A hiring manager takes a significant risk when they hire a new person – that you’re an investment that will pay off. The best way for your hiring manager to see you as a good investment is by demonstrating how you’ve already built shareholder value at past employers, by solving similar problems or meeting similar goals to your target company’s specific situation.

Most candidates don’t put themselves in the hiring manager’s shoes, writing a resume that focuses on what they themselves want or a resume that describes how they spend their workday.

Here’s 6 ways to demonstrate that you can provide value to your hiring manager:

Understand priorities: Before you can demonstrate what you’ve accomplished, it’s critical to first understand a hiring manager’s priorities. It won’t matter what you’ve accomplished if it isn’t relevant to what your hiring manager is trying to accomplish. For example, if you came up with an idea that made your company a billion dollars, it won’t matter to a hiring manager who’s tasked with cutting costs. You may have some outstanding accomplishments, but they may be the wrong accomplishments for this specific hiring manager.
Do your research to find out the type of value likely to be important to this specific company, department and manager.

Demonstrate value in numerical results or percentages: Use numbers or percentages where ever possible. Let’s say you cut costs by improving manufacturing processes. It’s much more powerful if you can state that you cut product manufacturing costs by 10% because of your improvements. Or if you can state that you saved your past company $1M in manufacturing costs due to your process improvement implementation.

Translate accomplishments to value: Listing improvements in metrics like customer satisfaction means different things to different companies – some companies place a huge value on customer satisfaction, while others (ex: some large phone companies) place a much lower value on customer satisfaction. But almost every company understands the value of profit, revenue, and cost reductions.

Claim responsibility: Even if you were part of a team accomplishment, describe your role, stating that your role contributed to a 20% increase in revenues. Even if you’re an admin assistant, you can state that keeping the project calendar and producing reports kept the team informed and focused to achieve $10M in increased revenues.

Don’t focus on responsibilities: Your next employer won’t care much about responsibilities of your past jobs. Your responsibilities are merely a job description – if you focus your hiring manager’s attention on responsibilities, you give the impression that you feel the best thing about you is that you met the minimum job criteria … branding yourself as a commodity. Instead if you focus your hiring manager on your accomplishments, you’re describing what you did that went above and beyond the call of duty – you describe yourself at your best. If you research first to understand hiring manager priorities, you can give the impression of a superior candidate by focusing on your accomplishments that are meaningful to your hiring manager.

Don’t talk about your past company’s accomplishments: Your next employer isn’t hiring a company, they are hiring a person. Focus on your accomplishments, not the accomplishments of your past company.

Look at your current resume – how much of your resume describes your responsibilities?

Do you place responsibilities in places of greater attention than accomplishments? Which do you list first?

About Ivy Exec

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