“What you just told me sounds amazing! Why isn’t that in your resume?”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve exclaimed this when speaking with clients after uncovering the bigger story behind an achievement they have listed on their resume. I have frequently observed a major chasm between how clients relate their stories verbally, compared to what appears on paper. Aside from simply underselling an accomplishment, experience has taught me that the bridge between these radically different narratives often boils down to one key element -- context.
Let’s start by defining our terms -- Context [noun]: the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.
Why Context is Critical
The underlined portion of this definition forms the basis of my major emphasis on context in resume writing. My ultimate goal for my clients is to have their career stories as fully understood as possible by their target audience. Being understood means being seen. When your resume can engender full(er) understanding of your candidacy, you are more likely to receive a fair(er) assessment of your ability to add value to a company. When job seekers are not getting good results from their resumes, it’s not necessarily because they are not qualified for the job, it’s more likely that their resume does not allow readers to fully appreciate why their achievements matter. A recent example comes to mind.
I was working with a client who took over as head of a struggling subsidiary of a major, multinational bank in West Africa. Each role in the experience section of his resume began with a laundry list of 10+ responsibilities, followed by a short list of 3-5 accomplishments whose descriptions left a lot to the imagination. One, in particular, stands out in my memory:
Turned around the bank in 6 months to profitability
On its face, this bullet very concisely summarizes a major achievement. We get the idea, sort of, but the severe lack of context disembodies what appears to be a significant achievement from the bigger picture. It also makes it sound flat. This robs the target audience of the ability to fully understand the magnitude of my client’s impact. In working with him further and asking him to describe the challenges he faced and the steps he took to turn the bank around, I was able to transform the above bullet into this:
Returned bank to profitability 2-years ahead of target, following 9-years running losses, and achieved 100% revenue improvement within first year.
As you can see, the added context creates a night and day difference in the telling of the exact same achievement story. Turning around any struggling business is certainly a feat, but not all feats are created equal. You must demonstrate why your feats stand out in your resume through context. The contextual details in this specific case let the reader know that my client inherited a bank that had been losing money for 9 years and that he beat the deadline for his turnaround efforts by 2 years. Without knowing the depth of the challenge and the fact that he was on a strict timeline for success, his target audience would be able to appreciate neither the scale of his impact nor the speed of his success.
Often when I ask clients for more information surrounding their achievements, there is some initial resistance or hesitation. The common worry is that their resume will be too long. We are certainly not trying to write a book, but we are trying to paint a picture, which is what context helps achieve. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. I’m asking you to select 1-2% of that thousand (10-20 words) to allow your audience to see that picture in the first place.
The rewritten bullet point above is exactly 20 words. It illustrates just enough to set the target audience’s mind in motion, building their own narratives as to what my client must’ve done to pull off this amazing turnaround. This is the goal -- helping your reader visualize and therefore understand and connect to your achievement by setting it in a context the lends meaning and allows for comparison to their own experience. The original bullet provides no answers. It simply generates a plethora of questions for the reader that the job seeker should have answered.
How do we close the context gap? By adopting the lens of a journalist.
How a Journalistic Approach Automatically Builds Context
Journalists work hard to report facts and place them in the correct context to allow their readers to understand the world around them. To do so, they rely on the simple set of questions known as the “Five Ws,” Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. You can adopt these to write a better resume. A resume automatically answers the “what” question by setting out what you were responsible for. Your job as a candidate is to go beyond the basics of what you did -- responsibilities -- and set it into the broader context. You can do this by anticipating the natural follow-up questions a journalist would ask you to get more information for their story.
Context in your resume is what allows your readers to gain answers for the all-important “why” question(s) of hiring that I discussed in a previous post about professional branding. The fundamental question employers are asking you is, “why should I hire you?” Your response to this question should not simply be “what” you did. It should show that what you did: made a difference to a certain set of people (who); within a certain timeframe (when); in a certain place (where); for a certain reason (why); and the process by which you made your magic happen (how).
You don’t have to answer all the 5Ws+H in every bullet point. Anticipate and select the 1-3 W’s that would best satisfy the curiosity of your target audience and use them to advance and enhance your narrative. Without context your achievements will remain static, and they, meaning you, will not be understood or seen in the way that you should. Context. Matters.
If you would like to discuss how you can better build context into your resume, I’d love to support you! BOOK NOW for a free resume consultation.
niiato@avenircareers.com | Call/text 917-740-3048