Recruiters skim resumes in seconds. A networking introduction takes just a few minutes. Even job interviews are rarely an hour – many are less than half that amount of time. In the activity of a job search, your background, skills, expertise, and motivation all need to be conveyed in a very short amount of time. To be that concise, you need to get specific. Ditch subjective claims like being “results-oriented” or having “extensive” experience and provide objective proof of actual results and experience. Regardless of industry or level, the best resumes, interviews and other job search material are specific and measurable in their claims. Here are 8 ways to add numbers and metrics to your job search marketing:
1.Team
How many people are in your group? If you are the single person doing all the marketing, that’s tangible proof you have range. If you are one of many but can point to results of your own, that’s proof you can stand out in a crowded field. If you manage a team, you definitely want to share the size of your team.
2.Budget
Even if you don’t have full P&L responsibility, you might have budget for a single project or initiative. Sharing budget gives the prospective employer a sense of the scope and scale of what you’re working on. It also gives an indication of how much you might be able to handle in a future role.
3.Reach
If you’re an event organizer, how many people attended your function? If you’re a marketer, how many people read your copy? If you’re an account representative, how many clients do you service? If you’re an administrative assistant, how many people do you support or calls do you field or calendars do you manage? Every job can be measured by its reach. Know how many people are impacted by your work.
4.Bottom line impact
Knowing your reach also helps calculate your bottom line impact. For revenue-generating jobs like sales or cost-saving jobs like procurement, bottom line impact is obvious. But every job contributes to growing revenues, cutting costs or increasing profitability. For the event organizer, it could be that the attendees are leads that contribute to marketing that funnels down to sales. For the administrative assistant, the people you support may have the direct contribution but you contribute a step removed by enhancing their ability to do their job.
5.Growth over time
If you have been at a company for several years, you can show year over year changes in your bottom line impact, reach, budget or team. This helps quantify your progress within the company. Rather than merely mentioning you took on increasing responsibility, you can point to managing a team of 2 to a team of 10 from one year to the next.
6.Before and after measures
In addition to changes over time, you can show changes from before you started at the company or before you took over a project or client to after. For example, if you started the company’s first newsletter and credit this with improving web traffic, you can share traffic numbers pre- and post-newsletter. If you were brought in to standardize the sales process, you might show that the original sales process took two weeks to turn out a proposal but now it takes two days.
7.Time spent
Time spent in each job is a standard part of a resume, and many job seekers will mention their total years of experience. But you can also share years of experience as a manager or years in a particular industry or years serving a particular client. Duration of projects and launches is also helpful for a prospective employer to gauge how fast you achieved a particular result. If the company has a tight deadline, a job seeker with a track record for quick launches could have an advantage.
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