Tag: Resume Writing

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.

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.

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.

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.

Personal Information on a Resume

A resume is a presentation of a person’s professional background, demonstrating their capability and potential. It needs to sell the job seeker to a hiring manager and generate interest that will lead to an interview.

Some job seekers try to personalize their resume by including information unrelated to their career. This can include their age, family status, religious affiliation, hobbies, volunteer work or other details. The only reason to put something on a resume is to make it more effective – in other words – land an interview. By putting personal information on your resume, you are asking a hiring manager to make a hiring decision based on this information.

Do you think that having three kids, being an active fisherman or volunteering at a charity is a reason why a person would be a better quality manager, distribution supervisor or sales executive? There are much better reasons why to hire a person. For example, their experience in a similar job and their education are usually good criteria for making a hiring decision.

Including some personal details is not a major detractor on a resume. Just as a hiring manager won’t hire someone because they ballroom dance, they will not reject them for this either. The reason you want to omit personal information is that your resume is limited in length. The vast majority of resumes need to be two pages or less. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are rare. With only two pages to show your entire professional background, extraneous information needs to be avoided.

Every element of your resume needs to demonstrate your potential. If a detail doesn’t help you get an interview, you should put something else in it’s place. For example,

  • Expand the descriptions within your work experience by adding additional accomplishments.
  • List training classes and continuing education you have completed in your field.
  • Qualify the skills you list on your resume with examples of projects that demonstrate your skill level.

Adding information to your resume that could impress a hiring manager and eliminating informations that is far less important to your career will improve your chances of landing an interview.

What Have You Created?

For many job seekers encounter, developing a good list of accomplishments to include on their resume and to discuss in an interview is a challenge. Listing accomplishments sounds like an easy task – just write about your successes. Despite this, it often proves to be very difficult.

The result, nearly half of all resume list no accomplishments.

There are several causes of this. Many people forget details from prior positions. Some job seekers find it difficult to focus on their successes after a job loss. Their reduced confidence affects their resume, interviews, and job search success. The most common cause I see is an a failure to recognize an experience as an accomplishment that will impress a hiring manager. This stems from a lack of understanding of what a hiring manager wants.

You can find accomplishments that will demonstrate your potential in a wide variety of work activities. One particular focus I find uncovers a lot of impressive accomplishments is to look for things the job seeker has created.

There are a few questions you can ask yourself to get the process started:

  • What systems have your created and implemented?
  • What processes have you created and implemented?
  • What tools, including forms, spreadsheets and databases, have your designed?
  • What products or services have you designed?

These questions will help identify potential accomplishments. From there, you need to look at your specific actions and the results that were achieved. Designing a great system that never gets implemented or a product that never makes it to market is difficult to sell as an accomplishment. Provide specific results. Did the project you completed increase sales, reduce costs, improve quality, increase customer service, or provide another benefit.

It is the benefit, the tangible value you provided an employer, that will impress a hiring manager.

5 Quick Fixes for Your Resume

The vast majority of resumes are ineffective. They look like every other resume and fail to give a good reason why the job seeker should be hired. If your resume isn’t getting much of a response, it probably needs a lot of work. You have a few options: hire a resume writer, become a resume writing expert so you can fix if yourself, or focus on the quick and easy changes you can make right now. This last option won’t perfect your resume, but it will help you make a lot of progress fast.

I’ve put together a list of the five easiest, fastest and most effective fixes. This list is far from being complete. It isn’t meant to be. It is just the changes you can make fast that will give you the most improvement.

  • Add a Positioning Statement

Your resume should create a clear picture of who you are. Most resumes are just a listing of facts – names, dates and responsibilities. To be effective, you want to frame the image you create. Do this by adding a summary at the top of your resume that defines who you are, the value you bring and an idea of the type of position you are pursuing. Only half of all the resumes have an objective statement and even less provide a compelling positioning statement that sells the potential of the job seeker. Adding a couple sentences at the top of your resume is the fastest and possibly most significant improvement you can make.

  • Lead off with an accomplishment

After you add a positioning statement, include a bullet point with an accomplishment. Often, I like to see two or three accomplishments at the top of a resume and a lot more scattered throughout the work experience of the job seeker. If you have a resume devoid of accomplishments (this is very common), it could take a lot of time and work to put accomplishments throughout your resume. Don’t let this discourage you. Start with one accomplishment and put it at the top right under your positioning statement. If you have accomplishments on your resume, put one to three of them at the top. The beginning of your resume becomes an executive summary that provides a statement of who you are as a professional and an accomplishment that reinforces this.

  • Separate your responsibilities from your accomplishments

Within the descriptions of the positions you have held, you probably list a combination of responsibilities and accomplishments. You want to draw the reader to youraccomplishments – they are the details that will separate you from your competition. Emphasize your accomplishments by grouping them separately from your responsibilities. One format to consider is to put your responsibilities in a single, short paragraph and put accomplishments in a bulleted list. Most people are drawn to the bullets more than a block of text in paragraph form.

  • Add titles to your bullets

To emphasize the bulleted information even more, provide a bolded title for each bullet. The title should be short and should summarize the theme of the bullet. For example, I have added a title to each of the five bullets in this list. I could have just bulleted the five paragraphs without a title. Visually, this would have been much less appealing. (Note: If your resume doesn’t use bullets and is written in large blocks of text, change this first. It is unlikely that long paragraphs will be read. Break the text into small blocks.)

  • Add Employer Descriptions

There are over 20 million businesses in the U.S. No matter how many a hiring manager knows, the number is still a very small percentage of the total. It is likely many hiring managers will be unfamiliar with some of your employers. Provide a short sentence summarizing the background of the company, including the industry and size of the company.

If you act on all five of these recommendations, your resume will improve significantly. All five can be addressed quickly… for many people, only an hour or two can make a huge difference.

Prioritizing Information on Your Resume

I reviewed a resume of a supply chain professional that failed to prioritize the content of their resume. The result was a confusing resume that didn’t create a solid picture of the job seeker.

The problem was not the content. The content was fine. It was the order and presentation of the information that hurt the effectiveness of the resume.

The basic structure looked like this:

Executive Summary: Supply Chain Executive with a strong track record of improving operations and providing leadership. Proven discipline for managing multiple departments and organizations with in excess of 150 employees.

Extensive professional skills and experience, including:

<listing of supply chain skills>

Work Experience

Most Recent Position – held for the last year
Operations Manager

  • Inventory Management Accomplishment

  • Sales Accomplishment

  • Sales Accomplishment

  • Inventory Management Accomplishment

  • Sales Accomplishment

  • Purchasing Accomplishment

Previous Position – held for 3 years
Sales Associate

  • Listing of sales responsibilities and one sales accomplishment


Military Service – 20 year career
Logistics Specialist

  • 7 accomplishments related to logistics and transportation

Education

After reading the executive summary, I expected a typical supply chain/logistics resume. The list of accomplishments under the most recent position started to confuse the issue. Sales and customer service activities were presented on equal footing with the logistics experience. The confusion built with the second position – a pure sales position. Looking at these two positions, the job seeker has split time between logistics and sales for one year out of the last four. It doesn’t present a strong logistics presentation. I could see some hiring managers hitting the delete key at that point.

Now, let’s look at the picture from a different perspective. The job seeker had 20 years of experience in logistics in the military. He tried a sales position for three years after leaving the military. He then moved back into logistics a year ago, managing operations for a wholesaler. In this capacity, due to his success in sales in the previous role, he managed some sales functions in addition to his primary responsibilities for operations and logistics.  In this description, the emphasis is on the twenty-one years of logistics work out of the last twenty-four.

To revise the resume this way, I would change the order of the content to emphasize the logistics experience like this:

Executive Summary: Supply Chain Executive with a strong track record of improving operations and providing leadership. Proven discipline for managing multiple departments and organizations with in excess of 150 employees.

  • Inventory Management Accomplishment from most recent position

  • Logistics Accomplishment from military career

  • Logistics Accomplishment from military career

Work Experience

Most Recent Position – held for the last year
Operations Manager

  • Inventory Management Accomplishment

  • Inventory Management Accomplishment

  • Purchasing Accomplishment

  • Very brief summary of sales accomplishments

Previous Position – held for 3 years
Sales Associate

  • Listing of sales responsibilities and one sales accomplishment

Military Service – 20 year career
Logistics Specialist

  • 5 accomplishments related to logistics and transportation


Skills

<Listing of supply chain skills>


Education

The change in structure is small, but increases the emphasis on logistics and supply chain experience. The sales experience is still listed; it is just deemphasized so that it doesn’t detract from the primary message.

Sentence Structure

I updated some of my social media accounts this weekend. My motivation was twofold. First, some of accounts badly needed an update to the design and content.  I had not updated some of the information in the last couple years and it showed.  The second reason was motivated by one of the blog readers.  She pointed out that the writing style and sentence structure of my LinkedIn account wasn’t consistent.  When I reviewed, I realized this was a generous assessment – my LinkedIn profile was awful.

I had setup my LinkedIn account a couple years ago and used my bio from my website. My bio is written in a 3rd person style and this is suitable to a corporate website. On LinkedIn, the style should be more personal, and written in the first person. The same goes for other social media sites. I’m still working on updating and improving – these are going to be a work in progress. That’s a lot better than what they were, though… stale and out-of-date.

So, what does this have to do with a job search? The sentence structure of a cover letter and resume need to be written professionally and in a suitable style.

A cover letter is a business letter from you to another individual. As a result, it should be written directly in the 1st person. Do not refer to yourself in the 3rd person. It makes a very poor impression.

The resume should have a different style. It should be written in an implied first person. This structure starts with the personal pronoun “I” but this word is omitted. For example, “Managed the production department” is a sentence that has an implied subject – the “I” is left off the beginning of the sentence. This style is appropriate for a resume.

Write your resume in the 1st person but avoid using “I” or your name in your resume.

I’m still working on improving my profiles online. On LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/garycapone), I accept all invitations to connect and have over 2,500 connections. You can invite me to connect at [email protected]. I setup a Twitter account this weekend (www.twitter.com/garycapone). The other account I updated was Facebook. This is the one account I don’t accept every invitation. I’m limiting it to people I know and have established personal relationship.

The Two Ways a Resume is Assessed

The basic purpose of a resume is get you an interview. This is a simple goal, but one many job seekers struggle to reach.  The problem stems from how a resume is assessed.  A resume is usually assessed in two very different ways, but few job seekers design their resume to make the best impression during both of these assessment.

The first assessment your resume needs to pass is the initial screen. During this screen, the goal of the hiring manager is eliminate as many resumes as possible in a very short time. A hiring manager might receive a hundred or more resumes for a position. The goal at this stage is to reduce this stack of resumes down to a manageable number, perhaps the top 10 or 20.

In this review, the hiring manager will often have a few criteria that are critical to the position. These critical elements could be educational, work experience or skill requirements. Usually, two or three criteria are sufficient to reduce the resumes down to the top 20.

As a hiring manager does this initial screen, they may only give a resume a 15 to 30 second look. That’s all that is needed to look for two or three main elements. For example, if a hiring manager requires an MBA for a position, it only takes a few seconds to see if the resume lists an MBA.

The common pitfall many job seekers fall into is not making their qualifications with critical elements of the job very prominent on their resume. The education of a job seeker is usually easy to find, since it is in a section of its own. Work experience and skills are not always as clearly identifiable. For this reason, it is extremely important to look at the requirements for a position and make sure you show how you meet these requirements.

If you have the experience that a company wants, it should be clear and easy to find. With hiring managers only spending 15 to 30 seconds on your resume initially, they can only do a quick scan. They will not read every word. Important details of your background need to be prominent. If they are buried in large blocks of text, there is little chance they will be read.

The second assessment is a detailed look at your resume where the hiring manager attempts to learn as much about you as they can. All of the resumes in this group meet the minimum basic requirements for the job. The goal now is to identify the best of the group.

In this detailed assessment, demonstrating qualifications isn’t sufficient. All of the candidates at this stage will satisfy the basics and many will have a background very close to the target of the hiring manager. The candidates that rise to the top and get interviews demonstrate a pattern of success. The key is showing how the job seeker contributed significant value to their employers.

Most job seekers focus on experience. This focus leads to an emphasis on the responsibilities they held. Because their competition for a position held the same responsibilities, this does not differentiate them. Usually, it only gets them past the first screen – the 15 second look. When they are looked at in the second assessment, they get passed over. There will be candidates that emphasize the value they have provided in their careers. By doing these, these individuals rise to the top of the pile and get invited to interview.

When you write your resume, you need to work to make your resume standout in both assessments. Ensure that your resume demonstrates your basic capabilities very clearly and includes detailed examples of your contributions to your employers. If you do both of these things, you will have more success than most of your competition.

Your Resume’s Executive Summary

I’m a big fan of starting a resume with a summary statement. A summary statement gives a job seeker the opportunity to create a very strong positive impression in just a few lines. The summary statement is also the grabber that motivates the hiring manager to read your resume closely, rather than just skim it fast.  Developing a good impression and grabbing the reader can make a huge difference in the overall effectiveness of the resume.

Today, I read an article on resume writing that offered some great advice but differed on the importance of a summary statement. The article gave three reasons to avoid an objective or summary statement:

  • You don’t want one

  • You don’t need one

  • You don’t have room for one

All three of these statements sound good.  Unfortunately, they are misleading.

You don’t want one:  If you don’t want to include a summary, you don’t have to have one. This goes for anything on your resume. The problem with this is that a good summary statement will make your resume more effective. Deciding you don’t want one is tantamount to saying you don’t want to maximize the effectiveness of your resume.

You don’t need one:  As I said, you don’t have to include a summary. It’s not a required element of resume. The basics that are essential to a resume are your name, contact info, education and work experience. Everything else that you may include is designed to help sell your potential to an employer. The resume police won’t hunt you done if you don’t have a good summary statement, but your odds of landing an interview may be lower without one.

You don’t have room:  The third point is the one that I really have trouble with. The more information on your resume, the more important it is to have a summary. If you have no experience to write about, there’s nothing to summarize. On the other hand, if you have 30 years of experience, a summary can help frame your potential and build interest in reader to look closely at your resume.

A good summary statement is similar to an eye catching headline in a newspaper or an action packed opening scene of a movie. Both of these are designed to grab the attention of the audience quickly with the most exciting information.

The key to an effective summary statement is to present a summary of the most important information to the hiring manager. You want to get the hiring manager excited and interested.

The term objective statement is misleading for many job seekers. Hiring managers want to know what type of position you will consider accepting – not what your goals, wants and desires are. Focus on the elements of your background that help sell you to an employer. This short sales pitch should generate interest in reading your resume closely. If you do this, you will be far ahead of most job seekers.