Long gone are the days when recruiters and employers would sit in uninterrupted silence and carefully read multi-page resumes from cover to cover. Nowadays, interruptions and distractions are the norm, and recruiters' time is increasingly crunched. Simply to decide if they want to take the time to read a resume, they need to quickly pull out key facts—do you have the basics of what they're looking for? Then, if they do decide to invest more time in really reading your resume, you'd better not lose their interest. Your resume needs to be sharply focused, compelling, and entirely relevant.
Because the VisualCV is web-based, it's even more essential that the resume component be crisp and clear. Readers/viewers will have multiple opportunities to click away from your information. Sure, they're most likely to click to another element of your VisualCV—perhaps a video, a chart, a presentation, or a reference recommendation. But in the time that they spend looking at your resume, you want them to gain quick impressions and a few hard facts that will reinforce your message of "who you are" and "what you're good at."
This guide will help you create a resume that communicates your message and establishes your value. It will lead you through decisions about what material to include, how to include it, and how to position it for maximum impact within the VisualCV and in the minds of recruiters and potential employers.
Before we start discussing what your resume should include, let's clear up a few common misconceptions about resumes. In brief, your resume should not be:
Instead, your resume should be a capabilities statement filled with promise and proof. And it should perfectly position you for the job you want.
Here's how to accomplish that.
Before beginning to write your resume and create your VisualCV, take some to think about what you want to do next. Defining your current career objective is a critical first step because how you want to be perceived is the perspective you must keep in the forefront of your mind as you choose, position, and describe all of the information in your resume.
Remember, you are not writing your "career obituary." You don't necessarily need to include everything about your past career experiences. You must carefully select the real and relevant facts and experiences that support your current goal. So take some time to reflect on what you love to do, what you do best, the kinds of activities you'd prefer in your next job, and the environment—the job culture, company type, location, and more—that will give you the greatest job satisfaction.
Now, you might or might not wish to include a Career Objective at the top of your resume. In fact, most current-day resumes begin with a Profile, Qualifications Summary, or other introduction rather than an objective statement. But whether you choose to include an objective or not, it's imperative to know what your objective is! Otherwise, you will not be able to conduct a focused and effective job search.
But what if you're considering more than one objective? If your objectives are substantially similar—such as CIO / Information Technology Manager / Director of Network Infrastructure, you will be able to use the same resume for most jobs that you're interested in. But in other cases, one resume won't do the trick—your objectives are dissimilar enough that trying to "cover all the bases" will result in an unfocused and disjointed resume.
Consider these instances when you might need more than one version of your resume:
With your goals clearly defined, you can create a single or multiple versions of your resume to present just the relevant information to potential employers.
With VisualCV.com, you can build and store multiple versions of your resume, and you can easily keep track of which version you send to which people and which companies. What's more, you can quickly pull together a new version of your resume for sudden opportunities that don't quite fit the resumes you have on file.
For those of you who are uncertain of your career objective—you haven't quite settled on a goal and don't want to limit yourself to specific job titles—you'll find that writing a powerful and effective resume is extremely difficult if not impossible. Remember, your resume must present just the right mix of meaningful information relevant to your goal. Without a goal, you don't know what information to include, what skills or successes to highlight, and what details to omit. You're forced to include everything—just in case—and the end result is usually a resume that does not capture interest because it's not focused.
Employers want to know what you want to do; it's not their job to figure that out. So do take the time to define a goal (or multiple goals) before writing your resume.
Most resumes follow a fairly typical format:
Introduction—might include some or all of the following:
Career History—most often in reverse-chronological order and usually including all of these elements:
Education—to include some or all of the following:
Extras—additional facts and information that don't fit into one of the previous categories but might be important to include, such as:
As you are gathering the material for your resume, organize it into these rough groups; but keep in mind that you don't have to follow a strict formula! You can create new sections, add in unusual information, or come up with creative ways to present your qualifications. The purpose of the resume is to tell your story and describe your capabilities in the way that is most beneficial to you and meaningful to employers.
Words on paper or on screen can communicate only so much. With the VisualCV, you have the opportunity to enhance the words in your resume with graphics, photographs, charts and graphs, video and audio clips, and additional paper documents (such as letters of recommendation or examples of your work) that paint a richer and more meaningful picture of who you are and the value you offer. Be sure to take advantage of this capability!
In later sections of this guide you'll find more information about the VisualCV enhancements and how you can incorporate them into your online presentation. For now, let's concentrate on capturing and presenting the right information in each of the different sections of the traditional resume that serves as the foundation for your enhanced VisualCV.
Consider this: For every job you apply for, employers will be reviewing dozens if not hundreds of resumes from people with similar skills and experience. If the job calls for two years of customer service experience, everyone who applies will have two years… or more. If expertise in Great Plains accounting software is called for, all applicants should have it. If Project Management certification is a job requirement, then most if not all applicants will have the PMP designation.
So how do you stand out in a sea of candidates who all have the essential qualifications?
In a nutshell, you can't rely on your "qualifications" to be the distinguishing factor. What will set you apart are your accomplishments—what you have done while earning those qualifications. Your unique experiences and individual successes not only will distinguish you from other candidates, but will give employers the evidence they need to evaluate whether you have what it takes to do the job.
Let's say a company is hiring a Project Manager to jump-start a key project and bring several other initiatives back on track. Not only do they want someone with proven project management skills, they need to know that their new hire can move quickly into action and get things moving when they've stalled. If your resume contains bare-bones information about projects you've managed or participated in, this doesn't tell them what they need to know. Instead, you need to tell the story of how you inherited six failing projects and brought them all in on time and under budget. You need to let them know that you were chosen out of six Project Manager peers to lead a mission-critical new project, and that you launched and completed that project successfully.
In other words, your resume must be all about performance and results, not just experiences and qualifications.
When writing your resume, be sure you include performance information that will give employers an insight into what you have done and how you have done it. Look beyond your job description or assignment and think about what you were asked to do and—specifically—how you did it and how well you did it. Come up with examples that illustrate your capabilities and support your current objectives. Then use these examples in all of the various sections of your resume, as appropriate—the Introduction, Experience, Education, and Extras.
Now that we've covered "big picture" strategies, it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty of actually writing your resume. We'll take it step by step, beginning with the Introduction and proceeding through Experience, Education, and Extras.
In the context of your resume, "who you are" usually refers to a job title. Are you a Software Engineer? Corporate Finance Executive? Customer Service Representative? Be sure to include this critical information right up front, as a headline or in the first sentence of your introduction. Your goal is to immediately communicate to employers the essential information that creates the context for everything else they will read in your resume.
For example, if you define yourself as a "Sales Professional," employers will be looking for key qualifications such as sales results, communication skills, relationship-building abilities, territory management experience, and so forth. If you define yourself as an "Accountant," they'll be looking for something entirely different—accounting and finance experience, knowledge of accounting software, attention to detail, and strong analytical skills. By defining yourself up front, you establish expectations and help readers better appreciate and absorb the information that follows.
Having defined "who you are," consider what information you can place "front and center" on your resume to support your claim. What credentials, qualifications, experiences, knowledge, and accomplishments do you possess that will prove you are, in fact, an effective Marketing Management Professional? Your goal is to create a "snapshot," a capsule portrait that conveys the most essential information to your readers. In essence, you want to quickly portray that you are an ideal candidate for the types of jobs you are pursuing.
You will need to condense a lot of information into a small space! The following examples are provided to help you see how three different job seekers—Alex, Sylvie, and Frank—handled this challenge. As we move through the resume-writing process, you'll see the different sections for each of these same job seekers.
Here are the Introduction sections. The circled numbers refer to notes below that explain the various elements of each Introduction.
3. Innovative technology leader who can translate ideas to action and results. Effective team participant/leader skilled in communicating technical concepts and gaining support for new ideas. Customer advocate recognized for commitment to usability and ability to develop new capabilities from existing technologies. Quick learner eager for new professional challenges.
4. Ardent believer in the power of technology to communicate ideas and advance human endeavors.
3. Advanced rapidly to management role with respected hotel-management company and delivered measurable improvements in multiple areas of performance: revenue, guest satisfaction, service, and safety. Built teams of talented professionals and motivated entire staff to work together to achieve stretch goals. Planned, managed, and executed large, complex functions to maximize revenue while delivering exceptional customer satisfaction. Captured new business, restored corporate client relationships, and delivered creative, high-quality guest experiences.
3. Performance-driven sales leader with a strong record of results in sales of complex technology solutions and services. Successful driving rapid revenue growth, penetrating target markets, revitalizing sales performance, and gaining strategic advantage against the competition. Effective building, leading, and motivating strong teams of management and sales performers. Experienced in operations/P&L management with sharp focus on the bottom line.
As you review the examples above, note that these are not generic "capabilities statements"; each is a very specific introduction to one individual job seeker. When writing your Introduction, be sure to include specifics and not simply the general kinds of statements that could be written about any and all candidates.
Be specific, be memorable, and be unique! Remember, your goal is to stand out in a crowd of similarly qualified candidates.
When you have written your Introduction, review it carefully to be sure you have included the right information in such a way that if they read nothing else, readers will come away with a clear picture of who you are and the value you offer.
With the VisualCV's hover-over feature popping up data from such reliable sources as Business Week and US News and World Report, the information that you present in your Introduction (and in fact your entire resume) is enhanced and solidified. Readers see that you have a BSBA from James Madison University, then learn that it is the top-rated public university in the Southern U.S. for business studies. They read that you have two years' experience with Ruby on Rails, and the pop-up informs them that this technology is just three years old—so they know you are a pioneer and an expert.
In later sections of this guide you'll find more information about the VisualCV enhancements and how you can incorporate them into your online presentation. For now, let's concentrate on capturing and presenting the right information in each of the different sections of the traditional resume that serves as the foundation for your enhanced VisualCV.
This section of your resume is generally the lengthiest, the most substantial, and the most time-consuming to prepare. You must provide readers with sufficient evidence of your experiences to make them believe in your capabilities, yet you do not want to weigh down the resume with so much detail that readers lose interest and the most impressive information gets lost. It is quite a balancing act!
To keep the Experience section to a reasonable length while highlighting the most meaningful information, follow this formula for presenting each of your positions:
When readers view your VisualCV, simply by hovering over the company names they will gain some valuable information about your past employers. Because of this unique feature, you don't have to include a lot of details about the company in the text of your resume.
Plus, the unbiased third-party reporting lets readers know key facts that can help them evaluate the importance of your experience. Let's say you're a customer service manager with a stellar record of customer retention. When the pop-up reveals multiple acquisitions and integrations during the time you were in that role, readers appreciate your accomplishment even more because they understand the challenges inherent in that environment
The area where most resumes bog down is in the job description. Keep in mind, you don't have to tell your readers all of the details of your job; they are really interested in what you actually did, not what you were "responsible for." When writing the description, provide just enough information so they understand the scope of your activities and extent of your authority.
Also consider abbreviating or eliminating some of your job information. You want the focus to stay on your relevant experiences and activities. For most people, the most recent positions are the most relevant and should consume the most space on the resume. Early career experiences can be briefly described or simply presented without elaboration (as you'll see in the examples below). But perhaps you're making a career shift back to something you did years ago. In that case, you'd want to emphasize that earlier experience and just briefly mention the more recent roles to avoid a gap.
If in doubt, go back to your career objective and evaluate whether the information is relevant to that goal. If it is not, downplay it on your resume so that readers don't lose sight of who you are—how you want to be perceived at this point in your career.
The most significant information on your resume is your accomplishment statements. Here is where you communicate how you contributed to the success of your company, your projects, and your team. It is a prime opportunity to demonstrate your capabilities with actual examples and results.
To create the most powerful and meaningful resume, be specific about the results you attained. Include hard numbers, percentages, comparisons, and other precise results. Let readers know—exactly—what you achieved and the impact you had on your organization.
Consider the difference in impact between these two statements:
The first sentence is vague, while the second uses hard numbers to make the accomplishment more concrete, more impressive, and more believable.
You will have to "dig deep" to uncover the numbers and results you'll need for your resume. Be sure to look beyond your own job and department to see how what you did affected the large organization. Use the following questions to stimulate your memory and look at your career from the standpoint of specific outcomes.
If the answer to any of the following questions is "yes," ask yourself "how and how much?" and keep digging till you get to the bottom—the actual, hard results that you can showcase on your resume.
Here are the experience sections from the resumes of our three job seekers. Again, the circled numbers are referenced below each resume to explain different components of each section.
KKY TECHNOLOGIES, Chicago, IL, 2004–Present 1
Technical Leader/Developer, 2005–Present 2.
3. Promoted to multifaceted technical/leadership role, collaborating with other members of the Customer Services team in a fast-paced, creative environment to envision, develop, enhance, and implement online services for the company's customer base—technical staff at large organizations such as AT&T, Nextel, Boeing, IBM, and the U.S. military.
Helpdesk Engineer, 2004–2005 2.
3. Brought on board to strengthen base of technical skills for the company's front-line customer contacts.
EDU-LINKS, INC., Chicago, IL, 2002–2004 1
Technology Manager 2.
3. Elevated technology capabilities of fast-growing online educational company. Managed network design, telecommunications, and helpdesk service.
GRAPHIC ADVANTAGE, Evansville, IL, 2001–2002 1
Webmaster 2.
3. Handled all technical and organizational aspects of the company's online presence. Also served as LAN administrator and technical support staff.
MACOMBER & REYNOLDS, 2001–2006 1
General Manager: Riverpark Luxor, Queens, NY, 2005–2007 156 guest rooms, full-service restaurant, meeting space 2.
5. Reversed negative profit performance and stemmed decline of aging hotel in a competitive business/tourism market. Managed P&L and annual business plan to achieve performance objectives. Led a team of 9 operational supervisors and 3 sales managers. Quickly filled open managerial positions, replaced underperformers, and built a strong team. 3.
Assistant General Manager: Lake Michigan Luxor, Chicago, OH, 2004–2005 247 guest rooms, full-service restaurant, convention space 2.
5. Helped achieve record high performance in quality, service, and satisfaction to propel property from #93 to #22 among more than 400 Luxor hotels nationwide. Ignited team and led aggressive improvement initiatives to meet stretch goals—set every benchmark above 90 and created incentive programs for exceeding goals. 3.
MARRIOTT CORPORATION, 1998–2004 6.
2. Manager: Tip-of-the-Top Restaurant, Marriott Hotel, Iowa City, IA, 2002–2004
2. Assistant F&B Manager: Marriott Westwinds, Tampa, FL, 2000–2002
2. Management Trainee, IMarriott HQ and multiple hotel locations nationwide, 1998–2000
CRYDON SYSTEMS (formerly Foxtel Information Systems), New York, NY 1
- AREA VICE PRESIDENT , (2003–Present) 2.
5. Rapidly grew revenues (+45M in 1 year) and built the #1 business-sales region in the country. Selected to lead expanded sales/service organization formed through Foxtel/Crydon merger, with direct accountability for P&L, sales, and market development in Northeast. Manage $400M annual budget and 75 sales and technical support staff. 3.
AREA SALES DIRECTOR, (1999–2003) 2.
5. Led sales region to consistent top performance. Directed a 60-person sales force, organized into 5 teams and achieving over $150M annual sales. Participated on strategic company initiatives including product/service reorganization, quality programs, and acquisition due diligence that led to Crydon merger in 2003. 3.
CORPORATE SALES MANAGER , (1998–1999) 2.
5. Rejuvenated an underperforming corporate sales organization, doubling gross sales in 1 year and laying foundation for 600% revenue growth within 3 years. Assumed leadership for 10-member team selling and servicing POS terminals for a large installed base of major retailer accounts. 3.
AMTECH CORPORATION, New York, NY 1
GLOBAL SALES REPRESENTATIVE 2.
5. Landed the company's biggest single contract ($20MM) and was consistently successful in sales of complex computer systems and services to Fortune 500 firms and their worldwide subsidiaries. Developed compelling value propositions and delivered winning sales proposals to C-level executives at client companies. 3.
IBM CORPORATION, New York, NY 1
- MARKETING REPRESENTATIVE (1991–1993) / SYSTEMS ENGINEER (1989–1991) 2.
5. Developed new business for IBM midsize and mainframe computer, storage, and software and communication products; managed 5 national accounts. Installed computer systems in customer locations in 40 cities across U.S. 3.
EARLY CAREER 6.
ACCOUNT MARKETING REPRESENTATIVE, XEROX (1987–1989); XYZ, INC. (1986–1987)
In writing the Experience section of your resume, remember to stay relevant; be as concise as possible; and emphasize performance and results rather than job responsibilities. This is the most important section of your resume and will probably take you the longest to write! But when you start interviewing, you'll be glad you took the time to dig deep into the activities and accomplishments of your career. Your past performance will convince employers of your future performance.
Typically the shortest and easiest section of the resume to write, the Education section simply documents the educational credentials that are a fundamental qualification for many jobs.
The more senior your level, the fewer details you should include in the Education section—often just the degree, the school, and possibly the year of graduation will suffice.
For younger professionals, it is more appropriate to add in some distinguishing information, perhaps illustrating academic achievement or campus leadership. This can help reinforce the image you are trying to portray in the rest of the resume.
But regardless of your age, take care not to include so many details about your educational experiences that this section overshadows your professional experience. You don't want to look like you peaked during your college years and it's been all downhill since! Keep this section brief and to the point.
However, do include continuing education and professional certification, especially if it's recent and related to your goals. For the most part, it's wise to avoid a long "laundry list" of training courses. You can keep track of this detailed information in a separate document and include just the highlights in the Education section of your resume.
The three Education sections below show varied levels of detail, as appropriate for each individual.
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
BS in Computer Science, 2005
Recent Training:
BA, Liberal Arts – University of Iowa, Ames, IA
MBA, 1991 (Major: Finance/Marketing)—NEW YORK UNIVERSITY / Stern School of Business, New York, NY
BA, 1983 (Major: Economics)—RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, New Brunswick, NJ
Professional Development: Xerox and IBM Sales Training; Target Account Selling; Merrill Lynch MBA Training
Although you've included most of your critical information in the first three sections, there are often additional facts and experiences that support your presentation as a qualified professional in your field. You might group all of these "extras" into one section, or have individual sections for several different areas, such as:
Before adding "extras," be sure they are truly valuable. You don't want to clutter up your resume with irrelevant information.
Also, beware of sharing personal information on the Internet. Although your VisualCV is not searchable or available without your permission, it is wise to protect sensitive personal data at all times. Your social security number and date of birth should never appear on documents or sites that are freely shared with others. Personal and family information should be shared with discretion.
Because your VisualCV is such a dynamic way to communicate about your career and yourself, you will find countless opportunities to share the VisualCV with different audiences. With some contacts, you'll feel quite comfortable sharing personal, financial, and family information; with others, you'll want to strictly limit the details they receive.
You can easily control and keep track of who has access to different versions of your VisualCV. And you are the one who chooses which information to share with which audience.
You can see that our three job-seekers have diverse "extras" sections, each reflecting the appropriate additional information they've chosen to round out the presentation of their career experiences and qualifications.
Volunteer, United Way
Member, Queens Rotary Club
Coordinator, Heart Association "Taste of Iowa"
2003, 2005, 2007
2006, 2007
2004
Step by step, section by section, you've built your resume. Congratulations! Now it's time to publish your efforts—on paper, via email, and most importantly on your VisualCV. With this essential foundation in place, you can now begin to expand, enrich, and enlighten your resume using the many capabilities of the VisualCV. The next sections of this Guide will give you some ideas and insights for doing just that.