functional resume Archives - Palladian Career Resources

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.

Top Five Reasons to Avoid a Functional Resume

A functional resume can be effective in a few rare situations, but more often, this structure will hurt your job search chances. Job seekers like the functional format because it allows them much greater flexibility in highlighting the information they think is important. Unfortunately, using a functional resume can cause a hiring manager to eliminate you from consideration before they understand your potential.

The basic structure of a functional resume separates a job seeker’s experience from their work history. In a chronological resume, experiences and accomplishments are grouped under each job. Functional resumes break this pattern. Experiences and accomplishments are grouped under functional areas, mixing experiences from different jobs. The job seeker’s work history is then presented as a list jobs.

The functional structure makes it easy to tailor a resume to the key elements of a job. It also emphasizes significant experiences and accomplishments. This makes it a tempting choice. If you are thinking of using a functional structure, consider these five reasons to avoid a functional resume first:

1. No Context for Accomplishments

Accomplishments establish your performance track record and provide the best selling point for your potential. A job seeker who shows a clear, easy to understand and significant accomplishment in the past will help show a hiring manager what they can accomplish in the future. This makes presenting your accomplishments a critical element of your resume.

For an accomplishment to be impressive, the context of the accomplishment must be clear. This requires showing the job seeker’s role, scope of responsibility, the actions the job seeker took and the specific results delivered to the organization.

In a chronological resume, listing an accomplishment under a job provides some of this context. The job description provides the scope of responsibility and can imply some of the actions that would ordinarily be taken. A functional resume detaches the accomplishment from the job, making the scope impossible to determine.

2. Job Responsibilities Are Unclear

Understanding the job seeker’s scope of responsibilities throughout their career is important for a hiring manager to understand their performance. A functional resume often omits this information. The experience and accomplishments of the job seeker are listed throughout the functional areas. They are not tied to the jobs. The job listing is just a list of employers, job titles and dates. If the job title doesn’t make the scope of responsibilities clear, there’s no way to know what the job seeker did. Most job titles are ambiguous. Even commonly used job titles vary in their scope from company to company, and some job titles are unique to a single company. You cannot rely on a job listing to show what you did.

3. Mismatches Hiring Manager Goals

Hiring managers review resumes with specific goals in mind. The hiring manager will look for key data points – skills, details of past jobs and accomplishments. The hiring manager will also have a priority for each element. For example, the first time a resume is reviewed may only involve a simple check for the number of years of experience in a role, the education and the years of experience with a key skill. In this situation, the hiring manager is likely to read the first few lines of the resume, and then skip to the employment and education section. Because these sections are just a listing of names and dates, they won’t do much to sell the job seeker.

You want to present information in the order that a hiring manager wants to read it. This requires focusing on the hiring manager’s goals – not yours. Functional resumes turn this upside down. It encourages a job seeker to focus on what they want to promote, and can make it more difficult for the hiring manager to find the information they want to see first.

4. Implies You Are Hiding Something

Hiring managers are naturally very skeptical. They know a resume is the best sales pitch a job seeker can write, and a resume emphasizes the positives and de-emphasizes the negatives. This can lead to mistrust and doubt any time a job seeker presents information in a way that makes it difficult to decipher. Using a functional structure to obscure an element of your background will usually backfire. The uncertainty in a key detail of your experience leads to the hiring manager to assume the worst. Instead of improving your odds, you have now created a situation where the hiring manager has a significant doubt.

5. The Least Common Resume Format

Chronological resumes are the most common format used. In our resume benchmarking surveys, we found roughly two thirds of all resumes are chronological. Functional resumes are rare and offer a vastly different presentation from the typical chronological resume. Being unusual has drawbacks (implying you are hiding something), but there is an even greater problem. Hiring managers are much more familiar with assessing chronological resumes. They will feel more comfortable with a chronological resume and will assess chronological resumes more efficiently. This can lead to a hiring manager missing a key detail in your resume because they don’t know where to look. It would be great if every hiring manager read every word of every resume but this is never going to happen. Hiring managers skim resumes quickly. If they don’t know where to look for key information and skip over it as a result, they will assume you don’t have the experience or skill they want. You then get rejected. Using a chronological resume makes this process easier for the hiring manager.

When writing a resume, job seekers want to “stand out” from the competition. The key is differentiating yourself for the right reasons. Innovative, unusual or creative designs obscure the substance of a resume. It is this substance that will get you an interview and ultimately hired.

Provide a clear presentation of your experience and skills. Including several significant accomplishments demonstrating your track record of success. Package this information in a clear, easy to read structure. Although following functional structure should usually be avoided, strictly following a chronological format is not required. There are numerous hybrid variations that incorporate functional elements into a chronological resume. This can often offer the best of both structures.

Top 6 Situations to Use a Functional Resume

A functional resume is a great format to use for some job seekers. Unfortunately, many people use it in the wrong situation, and others fail to use it when they should. If you are in one of these six situations, you should consider a functional resume:

Recent Graduates: If you are just graduating from school, you don’t have work experience to put in a chronological format. This makes a functional format a great choice.
Individuals Changing Careers: Moving into a new field presents several challenges. One of the most significant is showing that your prior experience is transferable to the new career. A functional resume can help demonstrate this.
Senior Executives: Many senior executives have extensive careers that can be difficult to summarize in two pages. Organizing information in a functional format can help in prioritizing the most important information without letting the resume get too long.
Project Specialists: Some careers, such as construction and consulting, are focused on completing projects. It can be difficult to write about each project in sufficient detail to highlight important accomplishments without having the resume get too long. A functional resume can make this much easier to do.
Stay at Home Mom’s Returning to the Workforce: Returning to the workforce after taking significant time off can be very challenging. A chronological resume focuses the readers attention on your career progression. With a large gap in your employment you want to focus on your skills and abilities, and a functional resume can help do this.
Transitioning Military Officers: Moving from a military to a civilian career is a very big change. Civilian employers rarely understand all the details of a military career. This makes highlighting your skills and abilities very important.

The important thing to remember when you select the format for your resume is to highlight why you will be successful. For some, this is their career progression and a chronological resume will work well. For others, their skills and accomplishments are a bigger selling point and a functional resume works better.