Three key differences between executive resumes and other resumes

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A few months ago I was browsing Reddit and I came across the resume of a VP of Marketing that was looking for help with their resume (posted below).

Something immediately stuck out to me. This person was at the executive level, but their resume read like that of someone with no more than 5 to 8 years of experience.

Don’t get me wrong, this resume has some good things going for it – it’s clean, neat, and easy to read. But at the executive level, that’s not enough.

That’s what sparked the idea for today’s post:

Let’s dive in.

1 - The Profile / Summary

The summary is one of the first things the recruiter sees when they look at your resume. It’s a quick snapshot of your career.

If you’re someone that just graduated, or if your career aligns very closely with your next job (i.e., you’re a product manager, you’ve held a string of product manager roles including your current role, and your next role is going to be very similar such as lead product manager), then you probably don’t need a summary.

But for most others, a summary can be very helpful in giving recruiters key bits of information about what makes you qualified for the role.

Now, something like this is fine for someone with 5 years of experience, but for an executive, this isn’t gonna cut it.

You don’t get to this level by just being a doer – you’ve got to deliver results through your leadership.

Whether it’s leading teams, programs, initiatives, or even entire divisions and business units, executives have to deliver big time results.

And if you’re looking to continue being an exec (or are looking for your first big break), your resume needs to show that you’ve delivered results in the past.

Here’s a resume I wrote for a client almost a year ago. You can quickly see the difference in summaries – this one is much more fleshed out, going into more granular detail about the individual’s career history and greatest accomplishments as a leader.

If you’re on the hunt for exec roles (Director level and above), this is what you want to think about when you’re writing a summary for yourself.

Page Length

Another thing that stood out to me about the resume I saw on Reddit was that despite having 16 years of experience AND despite being at the executive level, this person opted for a one page resume.

Now listen, I don’t care what you’ve heard from other people, whether they’re career coaches or even recruiters – I’ve written resumes for many a recruiter that couldn’t land an interview for the life of them, if you have this much experience and are at this level in your career, you need to be using a two-page resume (some execs even use three).

How on Earth are you going to be able to fully flesh out your biggest wins on a single page?

If you look back at the resume above, the VP role only has 4 bullets - to me, that is simply not enough to say what needs to be said (unless you really haven’t done much, worked on anything exciting, led any major initiatives, or accomplished anything, which is another story).

At this level, aim for between 5 and 8 bullet points for the current role, 4-6 bullet points for previous executive roles, and 2-5 bullet points for earlier non-executive roles.

Last but not least, the language and content

Language is the most important part of your resume regardless of whether or not you’re an executive.

But if you’re at the executive level, your language needs to convey IMPACT. As a leader, what did you achieve?

• Did you improve the company’s revenue generation ability?

• Did you build and scale an entirely new business unit?

• Did you initiate change that improved morale and by extension, staff performance?

• Did you oversee a successful acquisition and integration of staff and technology?

• Did you oversee the development and launch of a new product that significantly grew revenue?

These are some of the things you’re expected to do and conveying them on your resume with enough detail on a resume can be tricky - remember, you have to contend with limited page space, but you want to present enough info to give your reader three key pieces of info:

• Context/Challenge: What was the challenge you were tasked with solving? What was the objective of your work?

• Action: What did you do? How did you get involved?

• Result: What did you achieve?

Each bullet point that describes a project or accomplishment needs to include all three of these pieces of info - if it doesn’t, it’s incomplete.

Let’s consider an example from the VP of Marketing resume:

Increased brand awareness and customer revenue, both online, on Amazon, and in physical stores.

• Double digit growth (from 7 to 8 figures) with a 4.8 star average rating.

• Championed a successful rebranding initiative and formulated a comprehensive brand guidebook.

In this example, the candidate’s actions are missing. What specifically did they do? HOW did they increase brand awareness and customer revenue? HOW did they produce double-digit growth? Was it from the rebranding initiative? Something else? It’s not entirely clear.

A better way to rewrite this would be:

Now you might ask, “Well what’s the difference between this and another resume that is NOT executive?”.

And if you did ask, I’m glad.

At the executive level, you will be using terms and keyword combinations that signify leadership. Terms like:

• Led…an organization of over 120 personnel across 7 functions…

• Managed…the product development function for an enterprise SaaS org with $4B in revenue

• Oversaw…the integration of a newly acquired SaaS company…

• Presided over…annual budget planning and allocation for multiple departments, optimizing resource distribution

• Headed…global expansion initiatives and drove market presence in 5 international regions

• Strategized…long-term business plans that resulted in a 20% increase in revenue over three years