Hello and welcome to another English Tools. I hope you had a great weekend.

A quick review :
* Resumes are an advertisement for YOU.
* Resumes that get noticed are CUSTOMIZED for your prospect.
* Focus your resume on THEIR needs. Not yours.
* Your objective statement needs to be of interest to your prospect employer, NOT ABOUT YOUR NEEDS or how you want to develop your career.
* You’ve got 20 seconds to capture attention.

How To Write About Your Achievements 

It’s so important to remember this one truth: your resume is an advertisement for you. You’ll know it’s a successful document if it wins you interviews. If your resume is not getting you interviews, then you need to do some more work on it. (Resumes are to win interviews – YOU need to win the job.)

So if you’ve done your homework, you have a good idea of what your prospect is looking for. If you’ve done your personal homework, you should also have a good list of things you have done in your life that could be of interest to your prospect employer. (Remember the papers you worked on? )

Now it’s time to put your experience to work. Look through your papers and choose the most interesting, amazing, and most important of all: **relevant experiences** you have had that could be of interest to your prospect. Keyword: relevant.

If you’re applying for a management position, what have you done that has demonstrated your skills as a manager?

Quick example: Maybe in previous work experience you managed a group of call center workers. Perfect! Now dig a little deeper. What happened to the performance of that team of call center operators because you were there?

Let’s imagine that thanks to your work, the call center team you managed reduced employee turnover from 15% to only 2%.

Let’s also imagine that your team’s sales results went up from 7% to 12% in six months.

(Again, these are just examples. Maybe they’re silly, but the idea is to think about the positive impact you have had. If you can use dollar amounts, numbers or percentages that are true reflections of your work, the more solid your experience statement will be.)

So think of 4 to 6 relevant experience statements to include under the objective statement.

(**Important: Your resume need only be one page.** Think 20 seconds! Use the front page for your contact info, objective, and key experience statements. The back page of your resume could be used for your previous employment and educational background info.)

Here is an example of what your achievements section could look like:

Selected Achievements
———-

* Managed a team of 20 call center operators for a period of 2 years.

* Directly contributed to a reduction in annual employee turnover from 15% to 2%.

* I helped increase the team’s sales from 7% to 12% in six months.

Get the idea? You’re writing to catch your prospect’s attention! If I were looking for an experienced manager who could produce results, and if you wrote something similar to the above, you’d have my attention! I would keep reading, wouldn’t you?

There you have it. First page: Brief contact info (Your name, address, phone/cell numbers and e-mail address. ) This is followed by your Objective statement, which is then followed by your Achievements section. Try your best to fill the page.

Tip: Don’t label your resume “Resume” at the top of the document. Your audience knows what it is! And don’t label each section of your resume either. (You don’t need to call the ‘Contact Section’ the contact section. And you don’t need to call the ‘Objective Section’ the objective section. You’re wasting time and space.)

Well (firstname), I hope you found this helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to write and ask! I’d love to hear from you!

Or look at this:

Need Some Help?

Remember: On Wednesday, February 15th at 8:00pm (Mexico City time) we’ll hold a special 45 minute workshop on building your resume’s objective and achievement section. If you need help, or would like to get some feedback on yours, please feel free to join us! IT’S FREE!
How: Just reply to this e-mail, and I’ll tell you how you can join us. We’ll be using Google+ Hangout, so please NOTE: ONLY 9 PEOPLE CAN JOIN, so if you are interested, please let me know quickly!
Have a great week!