You want your resume to stand out. At the same time, you don’t want it to be unconventional to the point that it confuses recruiters and they pass over it. One way to boost your resume and still make it easily skimmable: tell a quick story.
Photo by StartupStockPhotos / 119 images
Jane Heifetz, founder of Right Resumes Career Coaching suggests prefacing your resume with bullet points that tell a story about your career, sort of like an outline. This would be a summary at the top of your resume. That way, all of those “job duties” bullet points under each one of your titles have a bit more context.
She explains:
Start by framing your bigger picture before adding those smaller bullet points. Tell compelling before-and-after stories. What were your previous places of employment like when you started there? What were their biggest challenges, and how did you help meet them? How are those organisations better because of you? Then add the more detailed bullet points to fill in those stories.
Here’s an example she cites. The “story” is really just a few points at the start of your resume summarising your career challenges and accomplishments. Maybe you boosted sales and helped a small business flourish. Maybe you led a team and “inspired them to thrive”, like in the example.
Keep in mind, you’re not writing a novella here. You still want your resume to be skimmable. The idea is to structure it in a more compelling, engaging way. You can think of it as an outline of your career story.
We’ve told you before: most resumes end up at the bottom of the pile because they’re boring. Jazzing them up means taking risks, but this is a solid one, as it lays out your accomplishments from the start. Instead of an “objective” of what you’re hoping to achieve, you’re immediately telling the employer what you bring to the table. Check out the full post at the link below.
Improve Your Résumé by Turning Bullet Points into Stories [Harvard Business Review]
Comments
2 responses to “Turn Your Bullet Points Into Career Stories To Make Your Resume More Compelling”
Most of the time I saw people say put an image in your CV also create a valuable response.
Whenever I see examples of spruced up resumes in this or other ways, people fail to point that one of the greatest strengths of that resume is not whatever way the accomplishments are presented, but the accomplishments themselves. Those resumes always belong to basically messiahs of their industries, people who have transformed water into wine and other miracles who’d likely get them hired even if the resume was written by hand on a piece of toilet paper.
Only one person among many gets to say that they were “the best” or “top 1″at X. What do all the others say?