Science Careers Blog

Sometimes the career advice columns on Science Careers offer tips for writing resumes, many of which urge resume writers to recognize that they are preparing marketing materials about themselves. A resume service company blog last month offers an approach to marketing yourself that can help make a resume stand out from the crowd.

A Blue Sky Resume blog entry on 12 July asks in its title, "Does Your Resume Tell a Story?"  Louise Fletcher, who writes the blog, notes that stories connect more deeply with readers than mere recitations of facts. If you can weave your experiences and accomplishments into an interesting narrative, your resume stands a better chance of catching the hiring manager's attention than the all-too-common staccato of isolated facts.

Fletcher gives an example. She received a resume from a client that had a series of bullet points telling about the client's accomplishments at a company. One of those bullet points read ...

- Helped increase sales by 10% through new marketing campaign.

Fletcher notes that as impressive as this accomplishment may sound, the reader has no context to gauge its value.  For example, if the company's sales growth rate was 20% during that period, a 10% sales increase for that campaign is nothing to brag about. Nor does the resume writer say anything about how this was accomplished. Putting the accomplishment in context (assuming of course that the accomplishment and context are true) helps tell a more compelling story. Here's how Fletcher suggested recasting this point, including the use of boldface font ...

- Repositioned outdated service provider by adding and promoting 3 market-leading services - drove a 10% increase in sales after 3 years of decreases. (Increase was achieved despite an overall market decline of 5%.)

A key point is that Fletcher implements her suggestion within the constraints of the standard resume form. The standard form is used creatively to communicate more information than most resumes manage to communicate; with just a few extra words, the resume goes from being a static recitation of facts to a dynamic passage--a story.

In a previous job, I once had to hire a computer system manager to run a large central system at a remote location. The job required not just the technical skills to run the system, but also good judgment and interpersonal skills to interact with the system's users. Wading through the first stack of resumes to find the top candidates was a long and arduous task, but one resume jumped out from the pile. It was from an applicant with the same amount and kinds of systems management experience many of the other candidates had. But he told the story of his professional life in essay form, telling how he got interested in this kind of work and relating his accomplishments, also in story form, in his current and previous positions. It was by far the most interesting resume, and he turned out in the interview to be an interesting person. We ended up hiring him and he stayed several years with this us, doing a splendid job.

The story here is to have your resume tell a story or series of stories, although it's probably too risky to put them in essay form like this system manager did. If you can work within the constraints of the format while still telling a story, it will help move your resume up towards the top of the pile.