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A new kind of resume

We all know that a good resume is crucial, but in today’s difficult market your resume needs to communicate a personal brand or value-added message that’s both consistent and powerful. It’s vital that this consistent message be reflected in all aspects of job hunt communication including your cover letters, resumes, and how you talk about yourself while networking, interviewing, and negotiating—even how you think about yourself and what you believe you have to offer to a future employer.

Below I’ll focus on what’s different about this new type of resume and how it fits into a consistent marketing message that you’ll communicate about yourself. I won’t cover more the more conventional resume issues such as length, functional vs. chronological resumes, headings, and the like.

Conventional resumes are loaded with job description information—worked here and there, responsible for this and that, and so on. Powerful resumes, however, emphasize specific accomplishments or success stories that demonstrate how you did your job, not just what your responsibilities were. The key points are to describe the problem, that you did something about it, and how that resulted in value for your company.

Call them PSRs

People refer to these career success stories by many names—PSRs, PARs, and STARS, for example, but they all involve a situation, an action, and a result.

A PSR (problem/solution/result) is a specific personal success story in which you used your skills to come up with a solution (S) to some problem (P). And this in turn led to a valuable result (R) for your employer. The entire story could have taken place in a year, a month, a week, or even a day.

The most crucial parts of a PSR are the S and the R—what you did and the benefits of your actions. It’s fine to just infer the problem in the PSR. The key is that you achieved a positive result by doing something that took skill.

Here’s an example:

PROBLEM: Qualifying suppliers was a slow process because each new specification was different. Engineers were required to test parts each time the supplier changed. As a result, engineers felt they were wasting their time.

SOLUTION: Analyzed the situation and then combined each supplier’s specification to make one uniform specification that would be applicable in all cases.

RESULT: As a result, engineers could now quickly qualify a new supplier by comparing the proposed specification to the uniform specification. This change reduced supplier qualifying time by 90% within the first two months of implementation.

Here’s the resulting PSR that goes into the resume:

“Eliminated costly component testing and reduced supplier qualifying time by 90% by developing uniform component specifications.”

Old style resumes just list responsibilities, not differentiating the job seeker from anyone else with a similar job description. We now give specific examples of valuable results.

In an old resume you might have written:

“Responsible for database design and programming.”

But now it would read:

“Designed and programmed a computer database linking 13 offices to a central organizational database resulting in better communication between offices.”

And “Program scheduling” becomes “Established and directed a compressed program schedule enabling all departments to effectively control budgets and minimize costs.”

Even if you can’t quantify your results with specific metrics, you can approximate them or write that the result achieved was greater than or less than it was before.

Generating PSRs

To help you start thinking of good PSR stories, remember a time when you did any of the following:

Increased: revenue, profit, growth/market share, shareholder value, employee retention, return on assets/investment, efficiency, visibility, goal attainment, satisfaction.

Reduced: costs, time/effort, complaints, risk, turnover, conflict, paperwork, stress.

Improved: productivity, business process, service, information, morale, communication, image/reputation, skills, quality, customer loyalty.

Created: strategy, system, process, business, product, service, brand, synergy.

These are all instances of generating clear results any employer would value.

Or think of each job you’ve had and then remember specific instances where you had to overcome an obstacle and achieve a valued result for your employer or customer—this could be an internal or external customer.

If you can’t think of many examples, imagine what would happen if someone inept took over your job—what repercussions would that have? Maybe decreased quality, more time spent by management double checking work, a decrease in perceived professionalism, etc. But when you’re on the job, you prevent this from happening. In fact, the opposite happens—quality goes up, management saves time, the company is seen as top-notch. Examples of these are first-class PSRs.

How All Job-Hunt Messaging Fits Together

Now that you understand more about what the new type of resume is all about, let’s emphasize how the resume is connected to all other job-hunt messaging to produce common themes of value aligned to market needs.

Here is how each component of job hunt communications flows into the next:

PSRs --> Résumé with value-added results
          --> Self knowledge & confidence
          --> Compelling summary profile
          --> Memorable elevator pitch
          --> Persuasive cover letters
          --> Effective interviewing
          --> Improved negotiation

Each of these pieces is directly connected to each other to produce a powerful form of self-branding. In the following order, you need to:

• Incorporate strong accomplishments (PSRs) into your resume. Emphasis is on problems you solve, value you add, or how you enabled someone else to succeed. This makes for a concrete, compelling resume that a potential employer (and you) can believe in. Confidence and self-knowledge rises.
• After you’ve written the PSRs , take a step back and ask yourself “If I didn’t know this person and I read all these PSRs, what value would I say this person brings to the table?” Then summarize that value-added answer in your career profile or summary at the top of the resume.
• Once the summary is clear and value based, it can be used as the basis (with a few modifications) for your introduction or 30-second commercial as you meet folks while networking.
• Also, you can use the summary and supporting PSRs when you’re being interviewed to answer questions such as “Tell us about yourself” or “Why should we hire you?”  PSRs also prepare you to handle difficult behavioral questions such as how you handled critical issues such as shortage of time, money, resources, stressful environment, conflict, initial failure, and so forth.
• You can also use your summary and supporting PSRs as a negotiating tool. Since they elucidate ways you achieve bottom line results, PSRs make an objective case why you should start at a higher salary or job title.
• After you’re employed, you can use your summary and supporting PSRs (including new ones) as a negotiating tool for excellent reviews, raises, and promotions.
• Since they’re going to need to be able to verbalize them in interviews, I encourage my clients to practice their PSRs out loud. A side benefit is the ego-boost that comes from focusing on stories where you were the hero.

All these pieces can form a cohesive whole in which you present yourself as a problem solver. You can confidently believe in this because everything you say is based on real stories. Through this process the value you can add to any company you’re part of becomes clear, as does why you should be hired or promoted. This approach provides a consistent “self-branding” message. It rings true both to you and the company.