Part 2 of our resume block is going to show you how to make your work history shine. We are going to dive into the nitty-gritty of how to describe your time at a company in terms of accomplishments, not duties. This gives employers an actual glimpse of the impact you can have at their company and goes far beyond just listing what tasks you have done for others. Let’s first dive into the head of a kitchen manager who needs to hire a new line cook. They’ve posted the job online and are now combing through resumes. As you can imagine, most of them have line cooking experience and their resumes look something like this:

Now, there are some common tasks we would all expect any experienced line cook to be able to do. Do those need to be on your resume? I would say no. Remember, the resume is not for you, just about you. It’s for the employer. The employer does not want to see the same things on every resume over and over. When you generically explain your job duties, you fall in to the crowd and miss on an opportunity to differentiate yourself. The question then becomes: how do you differentiate yourself even when you know that everyone that has applied has had similar roles? It’s simple: stop telling me what everyone with that role did, just cut to the chase and tell me how things are different because of you. This will ensure that your resume looks less generic and gives an employer information that is valuable: the impact you had and what you are likely to bring with you.

I’m Pretty Sure Trees Always Make Sounds When They Fall

There are many ways you can show impact. Describing your accomplishments, not your duties, is the best way. Let’s talk about a few ways you can transform your duties into accomplishments. The first way involves quantification –a big word for explaining something with numbers. Here, frequency, range, and scale are your friends. To quantify any bullet, ask yourself: How often? About how many? Exactly how much? Frequency is the simplest because all you have to add in is the phrase *blank* per *blank*. Range involves incorporating estimates or ballpark figures based off expected highs and lows. Finally, scale is all about raw numbers, if it’s impressive, just give us a gross sum. Also, feel free to manipulate (but not misrepresent) the numbers in the way that draws the biggest impact. Did  you save the company $2 a week by making the burger patties a millimeter smaller? I don’t care. But if you tell me you saved them hundreds ($2 x 52 weeks = $104) a year by minimizing portions, that sounds more impressive (even if its 1.04 hundreds).  Let’s take a look at this line cook’s resume after its quantified:

This looks way better. If we compare the two, the second sample has a lot more information packed into the same amount of space. Now we know there was a huge menu that had 50 items, they made American food, led a team of prep cooks, and were often busy, yet maintained a brisk pace of 38 tickets per hour. This paints a much clearer vision of who this person is when they are at work, not just what they did on a day to day basis.

Accomplishments will take you PAR

There are a few more things you can do to make your resume more accomplishment-based. The next method involves using a PAR statement. PAR stands for problem, action, result.  If each bullet point in your work history is a statement that presents a problem, tells what actions you took, then explains the result of that action and how effective it was, you are going to look leaps and bounds better than those without it. The first bullet point in the first example (3.1) is painfully generic. Prepared food items that were selected from a list known as a menu. Why would that be a deciding factor in why someone should hire you? Instead, we can present a problem, tell them what we did, and how it worked out. Every problem that you address in your PAR statements is potentially another nightmare that an employer has had. If you can say that you helped someone else work through that same problem, you become quite valuable to this person who needs help. Let’s add some PAR statements to this line cook’s resume:

This description is now complete. We have an idea as to what this individual’s impact at Bob’s Burgers was. There might have been 12 different line cooks working there at the same time, but only one of them reduced food cost with that idea to take things off the menu. Only one of them improved wait times by suggesting to hire seasonal staff. Only one of them  increased the tickets after they installed an update to that machine! This description makes it easy for an employer to say “THAT’S WHAT I WANT!!! SOMEONE TO REDUCE FOOD COST!” or “EXACTLY! WE NEED TO ADD SOMEONE WHO IS GOING TO MAKE MY GUESTS WAIT LESS!” Even if they do not need help with the specific problems you have solved in the past, they will know you are an individual that will have an impact at the organization. The first example we looked at did not provide any opportunities for someone to react in this way. The second example was better, as the numbers provided some context for their actions. The last one takes the cake because it does all the thinking for the employer by addressing problems they may have faced, explaining your actions, and describing the results. The key here is to LEAD WITH THE RESULT. Just go right ahead and tell them what happened, THEN tell them how you did it.

You may be convinced that some people have an easy time thinking of the impact they had on an organization and some people don’t. You need to cleanse yourself of poisonous thoughts like these.  Everyone has an effect on whatever organization they work for. What was different when you left? What did you change in any way? Who did you work with to get big things done? What would have broken if you didn’t fix it? Who saw you do something awesome once? What did you do that no one else was willing to do? Ask yourself questions like this to give yourself an idea as to where you did have an impact.

Next week, we’ll talk about how to list relevant skills. You are probably proficient in Microsoft Word, but there is certainly something better that can go on your resume.  Using a few things we have already learned, and a few new ones, we can prioritize this information and present it in a way that makes employers have an easy time imagining us being successful with them.