Are you feeling the anxiety that accompanies executive job search when writing your career story resume? Are you experiencing the intermittent highs of hope and the plunging moments of despair that naturally can occur when trying to wedge a job search amid an already packed work schedule or recover and rebuild your story on the heels of a stressful separation from your last employer?
If so, this may be impacting how you share your story. In the past 12-24 months, for obvious reasons, the angst that has accompanied many of my executive clients’ job search initiatives has exponentially multiplied.
Confidence That Is Eroding
Not only has this eroded confidence, but it also has constricted people’s apertures on how they see themselves. Once captaining ships of transformation in the seas of metamorphic change, many clients now see their travails as the focus and thus, diminish their results and undervalue their impact.
This behavior is exhibited in several ways through their resume story. As such, I have written three Do This, Not That tips to exhilarate your resume while tamping down the fear of selling your genuine and powerfully impactful brand story.
Do This, Not That
#1. Do This: Weave in meticulous details about the way you made revenue or marketplace grow, whether it be hammering out a strategic blueprint that laid a 3-year groundwork for transformation; rallying 1,200 cross-functional stakeholders; identifying 5 opportunities for new products; and/or presenting your ideas to the CEO and Board. In other words, be unapologetically BOLD and descriptive in showing HOW you did these things.
Not That: Limit your achievements to 1-2 liners; e.g., Powered double-digit revenue growth by delivering 2 new products with board approval. This type of to-the-point metric-based result is a yawner. While YES, your reader NEEDS to know you drove bottom-line results, and they need to see this information quickly, they also need to know more to make the story compelling. Otherwise, you’ll sound just like your competitors who also are driving revenue, building products, etc.
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#2. Do This: Use interesting and bold language, but not for the sake of ‘being interesting.’ Do it because the nouns, verbs and adjectives emphasize your impact. Not only do words and phrases like ‘metamorphic rise’, ‘rocketed revenue’ and ‘uncertainty swirling’ capture our attention, but they also evoke visuals that emotively impact the reader.
Not That: Don’t let ‘simple’ saturate your message to the point where your story is flat and boring.
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#3. Do This: Trust your research and your gut. If you’ve done a bit of research about ‘resume writing’ from what you consider valid sources, and you’ve determined how to move forward (write it yourself or outsource to a professional), now you should trust your gut and boldly move forward.
Not That: Source a dozen colleagues, mentors and former bosses to critique, advise and edit your resume after you’ve invested dozens of hours, days and weeks meticulously constructing your story. You know what they say about opinions? And besides, people often ‘don’t know what they don’t know.’
In Conclusion – Exude Confidence That Elicits Curiosity
Finally, by being true to yourself when writing your career story resume and articulating your essence in an exhilarating, strong voice, you will (quoting a client of mine), “exude confidence that evokes curiosity.” And, who doesn’t want to confidently grab the attention of decision-makers who may be struggling with the problems you’ve already solved? Why wouldn’t you power up the engine of your story to outpace those ‘competitor’ resumes that are telling the same-ole-same-ole drab story?
Instead, be the solution that energizes the decision-maker to pick up the phone and call (or text;) you today!
I am Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, Owner of CareerTrend.net and a certified Master Resume Writer. As an Exec Career Storyteller, I’ve exhilarated more than 2,000 C-Suite, Entrepreneur + Board Resumes, Biographies + Web Content. I humanize your story through meticulous deliberation that illuminates your unique traits and value proposition.
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