Write an Accomplishment-Based Resume

How to Write a Resume that Gets Read

With the influx of available skilled workers hunting for jobs, human resource personnel are extremely selective.

If their company is seeking a purple dinosaur, wearing green tennis shoes, that plays the ukulele… that’s the only person that gets the interview, and subsequently the job.

Accomplishment-based resumes, especially those which establish your qualifications, will sell you perfectly to a potential employer.

Using this format, you can list your skills in ways that demonstrate your ability to perform.

A simple, well written, accomplishment-based resume may not change the color of your tennis shoes; but it will get your noticed.

Send a simple straightforward chronological resume

The chronological resume presents your job titles, education, dates of employment, and career objective in an easy to read format. The functional resume, however, lists three or four skill categories as headings, with corresponding bulleted lists of duties and jobs that follow.

Instead of creating excitement about your skills and abilities, the functional format usually does the opposite and eliminates you from consideration for the position.

An accomplishment-based resume focuses on the descriptions of your experiences, not duties and responsibilities

Such entries might include:

• Supervised and trained employees that assisted agents with setting up ticketing, coordinating travel packages for group vacations, credit card verifications and handling incoming calls. Major Accomplishment: Organized Marketing Strategies for the promotions of Vacation Packages that increased sales by 200%. Reached yearly sales goal of $150,000 per quarter in 2000.
• Presented workshops and presentations to inform students, teachers, administrators, and parents about goals, and objectives of the program. Major Accomplishment: Developed creative recruitment campaign to increase participation numbers from 50 to 350 students in six months.

Don’t give recruiters or employers any reason to eliminate you

Recruiters must find the best candidates fast.  Unless you are an exact match, the recruiter will not read your resume, ask more questions about your history, or function as your advocate to help you get the job.

Present your job history in a format that everyone is accustomed to reading. In their search for great candidates, professional hiring managers find that a functional resume serves as a red flag that a candidate is trying to hide something.

Don’t get too creative Picasso, your resume is not a piece of art

Keep the resume to no more than one to two pages. No colored paper, crazy fonts, folded brochures and pictures should be included in the submission. These tricks can be a major distraction from your experience.

Forget the colored html backgrounds behind your e-mailed resume and cover letter…again, it appears that you are presenting bells and whistles to make up for your limited experience and lack of professionalism.

Use traditional sans-serif fonts like Times New Roman instead of Arial or Verdana

Resume-writing studies show that the little strokes and tails on the letters increase readability. Given that the resume is often your first impression, one must be sure that it’s also well written, well designed and grammatically correct.

Your resume is a simple advertisement. If it is effective, it will give an employer an overview of your past skills and benefits. Think of it as a tool with one specific purpose: to get an interview.

While many human resources personnel are overwhelmed with the volume of resumes submitted every day, a well written resume can be the first step in convincing the employer that you have what it takes to be a successful and professional addition to their company.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Resume Writing, Resumes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.