Preparing for a job search

I have provided executive resume coaching for years, although that’s not a part of my business model anymore. When I helped people at all levels of an organization to prepare for their next job search, I reminded them of the three steps of a successful job search:

1. Your cover letter gets their attention
2. Your resume gets you an interview
3. Your interview lands the job

Let’s start with the resume, because it turns out the “homework” you put in to complete the resume will help you to write the cover letter - and will also prepare you for an interview.

Identify your achievements

Before you can actually write a resume, you first need to collect the information you want to list on it. Employers want to know what you’ve contributed to an organization, because past performance is usually a good indicator of future performance. So start by reflecting on the impact you’ve made throughout your career.

Take some time to identify any project you’ve been part of, or any milestones you helped reach, how you’ve saved the organization time or money, how you turned around a project quickly, or any other achievement you can point to. As you identify these contributions, don’t worry too much about “filtering” at this early stage. Just write everything down; you’ll go through the list again later to make it more focused.

Also don’t worry about time. You won’t remember everything if you try to get it all down in an hour. You can’t identify everything in one “sitting,” you need to let your mind relax so you can remember some of these great achievements. Start a list, and add to it when an idea comes to you, and keep adding to it over a few days.

This list of achievements doesn’t need to be very detailed, just enough to remind you about what you did and what the project was about. For example, let’s say you came into an organization and fixed a years-old audit. You might write:

I responded to that 3-year-old audit when I joined the company. Cleared the audit in 3 months.

That’s all you need to write at this point. You don’t need to dig into the details; you’ll do that in a later step, anyway.

Break out the achievements

When the list feels complete, it’s time to edit it. In this second phase, you’ll need to review all the achievements and compare them to each other. Which achievements or milestones stand out to you? Which ones have the most impact? For recent positions, you might limit yourself to just three or four achievements. For roles you held a long time ago, you might only keep one or two achievements.

The goal in this step is to only highlight the strongest achievements, the ones you’ll include in your resume. Resist the temptation to include everything in a resume. The reality is that hiring managers and HR directors don’t have a lot of time to read through every word in a resume, so you want to only include the items that make the most impact. And that’s why you want to focus just on the achievements that are very strong. Leave out any that feel weak. In my experience, weak items in a resume “bring down” the strong, not the other way around; strong items in a resume don’t “raise up” the weak.

After you’ve identified the items that highlight your best achievements, you need to break them out into a framework. This framework will help you in the next step to write impactful statements in a resume.

I like to use the STAR+R framework. That stands for the five elements of a great story: Situation, Target, Actions, Results, and Reflection. So for each achievement, write out one or two brief sentences that answer each of the following:

Situation What was the origin of this special project or task? What were things like before you responded to it?

Target What did you need to do? What were you asked to do?

Actions What did you do to get there?

Results What were the positive impacts or improvements to the organization as a result of the project?

+Reflection What did you learn from working on it? Was it difficult to complete, and what challenges did you have to overcome to get there?

For example, let’s say you worked on a project that was poorly documented, but the product was incredible and would benefit your customers. To raise awareness, you wrote articles on your company blog about the new product, which raised visibility. Instead of describing this simply as “wrote about it on a blog,” you would break out the experience using STAR+R like this:

S: We had just released a new product. It was really well designed and easy to use, so project management didn’t have a big manual ready for it. Then users started to email us to ask questions about it.

T: Management said we needed to figure out a way to help our users. We basically needed to write a manual, but not really a manual because it was so late after launch.

A: I worked with a technical writer and someone from the Helpdesk to plan a series of “how-to” articles about the product, to run on our website. We created a list of article topics that would answer the customer questions, and prioritized the “big hitter” items first. Since I had the most hands-on experience (because I helped build it) we decided I would write the drafts. The Helpdesk person created the screenshots, and the technical writer edited everything and posted them on the blog. We posted a new article every Monday through Friday for a month. That’s 22 articles, written over 2 weeks, and over 23,000 words.

R: This “did you know?” series did really well! The users loved that we were writing these articles that helped them, and the calls to the Helpdesk dropped to almost zero for this product. Management also loved that it boosted our social media profile, because everyone was sharing these “how-to” articles, especially on LinkedIn.

+R: It was really hard to write the first few articles. But after maybe 5 articles, I’d figured out how to write a very brief 2-paragraph introduction to “set the stage” before I jumped into the topic. That made the rest of the articles a lot easier to write. It’s not boilerplate, but it’s kind of an “outline” style that I still use.

Make them eye-catching

This breakout exercise is an excellent way to identify the components of your achievements: what things were like, what you needed to do, what you actually did, what you achieved, and what you learned. However, that’s too much for a resume. Instead, you need to rewrite these top achievements to help draw attention to them on your resume.

Hiring managers and recruiters tend to read resumes in a capital F or capital E pattern. They literally scan the first few words on each line, and if nothing grabs their attention, they move to the next line. They’ll only read the rest of the line if there’s something noteworthy up front.

That means you can’t write normal sentences like “I wrote a series of articles on the company website that answered user questions.” Instead, you need to rewrite this so the important information is up front where it will get noticed. That means rewriting these achievements to look like “Results by Actions.”

Also use numbers, and don’t write them out. Hiring managers respond very well to numbers on a resume. If you have cost savings, or other hard numbers that you can share, put them up front as numbers. For example, you might rewrite the “blog” example to use “Results by Actions” like this:

Eliminated helpdesk calls by writing 22 articles in 2 weeks, posted as a month-long series on the company website.

As a recruiter reads your resume, the first thing they’ll see on this item is “Eliminated helpdesk calls.” That’s very compelling, and they’ll want to read a bit more. The next thing they’ll see is “22 articles in 2 weeks,” which uses numbers to grab attention and keep it. That leads them to finish reading “month-long series on the company website.” By restructuring how you describe the achievement, you lead the HR director or hiring manager to read the whole thing.

Assemble your resume

Once you have identified all your achievements and written them in the “Results by Actions” style, you can finally assemble your resume. Don’t forget to use clear formatting and leverage white space wisely to make it easier for whoever reviews your resume. For example, you might use this template:

Overall tips

Double check your spelling and grammar. Nothing detracts from a great resume quite like a spelling error or grammar mistake. For example, I once gave advice to an executive on their resume, which was well formatted but had failed to gain traction. The mistake? He had misspelled the name of a technology - and it was in a section heading. It was a different example, but think “Cluod Migration.” That kind of error gets noticed by technology companies, although no one told him about it.

When your resume is ready to go, save it as a PDF. Unless the application specifically asks you to submit in a different format, you should always submit your resume in PDF format. Microsoft Word can be finicky with fonts and formatting, so what looks great on your system with your fonts may not look as nice for someone else. But PDF embeds all fonts and formatting, so it will look the same everywhere, whether that person is reading your resume on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook, tablet, or phone. Your resume will always look how you meant it to look.