If you're going on lots of interviews you shouldn't change a thing. However, if you're not getting as many interviews as you'd like, you may want to re-examine your resume.

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TOP TIPS

A Resume Is...

• A marketing document
  
• Designed to get the phone to ring
  
• A showcase of your core competencies
  
• Full of quantifiable accomplishments
  
• Well written using active language
  
• Visually appealing
  
• Error-free
  
• About your last 15 years of employment
  
• Not about your personal life or hobbies
  
• A tool to capture attention and sell your capabilities
  
• Not a recount of your work history
  
• Evolving along with your career and achievements

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RESUME ADVICE: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER NEWFIELD
Peter Newfield is President of Career-Resumes.com and the resume expert for Executive Registry.

What is most often missing from executive resumes?

When we look at executive resumes, we need to see an executive summary, core competencies -- which are the person’s core areas of strength – and quantifiable accomplishments. We don’t see these features in most resumes. What we do see is the executive’s skill sets, which is helpful but not something that will make you stand out if that’s all your resume offers.

The resume needs to show: how did you make the organization or client money, save them money, increase efficiency, or decrease costs? You have to quantify it. If you just say “Increase sales, decrease profits,” that’s not enough. I want to know “Increase sales from X to Y.” My belief is if a company is looking to hire someone, they have a problem they need to fix or they need to increase sales. They are looking to your resume to tell them how much you increased sales, to see if your experience is comparable.

I often see resumes saying “Increased sales 20%,” but if I don’t know what the baseline was I don’t know if we’re in the same ballpark. The screener, whose job it is to keep people away rather than bring them in, doesn’t necessarily know what your company’s revenues were so can’t make a comparison. Many executives think everyone knows what their company does; reality is, they don’t. You need to tell them. If the company is privately held and you are concerned about confidentiality, you can say “Increased sales in excess of $8 million” rather than being more explicit with your actual sales figures. There is nothing wrong with protecting confidentiality, but it doesn’t have to hinder your resume from being an effective sales tool.

How should executives incorporate consulting or part-time employment on their resumes?

You have to account for your time so it would be foolish not to say that you have been doing consulting. You can list the client names and describe the things you were doing for them and the anticipated accomplishments. You might have been there only two weeks, but it is something to allocate the time.

The other way to circumvent concerns about periods of unemployment is, rather than including months and years of an appointment, just use the year. So instead of saying February 2002 to January 2003, say 2002 to 2003. When a question is asked about your last date of employment, you obviously should tell the truth. But at that point, the job of the resume is done; it has gotten the phone to ring for an interview.

What can be included at the beginning of the resume to capture attention?

My philosophy is that Page 1 of a resume is very valuable real estate. You need to hook them on Page 1; if you don’t, they won’t ever look at Page 2 or 3. You want to have information on the top 1/3 of the page that will get people to want to read the document. Visual presentation is critical. It has to be a Mercedes-Benz. Chevy’s and Pontiacs don’t cut it in this market.

A typical person’s resume gets a 15 second review from the “gatekeeper” to decide which pile to put it in. I want you to get into pile A – people we want to talk to – not pile B – people we’ll talk to if we don’t hire from pile A.

Someone with a lot of accomplishments earlier in their career might put a “Selected Accomplishments” section on Page 1 to catch someone’s eye. But you need to tie it back to where the accomplishment occurred; for all I know it could have occurred 25 years ago. The resume is a marketing piece, not a document of past history.

Remember, the job of the resume is to get the phone to ring. If the phone isn’t ringing, it’s not doing its job and needs to be changed.