Guest Post By: Heather Eager
It’s easier said than done to create a great resume when you’re under pressure to get it done. If you’ve had a long career and you’ve worked your way up over many years, this is definitely the case, as it’s difficult to provide a sense of focus to your resume.
But, of course, ultimately there’s no excuse for having a subpar executive resume. Whether you’re stuck somewhere or just tuning up your executive resume, here are some tips to help you get the most out of the time you spend writing and perfecting it.
Define a Clear Target
One of the first things you want to do when organizing your executive resume is to define a clear target. You should always know a company’s mission statement and as much information about their goals and history as possible. Otherwise, you can’t expect to speak effectively about why you’re the ideal candidate.
Make Sure to Brand Yourself
At this point, you should be known for contributing something to your field. Whether you’re an expert in the world of communications, or can’t be stopped in the medical field, people should know you for your work. In branding yourself in your resume, you’re differentiating yourself from others and defining what makes you special. You especially want to highlight attributes that show your ability to lead and attributes that make you unique and critical to an organization.
Include a Success Story or Two
Again, at your level, you should be known for having accomplished a lot. You’ve got to show immense success in your field through your resume. It’s also helpful to show challenges you’d faced in order to achieve those successes.
Leave Room for White Space
When writing an executive resume, it’s often difficult to find a balance between including the right amount of information and leaving enough white space so that BlackBerry email cruisers won’t be overwhelmed with information. Use the most valuable information in your resume to create short, on-brand statements in order to develop a balanced, easily scannable executive resume. Employers will find each sentence easily “digestable”, and your resume will rise to the top of the pack.
Edit and Re-edit
There is absolutely no excuse for having misspelled words or grammatical errors in your resume at the executive level. If you’re not the best speller or grammar buff, you most definitely should have everyone you can think of edit your resume to avoid the embarrassment of being overlooked for something so elementary.
Avoid Too Many Pages
You may have a lot of information you’d like to include in your resume due to your extensive experience; however, as you know, managers are busy people with little time to read pages of accomplishments. So instead of writing five pages of details about yourself, try cutting it down to two pages and only including essential personal branding and marketing information.
Hopefully these tips (and your short breather) have helped to give you some focus as you write your executive resume. Now it’s time to write the best resume you’ve ever laid eyes on.
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