Top Notch Executive Resumes

Creating Flawless Resumes for Managers, Executives, and CEOs

Katharine Hansen

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781601637925
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Carriera

Branded resumes that illuminate the candidate's unique value proposition and ROI are a must in today's quest for the executive suite. Top Notch Executive Resumes not only explains how to integrate branding into career-marketing communication, but also how to craft resumes that address your fit with the organization's mission and meet an employer's specific business needs. Hansen instructs high-level professionals in framing past accomplishments so that the employer can visualize the executive's strategic vision and industry insights, as well as what he or she can contribute.

Highlights of the book include:

• A huge collection of resume samples in cutting-edge formats, organized by profession for easy navigability.
• Examples of a wide variety of complementary documents—including leadership profiles and executive bios—that top-level professionals need to round out their executive portfolios.
• Special additional features, including the preferences and peeves of hiring decision-makers, guidelines for working with recruiters, frequently asked questions, and case studies detailing complete job-search marketing campaigns.

Let Top Notch Executive Resumes get you into that corner office!

Chapter One
FABUKA: The Most Important Aspects of the Executive Resume

Most people find the idea of creating a resume overwhelming. Even the notion of revamping an existing resume can be daunting. Whereas Chapter 2 offers all the detailed nuts and bolts, this chapter assures you that, if you can nail six key aspects of today’s executive resume, you will be off to a great start. These are the most important concepts of executive resume writing, and understanding these and the reasons behind them will enable you to undergird your resume with a firm foundation. The philosophy behind these concepts can then pervade your entire resume, making it a winner. The bottom line is that, if you read no further than this chapter, you will have mastered the ingredients of an executive resume that gets results.

If you can remember the acronym FABUKA, you can remember the key aspects of an effective executive resume.

FABUKA stands for:

Let’s look at each element individually.

Focus

Your resume must target your desired career goal with precision. Job-seekers tend to forget that employers review resumes extremely quickly—often in just a few seconds. An employer taking such a quick glance should be able to immediately grasp what you want to do and have a sense of the value you can contribute to the organization. The executive resume must focus on key strengths that position the candidate to meet a specific need and target specific jobs/employers. In other words, employers don’t consider resumes that aren’t focused on a job’s specific requirements to be competitive, and the one-size-fits-all resume is especially ineffective at the executive level. Employers and recruiters expect your resume to be precisely tailored to the position for which you’re applying. The reader should be able to tell, at a glance, exactly what job you’re targeting and what need you will fill. The reader should never have to guess or wade through copious text to determine what job you want and what you’d be good at. An unfocused resume is a time-waster for the employer.

What are some ways you can sharpen your focus?

1. A headline atop your resume stating the type of job you seek, as in these examples:

ARLENE STEIN

4000 Gopher Road, Reno, NV 89511-8698 • Phone: [phone] • Cell: 555-000-6438 FAX: [phone] • E-mail: [email protected]

EXECUTIVE SALES LEADERSHIP • MARKETING • SOURCING • STARTUPS

DANIELLE BANFIELD

12 Ridge Drive • Fairfax, VA 22033-4630 • Phone: [phone]

E-mail: [email protected]

EXECUTIVE MANAGEMENT • COALITION BUILDING • LEADERSHIP ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGIC PLANNING

MAUREY MARDER

2000 California Street, San Francisco, CA 94115

Phone: [phone] • Cell: 555.000.5981

E-mail: [email protected]

MARKETING EXECUTIVE • STRATEGY • HIGH-TECH • MANAGEMENT STRATEGIC MARKET PLANNING • LEADERSHIP • PROJECT MANAGEMENT • BRANDING MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS • NEW PRODUCT/SERVICE DEVELOPMENT • PRODUCT LAUNCH

2. A branding statement that positions you for a specific job or type of job. (See the Branding section that follows.) Note that headlines and branding statements are often used in combination.

3. An objective statement. Objective statements have lost some popularity in favor of headlines and branding statements and must be effectively worded when used. (See the section on Objective Statements in Chapter 2.)

4. A Qualifications Summary or Professional Profile section. This increasingly popular resume component contains three to five bullets that represent your top selling points. Choose bullet points that directly tie your strengths to the requirements of the job you seek. (See more about these sections in Chapter 2.)

5. Use of the targeted employer’s name in the foregoing resume elements. What could make your resume more focused than using the name of the employer? For example, one of the job-seekers whose resume appears as a sample in Chapter 7 seeks a position with a company called SolarBright and makes the following statement atop his resume:

Eager to lead innovative strategic marketing and operational initiatives that aggressively increase SolarBright’s market share, sustain growth, and maximize profitability.

6. A section listing your Core Competencies/Proficiencies/Areas of Expertise. The keywords you select for this section should relate directly to the type of job you seek. (Read more in the Keywords section that follows and in Chapter 2.)

7. Strategic organization of your resume to position you for the job you seek. Remember that a resume is a marketing document that should highlight the aspects of your experience that best sell you for a particular position. In most cases, employers and recruiters want to see clear progression to where you are today. If your career path does not represent a clear trajectory to the position you seek, however, you may want to consider a non-chronological arrangement of your experience, keeping in mind that such organizational schemes can carry an element of risk (See the Organizational Formats section of Chapter 2). You may also consider placing other sections of your resume before your Experience section to showcase your best selling points. For example, do you have a newly minted MBA degree that adds value to your candidacy?

8. Bullet points describing your experience in a way that is specifically tailored to the position you seek. You’ve undoubtedly held jobs that encompassed a broad scope, many accountabilities, and numerous achievements. Fine-tune these to a razor-sharp list of those that are most relevant to the high-level job you seek next. Eliminate any bullet point that fails to support what you seek to do next.

9. Create multiple versions of your resume. You’re probably thinking that the foregoing list means you need to craft a distinctive resume for every job for which you apply. And, yes, that’s the ideal. But you can create boilerplate versions for various types of jobs and then make small changes to customize each to specific positions. One client of mine, for example, was interested in operations management, project management, and quality management, and asked me to prepare a resume for each type of position. He then had the option of tailoring each of those to specific job requirements.

Accomplishments

The executive resume must—with a future-oriented flavor—emphasize results, outcomes, and career-defining performance indicators. Using numbers, context, and meaningful metrics (for example, previous years’ performance, competitors, counterparts, forecasts/projections/quotas, industry trends), the resume must paint a picture of the executive in action—meeting needs/challenges, solving problems, impacting the company’s big picture, growing the business, enhancing revenue, and driving profits. This section also reveals how to mine and brainstorm accomplishments and demonstrate sought-after ethics and integrity.

Concrete, measurable accomplishments are the points that really help sell you to an employer—much more so than everyday job duties, and you can leverage your accomplishments for job-search success at all stages of the process: resume, cover letter, interview, and more.

Resume writer JoAnn Nix gave this advice in an interview on the Guru.com Website (www.Guru.com, August 2001): “A resume shoul...