How To Create A Resume With Impact: Duties vs. Results

When preparing your resume, remember this is a document to market your experience and skills and showcase what you have to offer. Your resume is much more effective and attractive to employers when it demonstrates what you have achieved with your previous experiences and what you can potentially achieve for the new employer.

Unfortunately, a bunch of the resumes employers receive today still read like a laundry list of duties. Avoid this common mistake with the tips below to create a resume with impact.

Don t State The Obvious

If you re simply describing your job duties on your resume—a generic job description—there s probably going to be little interest from employers. Although today s applicant tracking systems (the software that reads and ranks resumes) will need this information, employers really need to know how you performed against goals or your peers.

Quantify And Qualify Accomplishments

Your accomplishments on the job are what will differentiate you from the next candidate. They're also what will help demonstrate why you are the best candidate for the job.

For instance, if you have a career in sales, rather than state the obvious ( Contact prospective customers to introduce new product releases") tie in the results you ve achieved. A more effective statement would read: Initiated contact with 20+ prospective customers on new product releases and secured 15 sales contracts, ranking as the top salesperson of the year. This latter statement, which includes numbers that quantify your work experience, provides insight into why you're a great candidate for a job in sales.

If you are in a position where it's not easy to quantify accomplishments, then consider these questions:

Are you the only person doing this job?
If not, how many peers do you have, and how does your performance compare?
Are you the go-to person for anything in particular?
What are some of the things that your managers have put in your performance evaluations?

Be The Problem Solver

Job postings will include details of responsibilities, but sometimes they may also hint at situations where they seek candidates with particular experience in the area. Be the problem solver by demonstrating on your resume a similar situation that you took action on and resolved. Whether it was to help streamline order processing or enter a new international market, bullet points to convey experience on the matter and results achieved offer greater impact than detailing your general duties on the job.

Employers simply want to hire the best talent so show them what you can accomplish for them, not the general job duties of a position. Keep that in mind and you ll create a resume with impact!

We know writing an effective resume isn't easy, especially if you're not excited about any of the jobs you're applying for. If you're feeling trapped, lost, or burned out in your career, we're here to help.

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This article was originally published at an earlier date.

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Published October 24, 2022

How To Explain Why You Want A Job After Owning A Business

There are a lot of business owners out there right now that might not want to own a business anymore. They want to work for someone else.

When you first become a business owner, you think you’ll be doing this one thing you dreamed of doing all day long. Nope. That’s only about 10% of your job. The rest of the time you’re doing things that you hate doing in order to run the business.

I’ve worked with many people who’ve said, “I’m done running the company.” But recruiters are critical of professionals who suddenly want a job after owning a business.

What Recruiters Are Thinking

@j.t.odonnell Replying to @bookbae256 How to explain why you want a job after owning a business. #careerchange #resume #businessowner #jobsearchhelp #jobsearch #jobsearchtips #boss #career #howto #howtotiktok #explainyourself â¬ original sound – J.T. O’Donnell

When recruiters see that you’ve owned a business, they’re thinking a few things:

Did the business fail?
Is there something going on in your personal life?
Are you sick?
What’s making you not be able to handle running a business anymore?
If you do work for us, are you going to be a know-it-all?
Are you going to want to run everything because you’ve always been in charge?
Will you get bored easily?
Is this going to work for you because you’ve never reported to anyone?

These are all the negative things that go through a recruiter’s head when they see that you’ve owned a business and now want a job at their organization. Your job is to disrupt that mindset.

A Connection Story Is Key

Happy woman on laptop writes a disruptive cover letter

You’re not going to disrupt that negative mindset by writing a good resume. How you do this is through your networking strategy and through what we call your connection story.

You need to create a great narrative, a connection story about what you’ve experienced and what’s making you want to make this transition. Now, you’re not going to be brutally honest, but what you can say is something like this…

“I’ve done all I can as a business owner. It’s been a great and powerful experience. Yes, it’s had a lot of upsides, but there are a lot of downsides, too. What I’d like to do now is work in a larger organization, bigger than the one that I’ve owned, collaborate with like-minded people, and learn and grow. When you’re the only person, you’re not learning or growing as much. So I think it’s been a great run as a business owner, but now I want to learn more about this and I want to grow in this area. And taking on a job like this would give me the opportunity to do that. Plus, having run a business, I really understand what goes into it and how hard it is, and no one will be more respectful than me because I will understand what you’re going through. So I will work like I own the business, but I’m not going to act like the business owner.”

This is how you can shift a recruiter’s perspective because you’re able to explain to them valid business reasons why it would make sense to go and work for someone else. But that comes from your narrative, from your connection story, and the best way to share that is with your disruptive cover letter. This way, the recruiter is reading that story in your disruptive cover letter first, and then when they see your resume, they’re not misinterpreting it. And that’s really the secret to explaining why you want a job after owning a business.

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