Monthly Archives: January 2012

Job Search, People Matters

Craft Your Resume with Pride: A Guide to Showcasing Confidence, Creativity, and Results

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The most important thing about your resume is that you be proud of how it presents you. If you are not proud of it, then how can you expect any one else to be impressed? Keep working on it until it presents you in just the way you want. Whenever you even think about your resume a smile should come to your face and when you give it to others your head should be held high!

It is usually possible to push up your presentation to make you appear more powerful, confident, and results oriented. These are traits employers seek.

Think about how much time is put into packaging products advertised on TV or in magazines. Spend the time it takes to package yourself in the same way. Think about what employers want to buy and then tell them your story in a way that compels them to be interested in you.

The experience section needs to project the value you delivered to the ones you worked for at the time and not just recount how you spent your time or added to your experience base. Specifically, each experience entry needs to answer the question: “What are you most proud of having accomplished in this period”. Prospective employers need to know:

      • What you produced.
      • What problems or challenges you overcame and in what particularly creative or ingenious ways.

Your resume must be visually appealing and easy to read. It must not be too dense or leave too much white space on the page and there can be no type-Os, spelling mistakes, or grammatical errors. It should also be only one page unless it absolutely has to be more.

Experiment with formats such as those used in this Example Resume and my own resume, PeterD Resume.  Note that a two-column table is used to get the format right. You might try the same.

Clearly state what you want to ideally do both next and in the long term; for what kind, size, and stage organization; and where either in an opening OBJECTIVE statement or in a cover note.

The idea is to introduce yourself in a context that makes it easy for the reader to understand why you are a fit for their organization. The answer may seem obvious to you but you will be ahead of the game if you put it in words that smoothly reveal the fit before ever meeting you.

Do & Review, Executive Reviews, Manage to Lead

Eight Reasons Executive Review Meetings Underperform

The main reason things go wrong  is lack of management attention. Hence the importance of Executive Review Meetings! However, management reviews can also go wrong.  Here are eight common reasons why they often do:

# 8. The leaders did not prepare, so the meeting becomes the preparation and the review never materializes.

# 7. Too much time spent on history, story telling, and showboating. It is up to the leaders to be sure that whatever is really important gets covered.

# 6. The leaders talk right up to the end of the meeting and never created a space for the reviewers to ask questions, clarify, challenge, and then offer their best thinking.

# 5. Top management fails to create a safe environment thus turning the review into a sham (a.k.a. dog-and-pony show).

# 4. Management fails to really pay attention to see what needs to be seen and to deal with what needs to be dealt with rather than seeing what they want or hope to see.

# 3. Management fails to generalize what is learned to incorporate and reuse elsewhere

# 2. Management discovers during the review that things are in much worse shape than expected and, without intention, makes the management team feel inept by piling on and trying to help too much in the moment.

# 1. The number one reason why these meetings don’t go well is that the most important reviewers fail to show up due to last minute crises or they show up physically but not mentally.

Job Search, People Matters

Two ways to improve your resume

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Improve Your Resume

  • Make clear what you want to do.  Most resumes assume that the reader is to figure out something for the applicant to do and offer no specific idea what they actually want to do…this is asking more than most readers will ever bother doing.
  • Describe the results you produced, not what you spent your time doing. Most experience entries describe what time was spent doing not what results were produced or what was particularly clever about what was done.  The reader then thinks the applicant cares mostly about themselves and not about their employer.  Instead you want to convey the idea that if the reader were to hire you they would be a big winner because you would do clever things and produce valuable results.