I met a very nice HR person the other day, and he said “All those years I looked at resumes, and I can’t write a resume for myself.”
“What have you done as an HR person, that you’d care to let people know about?” I asked him.
“Well,” he said, “I launched our company’s first intranet site. I created a new performance-appraisal system. I kept the policy handbook up to date.”
A voice in my head asked, “So what?”
“Can you tie those accomplishments to your employer’s goals?” I asked. “For instance, why was the intranet site important to your employer?”
“We had never had one before,” he said. “My VP wanted one.”
Lots of people — HR folks and others — have trouble zeroing in on the feathers in their caps that made a difference to their employers. When they were working on those projects, they knew why they were doing it. They were doing it because their manager had told them to!
That is a good reason to work on a project, no doubt. It’s just not good enough for the next prospective employer. They don’t care. We’ve got to beat the “So What?” barrier in our resumes and our job-search conversations. We’ve got to let hiring managers know that we know why we did the things we did. We’ve got to let them know that we see the link between our own work and the success of our employers in their respective markets.
If we can’t do that, the accomplishments on our resumes will fall flat. “Re-organized the filing system” is a big yawn inducer. “Built a database and simple retrieval system to cut claims-processing time in half, saving about $50K/year” is meaty.
The filing-system resume bullet says “Here’s what I did.” We risk the deadly So What? reaction with a bullet like that. Without the benefit of context, readers may wonder “Why would I care about that?”
The other resume bullet says that we solved a problem — claims taking too long to be processed because the filing system was out-of-date. Not only that, our new bullet says that we know the business impact of that project. Maybe we didn’t know it at the time. So what? If we can extrapolate some numbers to prove our case, using what we know about the business operations, all the better.
My HR friend and I talked some more, and here’s what we discovered in our conversation. His new performance appraisal system had improved performance across the organization and reduced turnover, as well. He had been proud of that success at the time, but hadn’t thought to include it on his resume.
We’ve been taught by many books and articles to share the “What” of our accomplishments. These days, it’s just as important — maybe more so — to share the “Why,” as well. We want the “Aah!” reaction from readers of our resumes, even if we’re not there to hear it. If you’re job-hunting, it’s a good idea to read through your resume with a critical eye, looking for bullets that might elicit a “So What?” reaction from readers. You’ll be happy you did.
Our job-search and career-development workshops are ongoing; new members can join us at any time. Write to me for more info.
Liz Ryan is the CEO of Ask Liz Ryan, a Boulder human-resources and career-development consulting firm. She can be reached at liz@asklizryan.com.
