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• Classic-Fiction

• When did I do it? In 2006.

• Who did I do it for? Our company’s #1 client, which represented $14 million in annual revenue.

• What happened as a result of my efforts? The client was happy and stayed with us.

Now, here’s how you can rewrite the boring statement—Cleaned up Oracle database—to include the specific results of your actions: “Helped retain $14-million account by working 12-hour days for 2 weeks to clean up Oracle database for firm’s top client in 2006.”

See the difference?

A few sentences like these are all you need in your Guerrilla Resume to make the phone ring with interview requests from employers who are anxious to meet you.

I think you’ll agree that this is powerful stuff. It really is easy to uncover specific results in your work history by asking yourself these questions.

Here are 2 shortcuts to help you create a list of achievements for inclusion in your resume.

➤ Shortcut 1

Write down all the money you’ve saved or generated for employers in every job. What have you done to increase overall profits in your current and prior jobs? Be specific!

Do NOT write, “Sold products and met quotas.” Write, “Sold $516,750 in 1 year while exceeding all quarterly quotas by an average of 21 percent.”

Do NOT write, “Produced substantial savings.” Write, “Saved $45,890 in 45 days.”

➤ Shortcut 2

You may find it difficult to quantify your work in terms of dollars. You may even find it impossible. If so, try to come at it from a different angle.

Write down everything you’ve done to increase efficiency or save time. Time is literally money to employers. Perhaps you wrote an employee training manual, or created a way to back up data faster each night, or devised a way to speed up shipping out on the loading dock. Anything and everything is fair game here.

The key is to figure out exactly how many hours you saved per week, then assign a dollar value to those hours. Then annualize that figure to get the highest, most impressive number. This requires you to do one very important thing: you must do the thinking for the reader of your resume. It’s your responsibility as the author of your resume to connect the dots for the reader. Make it easy for the reader to picture you as an excellent employee without thinking.

For example, say you created a process that saves 10 hours a week. How much does your employer pay someone to do what you just automated? If it’s $10 an hour, add another 30 percent to cover insurance and other benefits, and you’ll get a figure of $13 an hour. Multiply that by 10 hours per week and you’ve just saved $130 per week, $520 per month, $27,040 per year.

So, you can write this eye-catching sentence in your resume: “Saved $27,040 annually by automating widget process.”

Now, here’s the fun part. When you save $27,000 here and $27,000 there, pretty soon you’re talking real money. Include all these money totals in your Guerrilla Resume.

When you fill your Guerrilla Resume with specific achievements that are quantified in dollars, guess what? You turn yourself from just another job seeker, crying “Please give me a job!” to a walking, talking, blue-chip stock, who says: “Hire me at $50,000 and I can deliver a 400 percent return on your investment because I’ve routinely saved $200,000 annually at my prior jobs.”

While ordinary job seekers are crying out, “Please give me a job!” your resume will be saying, “Hiring me is like buying money at a discount.” Other job seekers come across as supplicants, begging for work, while you come across as a superhero minus the cape.

Put another way, you will put an immediate halt to the “apples versus apples” comparison that employers make when considering ordinary job seekers. It’s now “apples versus oranges”—and you’re the only orange. You’re changing the rules of the game and putting them in your favor—kind of like picking up a Monopoly board and tipping all the money, hotels, and houses into your lap.

Nice, eh? And it all starts when you stop thinking of yourself