Guerrilla Marking for Job Hunters 2.0 - Jay Conrad Levinson [19]
For Sally, our fictitious example, the skills she does well and enjoys doing are: public speaking, client service, solving computer problems, and speaking French.
Pretty simple, huh? By answering these 2 questions, Sally now knows more about herself than roughly 90 percent of job seekers who don’t know what they do well or what they want to do.
Now, complete this exercise for yourself. Write down your answers to questions 1 and 2, then underline those skills found in both lists. These are skills you do well and enjoy doing. You may come up with 3, 4, 7, or more skills.
You’re almost done. Now, choose the 2 or 3 skills you think will be most attractive to the hiring authority reading your resume. These are your most marketable skills. They will form a skeleton around which you build your entire Guerrilla Resume.
WARNING
This is the most important step in the process of writing your Guerrilla Resume. Do not go on without completing this exercise. Stop. Do it now. Write now!
Why? Because once you know what your most marketable skills are, you can highlight your most relevant experience, which will help you find the job that’s best for you. It all flows in order, like painting your garage—first the prep work, then the painting.
Okay, now we’re ready for the second part of this 2-step process.
➤ Find Achievements That Prove Your Claims
What achievements/accomplishments prove the marketable skills you listed? For each skill, write down at least 3 things you did that you’re proud of along with their specific results.
Use facts. Be specific. The more exact the better—figures, dates, percentages, and so on. What have you done to increase productivity, profits, efficiency, sales, and so on? Your achievements can be from paid or volunteer employment, school projects, or even hobbies. As long as they’re relevant to the work you want to do, you may include them in your resume.
Here are some more examples to illustrate what you should or shouldn’t write for achievements.
First, here’s what NOT to write. These nonspecific achievements prove nothing:
• Managed numerous projects to success.
• Provided sales and customer service to house accounts.
• Wrote reports and correspondence for busy executives.
Now, here’s what to write. These specific achievements prove your skills:
• Managed 100 percent of 27 projects to successful completion in 2006, finishing an average of 10 days early on budgets ranging up to $256,850. Built and led teams of up to 34 staff.
• Increased sales $456,000 in 1 year by managing and developing 34 house accounts.
• Saved $52,000 after writing 3 employee manuals that standardized operations. Also wrote more than 85 reports for a team of 23 executives, meeting all deadlines.
See the difference?
It may help to interview yourself as a newspaper reporter would, and ask yourself a series of questions (Why, How, When, Who, What) about the things you’ve done that you’re proudest of.
For example, let’s say that in your last job you overhauled an Oracle database. For most job seekers, they would stick this phrase in their resume: “Cleaned up Oracle database.”
And then ... nothing would happen because language like that tells readers nothing at all about your value on the job. The phone won’t ring because employers won’t be interested.
Instead, ask yourself questions about your achievements, like these:
• Why were you assigned to clean up the database?
• How did you do it?
• When did you do it?
• Who did you do it for?
• What happened as a result of your efforts?
Your answers will often lead to surprising results, which will serve as the basis for a very powerful Guerrilla Resume.
Example Answers
• Why did I clean up the database? One of our clients was ready to take their business elsewhere because a database we built for them kept failing.
• How did I do it?