How to capture the hiring or promoting manager’s attention.
Your work history is solid. Your experience is exceptional. Yet you are not getting the job offers that you want. How can you get your work and resume out in front?
One thing that would make your resume more powerful and therefore, stand ahead of the others, is to quantify your achievements toward “what it means to the company” (money wise).
Remember that companies are in the business of making money. And understanding how the boss’ mind works is an advantage (more about how to do that in my Professional Development Toolkit).
Add a section of Professional Skills — that quickly lists all your technical and transferable skills.
Then ….
Rethink your great achievements (and qualifications) and voice them in “what it really means to the company” – or “what did the company get out of it” in regards to (but not limited to):
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Retention of customers in migration process
- Brought in new customers/clients
- Speediness of customer to find->see->purchase and repurchase
- Increased referral of new customers by previous clients (referrals increase revenue without additional marketing costs. It’s expensive to find new clients because of a large lead-to-sales conversion rate. Getting referrals from previous customers is a Win/Win/Win).
- Reduction of lead-to-sales conversion rate (it may take 100 leads to make one sale….if you can show how you reduced this conversion rate….)
- Increased revenue into a new market or client base
- Conversion of customers from competitors to your product
- Use of affiliates and even competitors to gain a market advantage
- On-time delivery into the market
- Reduced time to market to gain the sweet spot of the market window – and gain a competitive edge
- Reduced technical support and maintenance costs which increased customer loyalty
- Reduced the number of maintenance cycles or eliminated them altogether – which reduced costs and increased client satisfaction.
Do the same with your performance evaluation summaries as well.
If you can put some tangible $$ or % numbers to your accomplishments that explicitly quantifies your value to the company’s bottom line – I think that would be a show-stopper.
Made up examples – just to give you the idea:
Things like:
- Initiated a referral program that allowed us to track the number of clients getting referred to us, but also allowed us to devise an improvement program to increase (and forecast) the number of referrals in the future.
- Increased customer satisfaction by 50%, which resulted in a 30% rise in client referrals.
- RE-introduced ProductX into a totally different market. By slightly re-engineering the product, we were able to launch our solution into an unsaturated market with little overhead. This resulted in an additional $100,000.00 in revenue the first quarter and forecast to double in the next.
- Redesigned the e-commerce site for more visibility that resulted in 50% more traffic to our sights, and an increase of $100,000 in sales per month
- Initiated 2 affiliation partnership with complimentary companies/products. These partnerships increased our advertisement exposure by 75% with no increase our marketing budget. It also resulted in $100,000.00 additional sales per quarter.
- Wrote monthly whitepapers on hot-topics in the industry. This free subscription added approximately 200 new sales leads a month, which resulted in 100 new clients a quarter (resulting in additional $50,000 in sales a quarter).
- Implemented various shopping cart optimization routines that made it more efficient for clients to view, select, and purchase the products. This reduce their shopping-to-purchase time by 10% and increase customer satisfaction by 30%. Because of these changes, “Returning customer numbers” increased by 45%. And referrals (by previous customers) increased by 30%.
- Achieved 100% on-time delivery of 7 of YYY products and services which resulted in 100% client retention between releases.
- Incorporated Early Product Release to certain high-profile clients – to assure these million dollar clients stayed with the company.
- Initiated a loyalty reward program that resulted in 30% increase retention rates of clients
- 100% retention of our client base through the migration of Product X to Product y. Typical migrations lose up to 7% of our customer base in addition to bad reviews. This migration not only accomplished our 100% retention rate, but gained us an 5% bump in referrals.
- Increased company revenue by $1,000,000.00 by converting a competitor’s client to our product line.
- Consistently pulled in the release dates on <list the products> – which enabled the company to hit the market early and before competitors. Early release allowed the company a greater lead time and resulted in a million dollars of new market shares. Our current 100% rate was written in the XXX Technical Journal, giving us free advertisement and contributed to a 30% bump in sales leads.
Think like the owner. What is he/she most interested in knowing? Quantify your accomplishments in those terms. Don’t get rid of your other resumes … just see how this new version of your resume feels to you.
- Have that one project that you have been stalled on?
- Need objective eyes on your problem?
- Need just a different way to look at the solutions?
I have helped people on a per project basis. For example: mapping out the pros and cons of two job offers; revamping their resume to attract more corporate interest; managing their boss; and narrowing the direction of their next steps. I have reasonable rates for per project consulting. No long contracts and discounts for continued enrollment.
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