11 tips for execs to craft a winning resume
As you get more senior, you think less and less about your resume. After all, your success speaks for itself, right?
I promise, it still matters. In my 12 years working as an executive recruiter, I reviewed the resumes of thousands of senior folks — many of which were a catastrophe. I used to frequently return resumes to candidates asking them to make changes before I’d present.
Why? Employers and recruiters “thin-slice” resumes, spending at best 20–30 seconds reviewing. These folks are really good at pattern recognition and will make a quick judgement on your eligibility for a role — so your resume needs to be watertight and free of howlers, even at the senior level.
Treat your resume similarly to the way you’d treat your shoes in an interview: the right polish and fit make a strong professional statement.
Here are eleven suggestions, in order of importance, to build a resume which will grab the reader’s attention:
1) Strive for a single page.
Nobody needs a resume longer than one-page — even if you’re Elon Musk or Lloyd Blankfein. Shoehorning your mega-impressive and lengthy career into 1-page will be hard and an exercise in brutal concision, but absolutely worth it: it’ll be far more scannable and digestible. In reality, most recruiters will spend the same amount of time scanning your resume regardless of whether it’s 1 or 10 pages.
2) Eliminate jargon and cliché.
Writing that you’re “goal-oriented”, “mission-driven” or a “visionary leader” is contemptible fluff and an immediate red-flag. These are weasel words that show a basic lack of sophistication and imagination. Let’s face it: anyone who describes themselves as “goal-oriented” probably spends their days in the office writing SeaQuest DSV fan-fiction.
3) Embrace the bullets.
At Shortlist, we love good prose — in novels. For a resume, you want to break each section of your career down into digestible sound-bites. Rank these by order of importance, as employers will often read only the first.
4) Be specific and fact-based.
Ground every bulleted statement in metrics and hard-facts. For instance, writing “raised large amount of new capital from institutional investors” is significantly less compelling than “raised $1.3bn since 2012 from West Coast endowments and foundations.”
5) Avoid the first-person.
“I was hired to build” should be written as “Hired to build”. This’ll take up less room and read as more objective and factual.
6) Use your real-name, dammit!
The first thing the employer will see is the name at the top: writing James “Jimmy” Smith makes you seem like a goof-ball and James Smith III makes you seem patrician, entitled and old-fashioned. Keep it simple.
7) Prune your objectives sections.
We’re skeptical of objectives sections — they can seem overly earnest, take-up valuable room and frequently are so lacking in precision that they do a poor job of describing the candidates’ actual objectives. If you’re absolutely set on an objectives section, replace something generic like “Seeking a world-class firm where I can deploy my ten years of sales experience” with something pointed, such as: “Seeking an institutional sales role within an alternatives manager covering endowments and foundations.”
8) Normal interests.
Interest sections are fine, but keep them to one-line and avoid anything too esoteric. Call me a banal old conservative, but even if you’re a fan of “magnets and little green ghouls” or “medieval ship-building technique”, you’ll be better served going with something less idiosyncratic like travel photography and hiking. Remember, you’re looking to relate to people in an interview.
9) Make it beautiful.
If you’re having difficulty formatting your resume properly (fonts, spacing, etc), there are tons of website where you’ll be able to get a professional to artfully reformat and typeset at low cost (99designs would be a good start).
Proper kerning, fonts, and spacing aren’t nice to haves — they’re musts. The subtle cues people get may not make or break you, but they do create an emotional backdrop for their interaction with you.
10) Save as a PDF.
Your resume will print better and render more accurately on different devices if you save it as a PDF file. Avoid RTF, Word Docx or any other proprietary formats.
11) Customize for the firm and role.
This one’s controversial, but powerful: if you’re interviewing for two different roles, there’s no reason you can’t have two separate resumes tailored to each role. For instance, if you’re interviewing for a relationship management role, you may want to stress different aspects of your career than if you’re interviewing for a sales role.
We’d love to help any of our Connectors craft a better resume. If you’d like to join the fastest growing and most senior network in asset management, you can always request an invitation.
Finally, if there’s anything missing, I’d love to hear from you.
Hugh at Shortlist
