22 Executive Resume Writing Tips and Strategies

Following are 22 executive resume writing tips and strategies for 2022, to help propel your career story forward.

1. Write with savvy and eloquence, as if in a board meeting. In other words, don’t write for a 6th grader.
2. Write succinctly, yet weighted by meaningful detail. When editing your content, don’t emaciate your value proposition.
3. Ditch the # of pages ‘rules.’
   As readers scroll through your resume on their digital devices, the number of pages is less relevant than value of the content. Ensure that you have a pithy and attention-grabbing introduction/profile to ensure they scroll further. Use design techniques to create a glimpse-able story.
4. Create a 1-2 page Exec Summary.
   Put your meaty resume on a diet to create a reduced-weight version that you may use to hand off to recruiters, your strategic network, and/or others who may require a lighter, initial introduction before immersing into your full story.
5. Prioritize your LinkedIn profile.
   Exec leadership, CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CMOs (etc.), Board members, recruiters and members of their sourcing teams are scouring LinkedIn. You not only want to be present on LinkedIn, but you also want to ensure that presence is polished and representative of your executive gravitas. In addition to your phone number and email on every page, make sure you hyperlink to your LinkedIn profile.
6. If you are concerned about creating drama by rolling out a new LinkedIn profile, consider the marketing drip approach.
   For example, consider updating your Headline first.  Or, update your past positions and over time begin adding threads of value to your current role. Crafting a revamp of your About section that is tailored to your company’s customers can be a good strategy to cull your value while also demonstrating loyalty to your current employer.
7. Beware crowdsourcing your resume.
   You can ask 10 peers and specialists in your industry for their opinion, and they’ll sure give it to you. But, are they storytellers? Do they have expertise in exec resume writing? This quote via @NavalismHQ on Twitter further underscores the downsides of gathering opinions:  “If you want to make the wrong decision, ask everyone.”
8. “Your real resume is a painful recounting of all your struggles.”
   This is another @NavalismHQ gem. If nowhere in your resume does the reader get a sense of the struggles you endured or the obstacles you overcame, then your story isn’t complete. Which brings me to …
9. Your resume is a career story.
   Your resume achievements should be composed in a way that articulates a beginning, a middle and an end, and includes a story climax, where the rising action starts to fall, requiring a solution or conclusion (pivotal moment). The story arc should show how you (the candidate) were a crucial character in your company’s rags to riches story, for example.
10. Write stories within the bigger story.
    In line with #9, but worth creating a separate bullet for, your stories within stories are those initiatives that roll up to the bigger story. For example, the company, and the departments therein, may have experienced several rise and fall story arcs throughout your tenure, and as such, your resume should present those mini-stories within the larger story. The point is to draw the reader in, create the drama of the scenario (who, what, where, when, why, how) and ultimately sway the reader that you were influential, using both your hard and soft skills, to effectuate a financial climb (or rise) in the story arc, culminating in a better profitability and market share outcome than before you joined the executive team.
11. Position yourself at the next-level versus where you are now.
    If you are a Director seeking to propel yourself to the C-suite, keep your aspirations in mind and use the next chapter of your career story to aim toward that goal. Perhaps the next logical stepping stone will be a VP role, one in which you will be accountable for the P&L and a global operation. Even if your current financial obligations are under-par to those required for this target, thoughtfully tease out the threads of related bottom-line value and experience. Take ownership for what you’ve achieved versus watering it down with an abundance of humility.
12. Be genuine and authentic–true to yourself–but don’t let that overshadow the value you bring to the target reader.
    Focus on their needs first, and wrap achievements and context around those needs. While you want to meaningfully weave in your idiosyncrasies, unique leadership thought processes and areas of value that paint a picture of how you are different from the pack, you don’t want those aspects to overshadow the achievements stories that clearly speak to the hiring company’s unique needs and goals.
13. If you hire a professional executive resume writer, find someone with whom you feel serendipity.
    Start by reading their website, scouring their blog posts and YouTube channels, reading their LinkedIn profile and/or reading their social media posts. If you don’t feel a kinship with what you read and hear, then move on to the next writer. Know that the best executive resume writers are in demand and will not readily schedule 30-minute consults unless they know you are seriously considering a partnership specifically with them versus doing a cookie cutter ‘vendor search.’
14. Did you know that a well-thought-out and strategized resume will help readers self-select?
    In other words, if you are strategic, thoughtful and precise in how and why you build out your executive resume, the likelihood of the wrong-fit employer, board member or recruiter contacting you for an interview is reduced. This is a great strategy to lessen the chances that you, or the hiring company, waste one another’s time and more importantly, energy, going down a rabbit hole of interviewing for ultimately an avoidable dead-end outcome.
15. Beware being a buzz(word) kill.
    Words like ‘reimagined’ and ‘strategy’ are important in order to mirror exec position description speak, but you must go deeper. By deploying a storied resume that knits in the nuances mentioned earlier, you will more naturally position your value versus focusing so heavily on buzzwords and echoing position descriptions.
16. Quality ranks over speed.
    If you’ve not needed to write a resume for 5, 10, 15 or even 20+ years, because all of your promotions have been through word of mouth and reputation, but you suddenly need a robust, detailed + storied resume ‘this week,’ then you may want to take a breath and step back. If you must get a resume together quickly for that friend who is hot on the trail to hire for a perfect-fit position, or an executive recruiter has contacted you for an interview forthwith, then consider building out a focused, 1-page resume brief. Follow it on with your well crafted story later. The upside is that a newly tailored exec resume will provide another reason to reach out.
17. Be faithful to your story’s complexity.
    When digging into your storied achievements, you likely will feel a sense of overwhelm. But keep digging. Draft a few lines around a key challenge, action and result story. Let it simmer. Return to it, and with fresh eyes, revise and perfect, in a meaningful manner. In other words, don’t neglect the complexity by unintentionally weeding out important, colorful details. Allow your stories to blossom.
18. Agility is good but beware creating an erratic story.
    In other words, at the executive level, adjusting and tweaking your resume at every turn should be unnecessary. By deeply thinking through your story, including the specific types of leadership initiatives, companies, cultures, etc. with which you want to align, your well-thought-out resume should be built on a solid foundation that requires very little, if any tweaking later.
19. Updating your resume can be hazardous to your story’s health.
    While it may be tempting to just add in your new position and leave everything else the same when it comes time to ‘brush off your resume and send it out again,’ don’t. In just 6 months, and certainly in 1 or 2 years, your career likely will have taken a completely different tack. You will need to adjust your storyline sails, from the headline through to the final chapter.
20. Your Board resume is different from your exec resume story.
    I described the nuanced differences between an executive resume and a Board of Directors resume HERE. Bottom line, know your audience; companies hiring for Board members are looking for specific qualifications, often related to M&As, fundraising and other financial and marketplace-related skillsets.
21. Focus your story. And, then, focus it some more.
    It is easy to get caught up in the all-things-to-all-people approach or even to go down 2-3 different paths on your executive or board of directors resume story. Don’t do this. I love this quote, which further reinforces this point: “The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going.” ~Epictetus
22. Content is king; design is queen. While your visual presentation matters, it is just “lipstick on a pig” if you’ve gotten the storied content part wrong. Focus on the words first, and then take time to elegantly frame those words.