Job Search: How To Write Accomplishment Stories

excellent post found at:

http://www.careerealism.com/write-accomplishment-stories/

During your job search, it’s vital to be confident in your abilities and accomplishments from your past experience. An employer won’t be able to figure these things out (nor should they have to).

You need to sell yourself sufficiently in order to make them believe you are the best fit for the opening.

Do you know how to convey your accomplishments through telling compelling stories on your resume, cover letter, and networking opportunities? The key to creating a good accomplishment story is to focus on:

• Problem – What problem or challenge were you faced with?
• Action – What action(s) did you take?
• Results – What resulted from your action(s)? What benefits did the employer see afterward?

Check out this example:

• Problem: Assumed leadership position in the products division, which was experiencing no profitability and slow sales.
• Action: Created a new training program for sales representatives including innovative techniques and marketing strategies.
• Results: Product sales increased from $20,000 to $40,000 in just six months.

Now, turn this into an accomplishment story to use on your resume or cover letter.

• Accomplishment story: Grew product sales by 200% in six months by implementing a new training program and introducing employees to innovative sales techniques and marketing strategies.

What have you done that you can use as an accomplishment story? Saved your company money? Implemented new processes to save time or increase productivity? Made significant profits for the company? Enhanced corporate image or built upon their reputation?

Ready to get started on your accomplishment stories? A few tips:

• Use action verbs to start each resume bullet when conveying an accomplishment.
• Concisely edit your stories so they make sense but don’t leave off any important content the employer might want to know.
• Share measurable statistics and numbers: How much? How big? How fast?
• Make your bullets flow logically so anyone who reads your résumé has a full understanding of what you accomplished.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

About Heather Huhman

Heather R. Huhman is a career expert, experienced hiring manager, and founder of Come Recommended, a content marketing consultancy.

How To Quantify Your Accomplishments On A Resume

Excellent post found at:

http://www.careerealism.com/quantify-accomplishments-resume/

Many of the job hunters I work with tell me their accomplishments aren’t really quantifiable. They just aren’t in jobs where they can say, “Saved the company $4 million a year… ” If you have those numbers at your fingertips, by all means use them. If you’re like most of us, you need other ways to quantify your accomplishments on a resume.

For example, your company may require a 40-hour week but you regularly worked unpaid overtime to help out another, short-handed department or contribute to a special project. Your job description may include interacting with customers, but you were chosen to fly out of state for a customer meeting. Compare your performance to the goals set by the company itself.

When you report how you exceeded those goals, you have quantified your accomplishments.

You can also quantify accomplishments by measuring your company against other companies and measuring your position in the company against that of your co-workers. If you’re applying to a large corporation, your job in an international company with $5 billion in sales gives you an advantage over a candidate who works for a local company selling $1,500 a week.

Consider, too, how you rank against your peers.

Do you have seniority in your company, is your output higher than the company or industry average, did you win an award for your performance or have you received more promotions in a shorter time?

You don’t have to lead an effort to take credit for its success; your contribution should be noted in your resume. Perhaps your most important contribution is a matter of attitude.

Consider your soft skills (the ability to meet deadlines, work in a team or independently, communicate complex ideas, placate customers). Relate an occasion where those skills made a difference to your company.

Testimonials are another way to quantify your accomplishments. If internal or external customers thanked you for your help, ask them for a written testimonial that describes your actions and the results.

Your bosses may have indicated your value to the company by assigning you a project, including you in client or executive meetings, recommending you for training or asking you to make a presentation. Give these indicators of success prominence in your resume.

Your accomplishments are varied and so are the ways to quantify them. If you feel hesitant to quantify your achievements—or you aren’t even sure you have achievements—give me a call. I’ll help recruiters understand how highly you rate.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

About Don Goodman

Don Goodman, president of Resume Writing Service - About Jobs is a nationally recognized career expert. Get a free career assessment from Don here.

How To Stand Out: Define Your Strengths

Good post found at:

http://www.careerealism.com/how-stand-out-strengths/

Though passions are powerful, Caspari  finds that defining your strengths in order to articulate them to your potential employer is another way to help a job seeker stand out.

“Everybody has strengths,” said Caspari.

Caspari works with a lot of at-risk individuals, both youth and adult.  She’s found they typically feel they don’t have a whole lot to offer a company because they’ve been in jail or prison. They don’t think they can get hired, which sets them up for failure.

“A lot of people don’t see their own strengths,” said Caspari. “Whether you’ve done time or not, getting a fresh perspective from a life or career coach can help you notice things about yourself you never thought could be strengths in the workplace.”

But how does one even begin to define strengths? One of Caspari’s courses, “Looking at Strengths,” helps answer this question by asking five questions that help individuals pinpoint what they are good at.

The questions include:

• What kind of activities do I like to do?
• What makes me happy?
• What are my talents and skills?
• What are my accomplishments?
• What are my best qualities?

In Caspari’s experience with this activity, the hardest question to answer for most people is, “What are your accomplishments?” She recalls a time when she was working with an at-risk kid who was having a hard time finding any accomplishments in his life. His aspiration was to be a professional soccer player, and he participated in soccer teams, but felt that wasn’t considered an accomplishment because it was something that was easy for him to do.

“It really broke my heart because here’s a kid who, very obviously, was beaten up by life,” said Caspari. “We don’t allow ourselves to see our wins or successes.”

She went on to say that a good way to get to know our strengths is by having an accomplishment story ready for an interview. “In our accomplishment stories we might think of one of our accomplishments that brings a number of our skills together and share it in a way that is a short story that brings those strengths to life,” said Caspari.

Saying things like, “I’m an organizer,” “I’m a team player,” “I’m adaptable,” and so on doesn’t tell employers what your strengths are. If you bring up a specific instance where your strengths really shined, telling that story will definitely help you stand out from the other people who tell employers the same old list with generic words that don’t really tell employers who you are.

“Depending on who you are, you want to highlight yourself in different ways,” said Caspari.

As a leader of a non-profit organization that teaches life skills, Caspari never considered how organized she really was. “I worked alone a lot,” she said, “and I had no one to compare myself to, but I’m really organized and because it comes so naturally to me I don’t even see it at times.”

It’s important to ask ourselves what our strengths are because the more we get to know ourselves, the easier it will be to show other employers who we are and what makes us stand out from other candidates.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

About Belen Chacon

Belen is a journalism graduate student at California State University, Northridge. She spends her time interning wherever she can and tweeting her heart out. You can follow her @journobelen.

How To Conduct A Job Search

Here are three tips to get started with your job search  found at: http://www.careerealism.com/job-search-conduct/

1. Talk To Your Network

With as many as 75% of jobs found through personal relationships, networking is a big part of the job search. If you did a good job networking in college and beyond, then you should already have a fair number of contacts. Reach out to friends, family, family friends, professors, former supervisors from internships, jobs, and extracurriculars, and anyone else who may be of help to your search. Let them know exactly what you’re looking for — saying, “Hey, I need a job, any job, any job will do!” is not going to get you very far. Ask if they know of any jobs that match what you’re looking for or if they know anyone who might.

Be patient as you network and be sure to follow up with that status of your job search. If, for example, you are still job hunting and haven’t reached out to someone in a couple of months, ping them. Let them know that you’re still looking and ask if anything has opened up. People inherently like to help others, so as long as you are polite and express gratitude your request should not be viewed as burdensome.

2. Visit Online Job Boards

Employers post hundreds of thousands of jobs online, and new ones are added every day. Bearing in mind the massive number of job postings, it’s important to know how to search.

Most jobs boards will start by asking you to enter “Keywords” (i.e. job title, skills, company name) and “Location.” After entering this information you can filter your results by the age of the jobs, which is helpful if you’ve looked recently or if you want to weed out the old jobs. You can also filter your job search results based on how far the jobs are from your location.

Tip: When you search for jobs, sign up for job alerts so you get new jobs matching your search criteria emailed to you daily or weekly.

3. Go To Job Fairs

Job fairs – sometimes called career fairs – are an excellent place to learn about jobs that are open now and to network with hiring personnel from numerous companies. If you are a great conversationalist who really shines in-person, then frequenting job fairs is a must.

Job fairs vary greatly in size, with the the majority being free to job seekers. Aside from attending ones sponsored by your university, it’s smart to look for job fairs that are more specific to your industry.

Be certain to present yourself at a job fair just as you would at an in-person interview - be polite, prepared, and professional. If there is a list of attending companies available, do some research beforehand to learn about the ones you’re most interested in. You’ll impress the hiring manager with your background knowledge and will have more to talk about with them. Hiring managers typically accept resumes during the event, so bring several copies. Oh, and bypass the jeans and tennis shoes for now.

In the end, the best job search is one that combines multiple strategies, so divide your time and conquer the job market.