The Secret to Using Work Wins and Success Stories to Land Your Dream Job
“Victory not history.”
I say this in coaching sessions every day.
Why? Because when you write about responsibilities on your resume, that is a position description, not a resume:
“managed volunteers; developed strategies; solicited bids; monitored budgets…”
…these describe tasks not impact.
And what happens when you talk about tasks and duties is you come off as just another candidate, not the top candidate.
More importantly, hiring managers and decision makers tell me they’re looking for the candidates to tell them about results, not job descriptions.
To land an offer in today’s economy, you must demonstrate how your work contributes to the top or bottom line either directly or indirectly.
This advice not only applies to executives with revenue-generating responsibilities but for everyone, except perhaps entry-level job seekers.
To land your dream job, you must do a better job addressing the following six points than the candidates competing with you.
If you do so in the examples on your resume and in your interview, you will significantly increase your ability to land the offer and beat out all other candidates. They will blather on about their responsibilities and you will demonstrate how you make things happen.
How do you do this?
Develop a written list of situations where you demonstrate from your previous experience how you:
(1) Made money. Show your prospective employer how you made or contributed to decisions that led to new customers coming on board, to retaining existing clients or to increasing profit margins.
(2) Saved money. Demonstrate how you affected sound cost-cutting measures, optimized services received for the same or less money, or improved resource utilization.
(3) Mitigated risk. Communicate where you had the foresight to share insight that resulted in prime product and company positioning or avoided problems – any time risk was averted while balancing opportunity capitalization.
(4) Streamlined processes. Did you reduce the aging from 27 days to 19 days? Did you automate processes that enable customers to sign-up six weeks faster than previous to your efforts? Identify when you helped make your prior organizations leaner and more effective.
(5) Contributed to culture. Spearheading safety initiatives, promote-from-within programs, and inter-corporate mentoring circles are examples of forming and contributing to culture. Companies seek out these traits since it is difficult to teach culture change. Have scenarios ready to present that demonstrate you have this skill.
(6) Influenced others. This is not about manipulating people or being fake. It’s about people skills.
Do people want to work for you? Do you find co-workers want to be on teams you’re leading? Are you brought in to close deals? If you are likable, easy to work with, and people want to follow you, that will score you major points. Collect your stories of where you made a difference to inch out your job-seeking competitors.
Some job seekers insist that #1, 2 or 6 don’t apply to them. They think all they need to say is, “I oversee…IT, Nursing, PR. As long as I maintained the systems/get leads/close business, that’s all that mattered.”
Or, if the job seeker is not a senior manager, the job seeker mistakenly thinks they can’t make a difference in any of these areas.
Make no mistake:
THESE 6 ITEMS MUST BE NAILED BETTER THAN YOUR COMPETITION FOR YOU TO LAND AN OFFER.
Period.
