Quintessential Careers Press:
The Quintessential Guide to Storytelling that Propels Careers
Chapter 5: Resumes That Tell a Story
Page 55
Humanize and personalize your resume. The trend in resumes has been to eschew personal information and
interests. But this type of human-interest information can work for you as long as you relate it to
professional skills. It also helps to reveal more of your story to the employer and portrays you as
someone he or she would like to get to know better. For their book, Insider’s Guide to Finding a Job,
Shelly Goldman and Wendy Enelow interviewed 66 top corporate human-resources executives, recruiters,
hiring managers, and career experts, among them Bill Welsh of Equinox Fitness, who believes that
personal information on a resume is important and that “the more he knows about someone, the more
informed his hiring decision will be.” Revelation of personal interests and affiliations can indicate
cultural fit with the prospective employer, create a bond with an interviewer with similar interests,
and demonstrate transferable and applicable skills. For example, the following sample bullet point
shows how a job-seeker might apply a slice of personal life to the corporate culture of the targeted employer:
Avid outdoor enthusiast poised to contribute my passion for outdoor sports to your firm’s
mission to promote the active lifestyle.
It’s wise to be story-minded when composing your resume so that you know what to leave out.
A resume is neither a job application nor a life history. It’s a marketing document, so it need
not and should not be all-inclusive. Keeping your story – and better yet your branded story, as
discussed in Chapter 8 – in mind as you craft your resume can help you judiciously omit material
that, in the words of David W. Brown, author of Organization Smarts, “doesn’t advance [your]
personal narrative.” WorldWIT’s Ryan similarly notes that most resumes “tell us what we don’t
need to know, for instance, the typical tasks in a Marketing Research Manager’s job.” She goes
on to describe how most resumes read: “I did this job. I stopped that. I had these responsibilities.”
Job-seekers need to dig deeper, Ryan exhorts. “What was your motivation?” she asks. “Surely you didn’t
go through these experiences in a daze. What was going on during that time? You’ve built your career,
thus far, from scratch. How and why?”
Remember that you don’t have to tell the same stories on every resume you send out.
The ideal scenario is to tailor your resume for every position you apply for so that you
can change up your stories, selecting those that are most appropriate for the job at hand.>
Quantify. Employers love numbers. Atlanta-based resume writer Gayle Oliver refers to these
numbers as “performance metrics,” for example:
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