The Importance of Including Quantified Accomplishments
With so many individuals competing for jobs these days, the only thing that will differentiate you from the rest of the equally-qualified crowd is what you achieved while on the job. But be warned – an accomplishment must be quantified in order to hold any weight with the hiring manager or recruiter.
Too many times I see resumes where the individual writes: “Reorganized an entire department per management instructions.” That’s not an accomplishment, that is a daily duty. An accomplishment would read like this: “Generated savings in excess of $25,000 annually by reorganizing the marketing department and employing temp workers, rather than full-time staff.”
The above speaks to what a hiring manager and/or recruiter wants to see – how you can make them money and how you can save them money.
To further strengthen your resume, make certain to put at least one, preferably two, quantified and relevant accomplishments in the opening summary. This is especially true if you use the word ‘proven’ to describe yourself. For example, you write:
Accounting professional with comprehensive experience and proven results in negotiations with the IRS.
Proven by whom? You? That’s not enough proof for a hiring manager or recruiter. They want more. It’s better to write:
Accounting professional with comprehensive experience and proven results in negotiations with the IRS as evidenced by the $.5 million in savings, resulting from the 2009 audit.
The above clearly states that you saved your company a half million dollars through your expertise. That speaks volumes to hiring managers and puts you well above the others competing for the same position.
Effective Letters of Recommendation
When searching for a new job, especially in this economy, it helps to have letters of recommendation from previous employers and industry professionals.
However, the letter must go beyond the general and mundane. We’ve all read letters that tell the prospective employer how much the former boss enjoyed working with the candidate. What a great guy/gal the employee happened to be. How fortunate a new company will be to have them.
As a hiring manager, that’s not telling me what I need to know. To make an informed decision, I need data that will tell me:
- How the employee excelled in their old position – not that they simply showed up for work.
- The employee’s progression through the company. Additional responsibilities. Promotions.
- How they did on performance reviews, especially in relation to others in their department.
- Their accomplishments quantified with dollar figures of money saved/earned, time periods in which this took place, and the methods they used.
These four points make for an effective letter of recommendation. They add credence to the often-used verbiage – “It was a pleasure to work with XYZ.”
No employer has the time to write the perfect letter of recommendation. So, it’s up to you, the employee, to give your boss or manager a draft detailing what you’ve done for the company and to make it as complete as possible so the new hiring manager or recruiter knows just what they will have in you.
The three things to bring to the negotiating table
by Jeri Hurd Dutcher, ResumeEdge.com Editor, CPRW, CEIP, CPCC
My client has been invited to interview for a network technician job. He’s not quite done with his CCNA, so that’s a wonderful thing. The catch is it’s about 70 minutes from his home where his wife owns a business. He lives in a place where winters mean blizzards and bad roads. Can he afford to commute or rent a studio apartment to reduce driving time and in case of storms?
He needs to find three pieces of information to be prepared to negotiate:
1. His personal wants and requirements.
2. The range the company will pay.
3. The average salary paid in the geographical area where he plans to work.
First, he gets out the household budget and figures out the minimum he will accept. This process should also define and prioritize the benefits he needs and wants and what he is willing to negotiate away.
Second, if there is no salary range listed on the job posting, he calls the company’s HR Department and asks what the salary range is for the job. If they say there is none, or it depends on experience, he asks what the current employee in that position earns. If that is not forthcoming, as well, he networks his way to someone else in the company who may know or can find out.
Third, he determines what the average salary is in the company’s geographic area. The best place to look for that is www.Indeed.com. On the main page, he clicks the salaries link in the upper left corner of the screen. He fills in the search fields and scrolls down to see the average salary, national salary trend, and average salaries of jobs with related titles (with links back to those jobs).
Other places to search include:
• http://online.onetcenter.org/
• Compensation.BLR.com (offers free trial)
• Salary.com
• www.payscale.com
• Library Resources
Research companies and job search specialists are also available to complete research. They often require completion of a form or a phone interview to define the desired position.
Thorny questions an interviewer may ask – and how to answer them
During every interview, you’ll most likely be asked a question that throws you. You’ll start to sweat and may struggle for an answer. What comes out of your mouth may make you cringe at that point or later.
To avoid this, it’s best to be prepared for the unexpected. Here are some thorny questions you may be asked and tips on how to answer them:
1. Who do you consider your best boss? Who do you consider the worst?
Take great care in answering. The interviewer is trying to determine if you’re angry at past employers for something that may very well be your fault and if you carry a grudge.
The appropriate answer would be that you learned something valuable from every boss you had and used it to better the company’s operations.
2. What have you been doing since you were laid off?
Employers are wary of individuals with job gaps, even in this awful economy.
To allay the hiring manager’s fears you can detail activities you engaged in while also looking for a full-time (or part-time) position. These activities would include being a caretaker for someone in your family (eg: children, aging parents), learning a new skill (eg: technology) or engaging in freelance projects to pay the bills until you reached full employment again.
3. What do you consider your greatest weakness?
Everyone has them and the hiring manager wants to determine if you have insight into your failings or if you’re so enamored of your strengths, you’re difficult to work with and refuse to learn from past errors in judgement.
In answering, don’t make the mistake of saying your weakness is that you work too hard. Employers have heard this countless times and few believe it. Instead, focus on a true negative (you’re a perfectionist) and turn it into a positive (eg: I don’t want to hold up schedules by triple-checking everything to make certain it’s perfect, so I’ve developed a process so that mistakes are avoided the first time around).
The above are a few of the many examples of questions you may be asked, which will prove difficult to answer – if you’re not prepared.
With our JIE (JobInterviewEdge) service, our expert coaches prepare our clients to meet each interview challenge and to succeed.
We’d like to hear from you as to what other aspects of the interview process you’d like us to address to make JIE even more worthwhile to jobseekers.
