People often ask me, how do you create achievements in your resume when you’re in an entry-level role or you simply have no influence in a company?

Today’s Podcast explains how:

No resume is ever read and no one ever gets interviewed or hired, unless the employer is trying to solve a problem or a series of problems.

Sales may be declining in a key territory, or the manager could be bogged down by routine administration; staff may be leaving in droves, productivity and morale is plummeting and costs are skyrocketing. Whatever the circumstances, the employer is looking for a problem solver.

How then, do you position yourself as the person who can solve these issues? (Especially if you’re one of those people who say: “I never do anything special; I just come in every day and do my job!”

Following, are three roles not typically associated with accomplishment. I’ll show you how problem solving talents can equal achievement!

Production Worker who never achieves anything (or so she thinks!)

People in production like to solve problems with safety (keeping incidents to a minimum), quality (keeping happy customers) and speed (meeting production targets) so they don’t have to pay costly penalty rates for overtime—another problem! Three bullet points that would show a Production Worker’s problem-solving abilities could be:

• Met all productivity targets without fail. Processed 100-high quality widgets hourly while exceeding quality control standards for scrap minimisation.
• Saved company hundreds-of-dollars weekly by preventing need for costly overtime payments.
• Commended for safety record—achieved 12 months daily activity with no safety breaches.

Administrative Team Member who never achieves anything (or so he thinks)

Many administrative professionals are gatekeepers for more senior staff; they talk to customers or disgruntled staff to save managers from the burden of dealing with routine matters. Essentially though, administrative professionals are experts in organisation. They restore order from chaos. Sometimes just reordering the filing cabinet can be the catalyst for improving efficiency by ending frustrating information searches. Let’s look at how problem solving can be presented to sell the talents of an administrative professional for the two instances mentioned:

• Liberated senior manager from the burden of routine tasks by acting as a personal gatekeeper. Resolved escalated customer and staff complaints to ensure manager remained on task and focused on business decision-making and revenue growth.
• Transformed haphazard filing system into a model of contemporary office practice. Colour-coded all files providing at-a-glance retrieval for all staff. Missing files and lack of accountability became of thing of the past as staff immediately embraced the newly devised “sign in/sign out” process.

Customer Service Operator who never achieves anything (or so she thinks)

According to many customer service operators, their job is to “answer the phones”. They have more influence than they realise. The role of a customer service officer is to retain customers, generate leads, exude goodwill and reflect the company’s reputation for professionalism! Customer service staff are problem solvers with the power to restore your faith in a company through their courtesy, speed/efficiency and professionalism.

• Surpassed personal and team targets for numbers of calls handled. Against a daily target of 100 calls, broke team records for averaging 125 a day for six consecutive weeks.
• Saved thousands of dollars in lost business by persuading 10 disgruntled clients to stay with the company in favour of taking business to a competing organisation.
• Won kudos from management for generating 50 “hot” leads to the sales department in 60 days outpacing peer efforts by almost 35%.

It’s not hard! Think of a problem and how you’ve solved it, and how by doing so, you’ve helped the company.

Achievements like these make business tick over every day. Never under-estimate your contribution! (Even when you don’t think you have done anything significant or been in a position to drive change).

And for companies, mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow. You’re the person they want, you just have to let them know it!

You know in your heart it absolutely looks awful. I’m taking about that gap in your resume where you just can’t easily explain your absence.

Did I say “gap”? The more you look at it you see a great yawning chasm with nothing to link the dates before “the event” and after.

“The Event” of which I speak can be any extended leave of absence that you feel uncomfortable in explaining and of which you would prefer, if you were less ethical, to fudge with a made-up job or a reference to the delightfully vague: Working Holiday. (An idea you dismiss reluctantly knowing that you’ll be found out one way or another).

There are many reasons for an extended absence from the world of work and frankly most of these reasons are for a pretty noble cause of which you should be justifiably proud: the birth and rearing of young children or the care of elderly or infirm parents (being just a couple).

So how do you explain “The Event” so that your resume isn’t filled with soppy personal information, nor does it look like you’ve been a couch potato staring at Days of Our Lives every day losing your entire skill base while Stefano DiMera single-handedly destroys Salem?

For stay-at-home mums and dads, there are a lot of opportunities to position your skills through your involvement in committees, parent/teacher associations, new mother’s groups, event planning, charity fundraising and the like.

What to do:

First, change the experience section heading of your resume from “Career Summary” or “Professional Experience” and instead call it: Experience, Initiatives and Results.

On top of the last job you held to cover the gap, place a heading (like a company name) that provides an overview of the type of job you are going to describe:

Here are two ideas:

COMMUNITY OUTREACH

or

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

Type your dates to cover the date of your absence from the workforce. For example, 2005 to Present

Next comes your position title. Consider terms such as: Fundraiser, Club Treasurer, Teacher’s Assistant, or Event Planner.

Then you could provide a brief description underneath the title:

• Joined fundraising club and volunteered to assume Events Planner role. Gained distinction for innovative ideas, powerful advertising on a shoestring budget and uniting a team of 20 volunteer fundraisers to scout and source locations for the best collection tin points. Four events held annually were considered an outstanding success raising $10,000 to purchase play equipment for the local school.

You could even place a few bullet points underneath that to highlight different skills such as financial management, team leadership and more.

This approach could also apply if you have been advocating for elderly or sick parents; frequently people acquire a lot of knowledge about government services, care centres, finances, pensions and healthcare—probably more than they ever wanted to know, but skills and knowledge are a gift, and not always a gift we can pick and choose. Many people find themselves wanting a change of career after such experiences, as they have found new skills by gaining exposure to a whole new world.

In times of sadness, being an executor of a family member’s Will provides you with a wealth of knowledge—from financial management, through disbursement of an estate, real-estate sales, government services, genealogy research and more. Again, these experiences can provide a very compelling case for the breadth and depth of your experience when positioned strategically and confidently on your resume.

It just needs thought. Everything we embark upon, in some way or another, provides us with knowledge.

How can you turn that knowledge around to build your case for employment?

Cutting and pasting your current job description into the experience section of your resume speaks volumes about your slap dash, throw-it-all-together-in-a-minute approach and attitude. Is that really the impression you want to give?

The key problem with job descriptions (apart from the fact they are mind-numbingly boring to read and full of fluffy, nonsensical business-speak) is that they were written long before you moved into the role. They give no indication of what you achieved. (And as you should know by now, achievements are key to articulating your value and getting noticed by decision-makers).

Realistically, how could the following phrases, a typical one seen in a job description, ever begin to sell you?

Reference:  Sales Career Online.

• Demonstrates ability to meet or exceed sales quota.
• Complete understanding of pricing and proposal models.
• Demonstrates the ability to carry on a business conversation with business owners and decision makers.
• Maximises all opportunities in the process of closing a sale resulting in the taking of market share from larger competitors.
• Sells solutions and makes recommendations to prospects and clients of the various products/services the company offers to their business issues.
• Develops a database of qualified leads through referrals, telephone canvassing, face to face cold calling on business owners, direct mail, email, and networking.
• Assists in the implementation of company marketing plans as needed.

Boring? Yes definitely! It says nothing about you and what you’ve achieved. But…there is a way to use your job description to turn your resume from robotic to robust and it starts off by using just two phrases: “How did I?” and “How well did I?”

Think of each entry as an example and ask yourself:

• HOW DID I meet or exceed the sales quota?
• HOW WELL DID I meet or exceed the sales quota?

• HOW DID I sell solutions and make recommendations….
• HOW WELL DID I sell solutions and make recommendations?

Asking yourself those two phrases before each area of your job description will have you well on the way to writing powerful sentences that highlight your achievements.

Here’s an example of your draft response:

HOW DID I meet or exceed the sales quota?

• I met and exceeded the sales quota by establishing a follow-up campaign where I called all clients every three weeks.

HOW WELL DID I meet or exceed the sales quota?

• I generated an average of $5,000 a week in repeat business which far exceeded the quota of $3,500 and beat my nearest competitor by $1000 a week.

The achievement in your resume then becomes:

• Consistently exceeded sales targets by up to 43% and outpaced nearest sales team competitors by 28%. Successes attributed to personally developed follow-up campaign that kept product and company name at the forefront of customers’ minds.

Now this is an achievement! It is also an easy way to develop value-added structure to your resume by using those job descriptions as a guide. All you need to remember is “How did I” and “How well did I”?

Let’s make this the week that you revamp your resume with the aim of making every point made on it a winner. Are you ready to take on that challenge?

I created my business slogan “Unleashing your career with the power of words” many years ago as it resonated with me. Words have always had power. They can hurt someone’s feelings, they can wield power by inspiring decision makers to act. Politicians, spin doctors, advertising professionals and product marketeers have known the secret for decades: to get customers to buy and remain loyal they need to use the words that paint a picture and grasp the attention of the buyer.

Consider this excerpt from Sir Winston Churcill’s famous speech “Their Finest Hour”

…..If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: “This was their finest hour” ‘.

Too many people write passively and that is a surefire way to place a wall between the reader and the information you are trying to convey.

Imagine “Their Finest Hour” as many people write their own resumes:

“I think that you should be aware that things will be quite difficult very soon and if we don’t contribute to the team effort the situation could become very bad for a long time. It is important that everyone contribute to the project at hand to make a long-term difference.

Just not quite the same call to attention is it? Fails somewhat in inspiring people to fight for a cause!

Consider then a job seeker who is hoping to create excitement in his or her services by listing job duties in a résumé like this:

• Fixing computer equipment for customers
• Calling customers to provide quotations
• Meeting deadlines.

These examples are far from inspiring. They don’t command attention, they do not have power, they do not explain how competent the job seeker is or if he or she adds value for the employer. These is a definite disconnect between what the job seeker is telling the reader of the résumé and what that person actually wants to hear!

On the other hand, consider this:

• Continually surpassed all established deadlines for resolving glitches on computerised equipment under warranty. Repair average of 4 hours from diagnosis to resolution compared favourably with company set deadline of 6 hours and a record of zero returns following repair.
• Scored highest in the repair team for customer satisfaction, rating high in areas of accuracy of information, quick response and strong technical knowledge when providing quotations and feedback on issues.

These are the type of words that inspire a decision maker to act. Accomplishments are outlined and presented in a compelling manner and tell about the how and why and give numbers that speak volumes.

Unleash YOUR career…with the power of words.