Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2014. Its description of TheLadders as the world’s largest job site for professionals is an unsourced claim from 2014.
Marc Cenedella is the founder of TheLadders, the world’s largest job site for professionals.
They previously gave us what they considered the perfect résumé today, and this time they offer a couple of basic rules to help you stand out from the other candidates applying for an executive position.
If you’re like most people, your résumé will include something like this:
- For 3 years I was southern regional director at XX Group.
- Managed a team of 15 people.
- Responsible for a €500,000 budget for national expansion.
Your numbers may be bigger or more impressive, whether in the size of the team you managed or the time you spent as an executive at the company, but according to these experts, the way you present them is exactly the same as almost every other executive.
What’s the mistake?
Those lines describe what you did, but they don’t tell your future boss how good you’ll be in the new job if you’re hired. Obviously, like most of the people who will send in their résumés, 1. you were hired by a company, 2. you managed people, and 3. you had money to grow the business.
We haven’t told the person who is going to hire us anything new.
Cenedella suggests you do the following:
First, read your résumé out loud, putting this phrase at the start of every line: “You should give me a bonus because…”
That way we avoid simply stating the position we held and the people we managed, because even a monkey can hold an executive position and have 15 people reporting to it, but the monkey probably doesn’t deserve a bonus.
The point is to describe your achievements (which is what sets you apart from the monkey), not the position you held.
How much did you increase sales? How much did costs go down? How much more profitable did your company become after your time there? Did you manage to make the company you worked for better in some way?
If you can’t find a single reason why you deserve a bonus, skip this small change and talk about the position you held rather than your non-existent achievements. That brings us to the second change to improve our résumé.
Count the number of € and % characters in your résumé. Now double them.
Achievements are usually measured in € and %, and they tend to be more persuasive when it comes to getting hired, because, really, we’re going to be hired for money. Our pretty face, silk tie and lovely smile have to make the company a lot of money. Deep down, the employer is thinking: “Show me the money.”
Instead of including phrases like:
- Increased sales considerably during my 3 years in charge.
- Significantly reduced manufacturing costs.
Include € and %:
- Through strategic selling we increased sales in the south by 27%.
- In the first year we cut manufacturing costs by 11% without affecting productivity.
- Saved the company €300,000 a year thanks to…
Clearly, if we show plenty of positive figures in % and €, then unlike the monkey we do deserve that bonus, and we improve our chances of being hired by giving the employer more than enough reasons.
Then, once we get to the face-to-face job interview, we’ll try to show not only what we’ve achieved, but how we’ll do the same at the new company if we’re hired.
Further reading
Featured image: New York Zoological Society, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
