. You need examples of your success that are clear and impressive. Without specific accomplishments, you will not measure up to your peers who list accomplishments on their resume. Even if you were successful, you are likely to be rejected before you get a chance to tell your story in an interview.

What is your specialty? Make sure you show a clear specialization on your resume. A non-descript generalist, with no specialization will appear very unimpressive. You need something that will differentiate you and specialization is critical. Make sure your fifty words show this specialization clearly.

If you complete this exercise and focus your resume to make your potential stand out in the first fifty words, you will dramatically improve your odds of getting an interview.

Functional Resume Without Accomplishments

The functional resume I read today makes a common resume writing mistake. The resume failed to include any quantified accomplishments. We’ve found in our resume benchmarking studies roughly half of all resumes do not provide any accomplishments.

Every resume makes claims about the job seeker’s skills and abilities. For a hiring manager, there is no way to validate the claims on the resume alone. This forces hiring managers to be very skeptical when reviewing resumes for the first time. The first step to assess the job seeker’s true capability is to assess specific examples the person’s past performance. Without providing success stories, your resume will look like everyone else’s, and the hiring manager will have to assume you don’t have a successful track record. Otherwise, if you didn’t have numerous examples of accomplishment, you would have listed them.

The resume I read today had the following structure:

Summary of Qualifications
Experience
Responsibilities
Accomplishments
Education

This structure seems like it would be a chronological resume format, but the job seeker used it in a functional format. What made this a functional format was the content of the sections. The Experience section was just a job listing, with the employer, job title and dates for each position. There was nothing describing the jobs.

The Responsibilities section has one paragraph describing some of the roles the job seeker held, but it is so vague there no way to really understand what each job was. Between the job titles and the responsibilities description, we can make a guess what the scope of responsibility of the job seeker was, but it is only a guess – not something most hiring managers are going to get excited about.

The Accomplishments section should provide the core sales pitch for the job seeker. Unfortunately, this section doesn’t include any real accomplishments. The bullets are just descriptions of responsibilities. Below are a few examples of the bullets from the Accomplishments sections:

Ability to read blueprints and use standard measuring equipment.
Experience and operation of a Semi Automatic Gundrill (limited).
Specialized in component marking and packaging.
Attended courses in JIT and SPC, as well as courses for Supervisory Training.

To make a strong impression, you need to show what you did, not just what you were responsible for doing. There are lots of candidates who have had similar experiences. The job seeker who will get the job is the one who shows what they did with their responsibility and provides specific details of contributions made.

In a functional resume, it can be tempting to focus on the responsibilities and experiences in different functional areas. Your experience is important, but this is just the starting point. If you choose a functional structure, despite the warnings of my previous two articles, make sure you provide specific accomplishments. These need to show your role, scope of responsibility, actions you took and the specific, quantified results you delivered. Without all of this detail, the accomplishment will not be as impressive as it could be.

Often a smaller accomplishment that you can describe briefly while supplying clear detail of the situation is more impressive on a resume than a vague accomplishment with a greater overall impact. This is usually because the big accomplishments are difficult to explain in sufficient detail for the reader to understand what really happened. They are better suited to an interview where you can take two or three minutes to describe the accomplishment in detail.

Functional Resume Example

On Monday, I reviewed five reasons to avoid a functional resume structure. Today, let’s look at a real example of a functional resume I received recently.

The job seeker who sent me this resume worked for the federal government for more than twenty years and has worked for a couple big consulting firms for the last five years. The titles listed in the employment history section include, Consultant, Program Manager, Senior Business Analyst and Team Leader. These titles are commonly used, but are not very specific. With the functional format, there is nothing in the resume that shows what the job seeker did in each job.

The content of the resume is grouped in four functional sections:

Leadership Skills
Performance Improvement
Communications
Project Management

In addition to the functional sections, the job seeker also has sections for education and employment history.

Under each functional section is a series of bullet points designed to demonstrate the job seeker’s skill and record of accomplishments. The problem with this structure is the lack of context for any of the information. There is no way to tell what the candidate’s role was. For example, one of the bullets under leadership skills is:

Demonstrated excellent leadership skills by implementing a new strategic business model which improved efficiency by over 90% which resulted in year on year savings of $15 million

Your first reaction might be to think this is a pretty good accomplishment. Saving $15 million is usually a good accomplishment. Unfortunately, there’s nothing that shows what the job seeker did. He says he implemented a new business model. There’s nothing about developing the business model or whether the savings achieved were in department he managed. If anything, this looks like a slam dunk accomplishment anyone could do. The job seeker was given new business processes and told to roll them out to his team. The person that designed the business model and sold the organization’s leadership on adopting it is the person who really generated the savings.

A bullet under Performance Improvement also provides some nice numbers but don’t show enough detail to know what happened:

Effectively Introduced and implemented benchmark standards to a national service for the public. The outcome was an increase in customer satisfaction of over 85% within 3 months

Improving customer satisfaction by 85% is a great accomplishment. There’s a lot we don’t know about this, though. First, who were the customers? Second, what was the role of the job seeker? Third, who developed the benchmarks? Fourth, how many customers were involved in this service?

These questions are important but the bottom line question is “what did the job seeker do that was exceptional?” If all he did was rollout a set of standards to his team that were being adopt across the organization, it’s not much of an accomplishment. From the resume, we can’t tell if he did this with a very small team of only a couple people or if he was directing a department with hundreds or thousands of people under his leadership.

The key element that is missing from the resume is something to clearly show what the job seeker did. Your resume should help a hiring manager picture you doing a job. To do that, you need to describe very clearly what you did in the past. This requires being specific about what you did and what the direct results of your actions were.