Résumé Help: Show Me the Money
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Today’s candidate presents an uninspired list of job functions. The tenses are not consistent. Some items are merely a statement of a function, like “Stakeholder management.” Many items hint that the candidate may be holding back and not sharing the real accomplishment. Overall, the candidate does not quantify the scope of her responsibilities, such as budget size, number of offices, number of staff,
number of accounts, and dollar value of transactions. After reading this Finance Business Partner’s résumé, I wanted to shout, “Show me the money!”
Brainstorming questions can help candidates to recall details of accomplishments. Whenever possible, quantify the accomplishments with dollar amounts, percentages, headcounts, office counts, volume of tasks, and more. When you show the money and other numbers, you make your authority and achievements tangible. Anyone can say, “Enhanced efficiency.” “Reduced turnaround from 8 days to 2 days and saved $2,400 in monthly labor expenses” has more punch and underscores the importance to the company.
Below are a few questions to help today’s candidate.
- How many team members did you manage?
- Did you plan and control a budget? What was the size of that budget?
- Did you improve accounting operations? What did you do? What was the measured result?
- Did you implement any new software applications? How many users did it impact? How did it improve operations? (quantify the improvement)
- Did you implement any changes to enhance quality? Do you have scores to measure this? How much was it increased?
- Did you manage transactions? What was the monthly volume? What was the dollar value?
- Did you uncover any errors? Did you find the root cause and correct? What was the result?
Answer these questions and you will turn a drab, unlikely-to-be-read résumé into a résumé that wins interviews. If you are struggling to recall accomplishments, create a list of questions. Think about ways
that you helped the company to make money, save money, improve quality, enhance customer loyalty, and increase productivity. For each of those items, attach a figure.
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