How to tell the story of who you are through your resume

Mar 11

It’s common for my clients to request a workshop or extra support focused on revising their resumes. We think of the word resume and we see images of painfully seeking out bullet points to describe previous positions and endlessly tweaking font and margin sizes to squeeze it all in.

We are led to believe that our resumes are a document of facts. The question that drives us: How can I represent all of the facts succinctly in a page or two?

This is where we get it wrong. Your resume is not a list of facts—it is a story about who you are. And you, my friend, get to be the storyteller.

The three questions to ask yourself before you even open that Word document are:

1. Who is my audience?

2. What do I want them to understand about me?

3. What's the best evidence I have to support that understanding?

Then shape the content around the story that you want to tell and who you're telling it to.

We often hope that the hiring manager will connect the dots of the facts we present to understand why we're the right fit for the position. But that's not enough.

You need to connect the dots for your potential employer by...

• Presenting a curated list of responsibilities that directly connect to the skills they're seeking and the role they want to fill—not a laundry list of every task in your job description. (Yes, it's true: you're allowed to omit irrelevant elements in order to tell a cohesive story.)

• Highlighting your accomplishments in addition to your tasks, to share evidence of your work's impact. (What are you most proud of? Brag about it!)

• Including #'s where possible—to convey the scale of your work ("Trained volunteers" could mean 3 or 350) and the improvement you've sparked (Ex. Increased volunteer retention from 34% to 65%).

• Pairing your resume with a cover letter that tells the same story through a narrative.(This is where the story can flow more naturally in paragraph form.)

Your resume is not about where you've been—even though it captures what you did in previous positions.

Your resume is about where you want to go.

Don't just hope they'll get it. Tell them a tailored, cohesive story about why you're exactly what they need.