Category: Resume Writing

The first step in recognizing your accomplishments. To do this, you need to know the expectations of your position. Meeting or Exceeding an expectation is an accomplishment, as is providing a contribution outside your area of responsibility.

Meeting Expectations

The first step in remembering your accomplishments is reviewing the expectations of your job. What were you expected to do on a daily basis? Did you meet these expectations on a consistent basis? Consistency is an accomplishment often overlooked. In sports, we see a lot of accomplishments that receive incredible respect that illustrate consistent performance, even if the performance in isolation isn’t impressive. For example, consecutive games started is a stat that is often highlighted. Starting a game isn’t unusual and only becomes impressive when it is done over time on a consistent basis. Have you met an expectation consistently over time?

Exceeding Expectations

Have you exceeded expectations? Review the times when you beat your goals. These could be budget goals, time to completion for projects or simply performing better than you peers on a metric. This is easier in organizations that track metrics closely.

Unusual Responsibilities

What have you done outside your normal responsibilities? It common for companies to develop special committees or project teams to address issues. Any results that come from your activities outside your normal responsibilities should be reviewed.

Check back tomorrow for the Six Elements of a Strong Accomplishment

Have you ever struggled to think of accomplishments to put on a resume or on your annual self-review? It’s a terrible feeling not be able to recall anything that shows you were successful. Most, if not all of us, have run into this.

In our 2008 Resume Benchmarking Survey, we found that a quarter of job seekers do not list any accomplishments on their resume, and only 40% listed three or more accomplishments for each position they held. Of the resumes that have accomplishments, many were poorly written or incomplete. This offers you an opportunity to stand out from your competition by having strong, well written accomplishments on your resume.

The problem isn’t that there are tons of people that have never accomplished anything. It’s that they don’t track their accomplishments, they can’t remember them later and they don’t recognize accomplishments at the time they have them.

What is an Accomplishment

Accomplishments are activities that demonstrate your skill, performance, aptitude or potential. They can be isolated events or a pattern of activity over time. What they don’t need to be is something that is earth shattering.

Check back tomorrow for a look at how to Recognize Your Accomplishments.

Although formatting is important, a resume’s content is critical. There is a number of key pieces of information every resume needs to contain. No matter how pretty, without these, a resume isn’t complete.

Contact Information: Your resume needs to make it easy to find you. It should have your name, address and phone number, at an absolute minimum. I would also strongly suggest you have an email address. Finally, providing multiple phone numbers, home, work and cell, is usually preferred.

Education: Any degrees you hold should be listed, with the degree, major, school, city and state. If you do not have a bachelor’s degree, listing your high school graduation/GED is a good idea.

Work Experience: You need to provide all of your current positions. How far back you go isn’t always clear cut. New college grads should list all their job since they have little employment history. Experienced professionals should list all the jobs from college on, although positions held more than 20 years ago can be omitted.

For the positions listed, you need to provide your employer, job title, location, starting date, ending date, key responsibilities and your accomplishments. Hiring managers want to see both months and years for the dates. Many people with gaps in their employment only list the years for each position. I do not recommend this. Most hiring managers will assume the worst if you don’t provide the detail. If you do have a gap that you are worried about, the are ways to explain this in either your cover letter or resume.

If you provide the information listed above, your resume will cover the basics. There is a lot of additional information you may consider. Look at the job description you are pursuing. The requirements for the position will tell you what information the hiring manager will want to see. If there is a requirement not covered above, such as a technical skill or foreign language, add a section to resume to provide this information.

I see resumes every day that fail to accomplish their most basic purpose – introduce and convey a clear picture of the job seeker.

How do they miss this? Typically, there are two primary mistakes. Job seekers leave out critical information and they fail to provide a clear structure that will make finding information easy.

A resume is an introduction. It is the first impression that an employer gets. A typical hiring manager might receive several hundred resumes each week. With so many resumes to review, most only get a 15 to 30 second look.

For many candidates, this can be frustrating to hear. You have just spent weeks deliberating over every word in your resume. You revised the content and developed witty or creative descriptions for what you have done. Then the resume hits the desk of an employer and gets little more than a quick glance.

Resumes don’t get hired. The introduction your resume provides is not designed to get you a job. Interviews, assessment tests, reference checks and other screening mechanisms do that. What the resume can do – what it’s supposed to do – is get you a shot at talking to someone. Do you make it easy for the reader to see why they should keep reading, and then set up a call?

A good resume will present the key pieces of information that an employer needs. Poor formatting can keep you out of the running for jobs that are a match. If it’s not clear in the first 15 seconds that you meet some of the basic requirements, you risk being passed by. The key to getting past this initial screen is making it easy for the reader to assess your background. By organizing your resume so that it is easy to digest, it will get a more thorough look.