A manager once told me all the resumes on his desk sounded the same. Each one was basically a list of job duties rather than a document that shared information about the person who wrote it. He was right. Resumes often end up telling what a person did instead of creating a story of what they can do.
When it comes to writing a resume, it’s easy to procrastinate, then resort to listing your prior jobs and each job’s daily duties in the hopes that an employer will perceive your strengths. Talking about your previous positions is important because they give the reader a sense of your role and the scope of your responsibilities, but it doesn’t have to be boring.
Take a few minutes to read your resume. If it sounds like you are describing your daily job duties and responsibilities without sending a unique message about what you can do for a potential employer, then your resume may sound more like a job posting than a document about you. Even if you have had multiple titles under the same employer, you can make the information stand out by highlighting responsibilities that are important to your search.
Behind the hiring scenes, employers don’t seem to care much about job descriptions. What they do care about is what you have done and can do for them. Simply listing all your responsibilities loses its impact on the reader and can end up blending in with every other applicant’s daily routines.
A good way to tell if you are starting to fall into writing job descriptions instead of describing your contributions is when you use the phrase “Responsible for…” with every position. Employers do want to see where you have worked, including dates of employment, but a detailed job description takes up valuable space and doesn’t personalize your abilities.
If you want to make your resume a powerful marketing piece that sounds like you rather than just listing your job responsibilities, Louise Kursmark, a certified resume writer, has these tips to help you energize your position descriptions and take them out of the mundane job-duties mode.
• Provide information about your positions such as scope of responsibilities, budget numbers, staff, major functions or projects. Keep the content brief and concise.
• Think in terms of the big picture. Give overviews regarding your scope of responsibility. Stay away from minute-to-minute job duties.
• Keep in mind that you will be describing some of your job tasks with your accomplishment statements. For example, if you’re a marketing manager and part of your job is to manage a company’s trade-show activity, you don’t need to detail this in your job description if one of your accomplishment statements describes the activity.
• List the most important thing you did in each job, then write a powerful statement that leads to a specific position description.
• Make use of active verbs to describe what you have done instead of falling back on the passive “responsible-for” statements.
• Limit your position description to four to five sentences. It makes it easier to read. If you need to use more than five sentences, consider making a second paragraph.
Your resume is one of the most powerful tools in your search, and it represents you as a unique contributor. You can strengthen your message by making it memorable.
