Achievements!

Quantifiable achievements are one of the most important, if not the most important part of your resume. Why? Because they show that you can not only do the basics of you job, but that you can do your job really well! Far too many candidates fail to put this in their resume; you do so at your peril!

Some of the key things to note about including achievements are:

• Always include your achievements for the last number of relevant roles in your resume.
• Have a separate heading after your responsibilities in each role (which are bullet pointed) and bullet point your achievements. This makes it easy to read.
• Quantify your achievements first. E.g. increased sales from $100,000 per month to $150,000 per month over a two year period. This make the reader sit up and take notice!
• You may then want to add the one or two key reasons for the increase, g. via opening three new key accounts.

Putting quantifiable achievements in your resume shows that you have quantifiable achievements. This is important information to a potential employer. These achievements may be saving the company money, making the company money or improving lead times, debtor days, exceed budget, improving market share, completing a project ahead of time. Line managers see the dollar signs in each of these examples and it makes you a more urgent person to interview than others.

The aim of your resume is to introduce yourself to a potential employer. You want your resume on top of the pile i.e. the first person the recruiter or HR person wants to get on the phone and speak to. Quantifiable achievements are a great way to get you to the top of the pile.

Without quantifiable achievements, the reader of your resume doesn’t know how good you really are. Think about it, if you are hiring a new sales person, do you want the one that has increased sales by 20% over the previous year, or the one that is not sure about their sales results?

The candidate that clearly articulates in their resume (and at interview) how they add value to the business is often the one that is hired. Quantifiable achievements are the quickest and easiest way to help establish that.

Happy job hunting!