Good resumes vs. Great resumes

Below are three traits I’ve noticed all great resumes exhibit. This is not an exhaustive list and applies to the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Academia, art/music, and other fields likely exhibit other dynamics. I’m hoping to be helpful by sharing some tips I haven’t seen mentioned before.

Great resumes:

1. Quantify accomplishments
2. Focus on skills acquired and required, not activity
3. Think about a career stepwise

1. Quantify accomplishments

Quantifying accomplishments allows others to understand impact and demonstrates that you measure things. People who are in the mindset of measuring are the ones who improve most over time. And if you aren’t measuring yourself, then you probably aren’t measuring other day-to-day things like your team’s progress or your employees’ progress. Using numbers is a nice way to have the data stand out from the surrounding text and save space.

2. Focus on skills acquired and required, not activity

Most people talk about what they did instead of what they had to learn and how they learned it. Great companies look for someone who will excel at the required job, but who can grow into a larger role as well. Since there is rarely a perfect candidate, finding someone who can do 85% of a role and can grow into the other 15% is often the best hiring strategy. The best indicator of how you will grow is how you have already grown.

3. Think about a career stepwise

The jobs you’ve held should be the steps to reaching your dreams and ambitions. The best candidates think of the job for which they’ve applied as a stepping stone to these goals. Show how each position you’ve held built on the previous positions and it should be clear very quickly to someone scanning your resume that you’ve purposefully developed skills and progressed over a career.

You should also project this forward. Why is the job you’re applying for a natural extension of what you’re currently doing?

Examples

Not Great:

• Work with a team to provide reliable tracking of users (Flurry, Mixpanel and custom tracking tools) and to analyze customer behavior through frequent analysis of usage statistics and power users.

Better:

• Implemented user-metrics tracking that resulted in 50% faster resolution of support issues and a 25% drop in in-bound customer support requests.
• Analyzed customer behavior to proactively identify power users, resulting in 10% faster conversion of free users to paid and was part of an effort that increased sales $250,000/year.

Not Great:

Some University (Sweden), Bachelor, Software Technology Programme, 2009
• Awarded President’s Scholarship
• Bachelor Thesis: Comparative Analysis of Development Frameworks

Better:

Some University (Sweden), Bachelor, Software Technology Programme, 2009
• Awarded 100% scholarship, offered to 5 students per year
• Bachelor Thesis: Comparative Analysis of Web Development Frameworks, available at: http://www.someURL.com

Not Great:

• Developed websites for clients. Included database design and implementation, use of the Model-View-Controller methodology and creation of unit tests. Involved extensive use of PHP / CakePHP and MySQL, HTML, CSS, XML, Ajax and JavaScript.

Better:

• Designed, architected, and developed websites for 12 clients in 6 months.
• Learned Model-View-Controller paradigm using CakePHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and Javascript in 2 weeks to launch our first client’s website.
• Developed a custom unit testing framework in 1 month which resulted in a 25% reduction in bugs per client over the life of a project.

Not Great:

• Led several projects and initiatives involving the automation of previously manually tested functionality and migration of data to a database.

Better:

• Led team that automated testing tasks that previously took 50 hours per launch, saving 5000 hours/year.
• Promoted to database administration team after 6 months. Self-learned SQL and helped migration to scalable database systems that could handle 10x more load.

Not thinking about a career stepwise:

• Company1  – Premiere Field Engineer (Sept 2009 – Sept 2011)
  • Engineered some project and worked on a team that did something
• Self Employed – Independent Consultant (Sept 2007 –  Sept 2009)
  • Technical consulting in IT and security projects
  • Trainer in courses for MCSE and MCSA
• Company3 – Trainer & Engineer (June 2004 – June 2007)
  • Trainer for Microsoft certified Systems Engineering courses
• Self Employed – Independent Consultant and Engineer (June 2002 – June 2004)
  • Security Consultant
  • Trainer and Consultant with deployment software

Stepwise positioning, with a clear building and career progression:

• Company1  – Premiere Field Engineer (Sept 2009 – Sept 2011)
  • Engineered some project and worked on a team that did something
  • Led Europe’s leading IT support company in initiatives to educate and train 450 support staff in Microsoft technologies
• Self Employed – Independent Consultant (Sept 2007 –  Sept 2009)
  • Started consulting business to train others for MCSE, MCT, MCSA
  • Consulted 45 companies on best practices for IT, security, & Citrix projects with an average class size of 23 trainees
• Company3 – Trainer & Engineer (June 2004 – June 2007)
  • Earned MCSE, MCT, MCSA certifications
  • Promoted to train others in the company on Microsoft certifications
  • Developed xyz things for the company
• Self Employed – Independent Consultant and Engineer (June 2002 – June 2004)
  • Security consultant focused on training new engineers on best practices for building secure software