Heres whats wrong with your resume

Heres whats wrong with your resumeHeres whats wrong with your resumeIf youre like most people, you have a resume that includes something like this Hired as Director, Tri-State Area- Responsible for a budget of $1.2 1000000- Managed staff of 5 in our downtown officeYour details may be grander, or your career may be at an earlier stage, but lots and lots of people have this style of information presentation on their resume.Can you spot the error?These resume bullet points simplydescribewhat you did. They dont tell your future boss howgoodyou are at doing the job.Its obvious If youve got a job, where you work in an office, in 2014, three things happened You were hired for that job You had some monetary resources to manage You had people working for or with youSeriously, you havent told the employer or your future boss anything they didnt already know with those three bullet points.So here are two simple tips.First, read your resume out loud, putting the phrase You should give me a nachs chlag this yearbecause in front of each line.If it doesnt make sense that somebody would give you a bonus, or increase your bonus, because of that line delete it.And write a different sentence that makes sense.For example, going into your boss office and telling her You should give me a bonus this year because you hired me to be Director, Tri-State Area wouldnt get you very far. You dont really deserve a year-end bonus just for getting hired. (Does not apply if youre a Japanese star being signed to play for the Yankees).Rather, the things you do that deserve a bonus describe your accomplishments, not your position.You increased sales. You decreased expenses. You improved the time it takes to do the tasks. You increased the efficacy of the process or product.You made your companybettersomehow. You didnt just show up you did something well.Which brings us to the second tip.Count the number of $ signs and % signs on your resume. Now double them.That is, rewrite your resume and include twice as many $ and % as were on your original resume. (And the minimum you should have, if youve been in the workforce for over a decade, is twenty.)Dollar signs and percentage signs are indicators of achievements that you can quantify. Quantifiable achievements are mora persuasive than qualitative achievements for most resumes.So rather than just increasing sales, decreasing expenses, or improving task times, you Increased sales by 27% in my region through the effective use of strategic selling.- Decreased costs by 11% in my division without impacting productivity.- Generated $11 million in new bookings through database marketing.- Reduced server load by 73%, and server cost by 22% through refactoring old code base.- Save $1.2 million in recruiting and legal costs by insourcing.- Improved factory throughput by 17% by re-engineering the supply chain and introducing new manufacturing techniques.When you read these bullet points with You should give me a bonus this year because, they all make sense. And thats because they provide a quantifiable achievement that made the company better because you were there.And demonstrating to your future boss the types of achievements that he can expect from you, in numbers that he can understand, is the best way for him to come to the conclusion that youre the right person for the job.And thats how you make your resume so much more effective in about two minutes on a cold Monday morning in January. Andthatis quite an achievementHave a 55% more fantastic week in the job search this week, Readers