Three ways to power-up your resume

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Joke of the week (scroll to the bottom for the answer)

What’s the difference between in-laws and outlaws?

Three ways to add power to your resume

People ask me this question all the time.

“How do I make my resume more powerful and more appealing to recruiters?”.

Today, I’m going to share three secrets that you can start using right now to make your resume more impactful, more results-driven, and ultimately, more differentiated from the competition.

#1 Talk about how you executed on the goals of your function

Every job, position, or function has goals. It’s up to you to know what yours are and to highlight how you solved problems/challenges, executed projects, or achieved milestones related to those goals.

For example, if you’re on the marketing team, your goal probably has something to do with:

• Increasing company market awareness

• Improving brand awareness

• Generating new leads

• Attracting new customers

What initiatives or projects did you undertake to generate more leads? Did you fine tune your SEO game to a point where you were bringing in more visitors from Google? Did you create LinkedIn content that successfully grew the followerbase by X (where X is a percentage, absolute value, or some other metric).

If you’re still not sure what goals are, consider:

• What are other companies asking for in their job postings for YOUR JOB. Those are probably your goals, or at least similar to them.

• How is your performance evaluated at your current job?

#2 Specify and quantify the effect of your actions

Any good resume needs results-driven bullets to show impact, and any results-driven bullet needs to specify the “effect”; in other words, what happened as a result of your actions.

An effect could be driving follower growth, generating more leads, or increasing company market share. If your results bullet doesn’t specify the effect, your work is only half done.

Next, quantify the effect. How? With metrics! A few examples below:

Sales & Revenue Metrics

• Revenue Growth: By how much did you increase revenue on a month-over-month or year-over-year basis (either in total or for a given product)?

• Conversion Rate: By how much did you increase conversions

• Frequency: How often did you execute sales campaigns?

• Customer Growth: By how much did you increase revenue for new customers versus existing customers?

Profitability & Cost Metrics

• Company Net Profit: By how much did you improve the company’s net profit?

• Departmental Profit: By how much did you improve departmental profitability?

• Project Costs: By how much did you decrease project costs?

• Operating Costs: By how much did you reduce operating costs and in what areas?

People & HR-related Metrics

• Recruitment: How many people did you interview or hire? Were you able to decrease the average time to hire?

• Team Leadership: How many people did you lead? How many teams did you oversee?

• Retention: By how much did you improve customer or team member retention or decrease turnover?

• Engagement: By how much did you improve employee engagement?

Marketing Metrics

• Cost Per Conversion: By how much were you able to reduce cost per conversion?

• ROI: What was the ROI of your advertising campaigns?

• Traffic: How much were you able to increase store or online traffic?

• Content: How many articles did you write or ads did you create? Do you have any relevant engagement metrics?

• Emails: What was the email open/response rate you achieved?

• Phone Calls: How many leads did you contact and what percentage were you able to convert?

Partnership & Deal-Related Metrics

• Quantity: How many partnerships did you create, deals did you close, or clients did you manage?

• Impact: What impact did the partnerships that you established have on the organization in terms of revenue, funding, or sales growth?

• Size: What was the size of the average deal you worked on?

Performance & Operations Metrics

• Efficiency: How much were you able to improve efficiency in time or percentage terms?

• Output: By how much did you increase productivity or output?

• Client Satisfaction: How much did you improve customer satisfaction metrics such as CSAT or first response time?

Analysis-Related Metrics

• Projects: How many projects did you analyze?

• Modeling: How many Excel models did you create? How many people used them?

• Outcomes: What results were you able to drive by leveraging insights from your analysis?

• Web: How did you improve website metrics such as bounce rate or domain authority?

#3 Tell a story

Lastly, it’s not enough to sprinkle a number here or stuff a keyword there - you need to weave it all together into a coherent narrative. It’s got to make sense to your audience. It has to read like a story.

How do you tell a story with your content.

• Showcase career progression: Progress is the essence of a good story. From the eager intern to the accomplished professional, your journey must depict growth, learning, and achievements. Don't just list your job titles and responsibilities; explain how each role contributed to your development and prepared you for the next step.

• Connect your actions to the big picture: Every role you’ve held and every project you’ve worked on had a larger purpose. Whether it was to boost sales, improve operational efficiency, or enhance customer experience, your actions were part of the bigger organizational objectives.

• Provide context to your actions: Context is the foundation of any great story. Without it, your achievements and actions lose their significance. When explaining your roles and responsibilities, provide context—what was the situation when you took the initiative or faced a problem, what challenges did you encounter, how did you overcome them, and what was the outcome?

That’s a wrap folks. Hopefully you find this week’s issue helpful. Let me know by voting in the poll below. If you have a topic you’d like me to cover, let me know at [email protected].

Which companies are hiring?

Curious which companies still have positions to fill? Check out this database of companies filling roles all across the world. You’re welcome!

Answer to this week’s joke…

Outlaws are wanted 🤣

About the Author

I’m James, Cofounder of Final Draft Resumes. I’ve been in the career consulting space for 13 years, and before that, I was a recruiter for AECOM.

I’ve helped thousands of job seekers, from industries like software engineering, IT, sales, marketing, manufacturing, and more generate job opportunities through well-written resumes that translate unique backgrounds into coherent narratives.

If you’re struggling with your resume for whatever reason, reach out - I just might be able to help!

If you’re more of a DIY person, then check out Resumatic, my free-to-try resume builder.