Are You Using Numbers on Your Executive Resume?
Are You Using Numbers on Your Executive Resume?
There are three levels of writing your executive resume. Choose wisely to fully describe your accomplishments in your executive resume.
Level 1: A mere description of your job, as recorded by human resources.
If you are an executive in charge of sales, this responsibility is likely recorded in your job description catalogued by human resources. This means that you are charged with growing sales, managing a team, and generally leading the sales endeavor. It says nothing about whether you actually accomplished this goal. Therefore, at the most basic level of resume writing, you can write:
* Responsible for increasing sales.
How does such a description sound to you? Does it answer your need for information about how well this person succeeded in the role? There is no context for how this person accomplished this goal, and certainly no metrics by which to measure his success.
Level 2: Some context, but no quantification
At a deeper level, you can deliver a clear description of the tactics and choices you made as an executive to dance your company. More than simply a description of your job given by HR, you can describe the choices you made to achieve your company’s goals:
* Guided sales team and drive alongs, providing coaching and mentoring to improve sales strategies and techniques.
As you can see, with more information and context, this accomplishment statement amplifies your story. Nevertheless, it does not yet provide The metrics that describe exactly what you were able to do. It gets you partway, but not all the way to writing an excellent accomplishment statement in your executive resume.
Level 3: Context, metrics, and demonstration of clear success
At the highest level of executive resume writing, you support those accomplishments with metrics that immediately demonstrate your success. These numbers can be straight numbers, or they can be percentages if you are concerned about divulging company private data:
* Increased sales team’s widget sales pipeline by 22% within two months of hire.
Sometimes, metrics are not quantifiable
What if your executive team does not measure your success with facts and figures? What if you build relationships, guide teams, and provide efficiency strategies that cannot be tied directly to specific metrics? If this is the case, then use the values by which you are judged to provide context and measurement of success. For one notable client I can recall, an internal auditing executive, his unique metrics was that his organization passed every annual audit during his tenure with the company. That’s not a metric of growth or sales, but his success was critical to the company’s success.
In conclusion, to demonstrate that you are the right person to take on those types of challenges again, you need to elevate your accomplishment bullets in your executive resume to show that you have the skills and the history to back up your experience.
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