Are You Understating Your Career Accomplishments? Most People Are!

I look at resumes for hours every week and I love it. I try to picture the person behind the words. Sometimes I get to talk to the resumes’ owners by phone and fit the words to the person and vice versa. Now that we are beginning to tell stories in our resumes and bring more of our personality across on the page, people are coming alive in their resumes.
We have such vibrant stories to tell – and how much power is in them!
Pam is a Payroll Supervisor. She got laid off when Acme Explosives moved its  headquarters. Now Pam is job-hunting. Pam’s resume was very formal and stiff before. Here’s what she said about her last job:
Acme Explosives, Phoenix, Arizona
Payroll Supervisor, 2009-2014
Led a team of four Payroll staff members. Attended supervisor meetings and updated payroll policies quarterly.

• Managed a conversion from Payroll Guru 3.4 to version 3.6
• Met or exceeded all performance metrics including attendance, staff overtime to budget and payroll dollars processed per employee
• Received excellent performance reviews

Who is Pam? How does she view Payroll? We have no idea. This version of Pam’s resume sounds like almost any Payroll supervisor anywhere. We get no sense of how Pam approaches her role, what she values or what she’d be like to work with.

Let’s look at Pam’s Human-Voiced Resume now and see what it has to tell us about Pam and her worldview:

Acme Explosives, Phoenix, Arizona
Payroll Supervisor, 2009-2014
I joined Acme to link its payroll systems to SAP and overhaul its payroll system. During my five years leading Acme’s Payroll team we converted payroll systems twice to handle the company’s growth, launched a Pay Facts newsletter for employees and cross-trained everyone on the  team.

• Working together with HR I led monthly brown-bag lunch sessions to answer employees’ questions about their pay and benefits.
• When the volume of employee pay queries grew dramatically we got our Payroll team of five certified in Payroll With a Human Voice and Leading with a Human Voice programs.
• Our Pay Facts newsletter was licensed by the local chapter of the Southwestern  Payroll Association for re-use by its members.
• Now that Acme’s headquarters is moving to New Jersey, I’m on the hunt for my next adventure.

We get a lot of Pam in this version of her resume. We learn why she started her job and why she’s leaving now. We can almost see Pam in action. We want to go to one of her brown bag lunches and hear what she has to say!
Will every single CFO or Controller be a Pam fan and want to meet her or hire her onto his or her team? Definitely not! That’s okay with Pam. She knows there’s a Payroll department in every employer with a hundred employees or more, and all she needs is one manager who think she’s pretty cool, the same way she does!
Pam is a new-millennium job seeker. You can showcase your accomplishments in your resume the same way Pam did and become a new-millennium job-seeker, too.
Notice that Pam doesn’t say one word in her Human-Voiced Resume about being rewarded or acknowledged by her company for her accomplishments. She did get that recognition from Acme while she was working there, but Pam doesn’t think that her greatest accomplishment is getting thanks or praise from someone else. She’s proud of herself for the muscles she’s grown, more than from any recognition conferred on her.

Pam’s boss the CFO tried for six months to convince Pam to move to New Jersey. She went and took a look. I’m from New Jersey and I think it’s the greatest place in the world, but Pam was not feeling the Jersey vibe. She wanted to stay in the Southwest. We can’t blame her for that! Now Pam is job-hunting again. She isn’t worried about her job search. She doesn’t believe that she has to take the first job offer she gets.

Are you downplaying your own accomplishments by wasting your precious resume real estate talking about the job description you held, instead of your own stamp on it? We want to know what’s in your wake! As readers we want to see you in action, in our minds.

Pam told little stories in her  bullet points. We call them Dragon-Slaying Stories. We see you in action in a dragon-slaying story. You can bring your resume and your career history to life by putting your favorite “I was there and I rocked it!” stories into your resume.
You have a lot to offer employers. Your pluck and brilliance won’t come through the standard mucky resume sludge. You are so much more than a Results-Oriented Professional, it’s a shame to describe yourself that way.