A good resume is important — you don’t need convincing to believe this. We often spend hours if not days trying to capture every valuable contribution and every noteworthy accomplishment in our career on that single page document. We fuss over the font size, font style, the alignment and sometimes even the look of the bullet.
I trust you when you say this is the best you could do. I really do. You have checked all the right boxes, after all. Then why does your best effort fail to be impressive? Your Resume probably fails the ‘So what?’ test.
As a reviewer or an interviewer, you need to tell me why I should care about what you did in your previous roles.
Jane: “Responsible for managing a $5M marketing campaign”
Umm, so what? You were managing it, cool, but what was your contribution? Your impact? What did you do differently than the people before you? Did you manage it successfully or did you end up killing the project? Managing tells me nothing.
You need to tell me how that impacted your organization for me to understand what value you’ll add to my company or my institution or my team if I were to select you.
Ella: “Launched a $5M marketing campaign to promote a new service offering, exceeding the first-year sales target in under 5 months”
Okay. Wow. That made me pause for a second and think, “This girl is impressive!”
Are you really conveying the things that will make you stand out? If not, it is time to block your next weekend. I hope this makes you take another look at your Resume and helps you get a step closer to your goal.
If you have any questions or would like to simply chat, free to connect on LinkedIn.
