Penned by Carolyn
By now, you’re back from spring break and have been furiously de-tagging all those photos to keep them out of the hands of recruiters and hiring managers (here’s the New York Times’ take on personal branding – he’s even more disgruntled than me).
Before work kicks back up again, take a few minutes to refine your resume. Focusing on the actual meat of your resume — work experience and positions held — here are tips on making your achievements powerful and to-the-point.
As a general framework, career coaches sometimes talk about the CAR technique:
- Circumstance means setting the scene — what challenges were you facing in the role? What goals did you have?
- Action: describe what you did to handle the circumstance. Use verbs.
- Result: what was the outcome that you achieved?
Specifically, here are some tips and tricks:
- Give context — the months or years you worked, a very brief description of the group or company if it’s not well-known, and where the position was located.
- Use numbers — as many as possible. This will help you avoid being vague (though clearly make sure the content is relevant).
- Use bullet points. Sentences glom together and are hard to glance over. Bullet points are easily digestible for hiring managers.
- Make it relevant to the job you’re applying for. Map your achievements to the skills/qualifications the company is looking for, and get rid of or downplay the rest.
So, here’s what one of your positions might look like (this one’s a bit on the long end):
1/07-3/07 Research Assistant, The Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development, Stanford, CA.
- Chosen by a visiting professor as one of two research assistants to quantify and codify ecotourism operators’ manners of addressing the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from travel.
- Wrote and distributed a web-based survey of 150 tourism operators on 6 continents.
- Compiled and processed data on tourism operators’ use of carbon offsetting programs using SPSS; created 25 charts to display results using Excel.
- Co-authored 30-page report published on The International Ecotourism Society’s website in 2007.
Go wild! And if you need a breather, check out this list of hilariously stupid things people have written on their resumes.
Tags: carolyn, green jobs, resume, students