The People Search Guru

It’s easier said than done to create a great resume when you’re under pressure to get it done. If you’ve had a long career and you’ve worked your way up over many years, this is definitely the case, as it’s difficult to provide a sense of focus to your resume.

But, of course, ultimately there’s no excuse for having a subpar executive resume. If you’re looking for new ways to gain some inspiration for your resume, here’s a few tips to set you on the right track.

Define a Clear Target

One of the first things you want to do when organizing your executive resume is to define a clear target. You should always know a company’s mission statement and as much information about their goals and history as possible. This helps you prove that you’re the perfect person for the position.

Make Sure to Brand Yourself

At this point, you should be known for contributing something to your field. Regardless of whether you work in heavy industry, communications, manufacturing, etc, you should be famous in your field for your excellent work. In branding yourself in your resume, you’re differentiating yourself from others and defining what makes you special. You especially want to highlight attributes that show your ability to lead and attributes that make you unique and critical to an organization.

Include a Success Story or Two

Again, at your level, you should be known for having accomplished a lot. You want an impressive resume that highlights your successes. Showing how you’d overcome various obstacles to achieve those successes can also be immensely impressive and beneficial to your chances of getting a job.

Leave Room for White Space

When writing an executive resume, it’s often difficult to find a balance between including the right amount of information and leaving enough white space so that BlackBerry email cruisers won’t be overwhelmed with information. Use the most valuable information in your resume to create short, on-brand statements in order to develop a balanced, easily scannable executive resume. Employers will find each sentence easily “digestable”, and your resume will rise to the top of the pack.

Edit and Re-edit

There is absolutely no excuse for having misspelled words or grammatical errors in your resume at the executive level. If you’re not the best speller or grammar buff, you most definitely should have everyone you can think of edit your resume to avoid the embarrassment of being overlooked for something so elementary.

Avoid Too Many Pages

You may have a lot of information you’d like to include in your resume due to your extensive experience; however, as you know, managers are busy people with little time to read pages of accomplishments. Don’t write five pages of extensive detail; instead, cut your resume down to a few pages with essential branding and information that markets your abilities and successes as a strong investment.

Hopefully these tips (and your short breather) have helped to give you some focus as you write your executive resume. Now it’s time to write the best resume you’ve ever laid eyes on.