Executive Resumes: Selling the Person or the Product

Some resumes are comprehensive fact sheets that educate the reader, and others are polished marketing documents that exude personality. Which one is yours?

You can find out where your resume stands by emailing a copy to review@firstimpressionresumes.biz for a Free Resume Critique. You’ll get an honest appraisal and some career counseling tips on specific measures that can help you jump start your job search. Now for those of you who can’t decide which of these two resumes is better, here’s a hint.
No doubt you have heard this hundreds of times before, but it still bears repeating one more time. The golden rule of being a successful salesperson is recognizing that “people buy people before they buy the product.”

Ask any sales trainer and we'll tell you that in order to get a foot in the door and close a sale, the person/s you are selling to must buy into you first.

The same holds true in my profession as a resume writer and executive career coach, as it holds true for you as a business executive, project manager, or career professional whose success depends on positive interaction with others.

I am certain that most of you know from personal experience that it is near impossible to implement a strategic plan, no matter how flawless or well documented it is, unless you first achieve unanimous stakeholder buy-in. Unless people buy into you, the project is flawed and will get off on the wrong foot.

In the case of a job hunter it is a little trickier because you are both the salesperson and the product. That is why I advise my clients that it is incumbent on them to first sell yourself and only then should you begin to sell the product; and in a job search the first place to start is in your resume. You must then continue this tactic during each successive interview, and throughout the salary negotiating process.

This brings us back to our initial question; is your resume a comprehensive fact sheet that educates or a polished marketing document that sells; and which is better.

If you think about it the answer is self apparent. When you fill your resume up with data about you “the employee” and what you did on a daily and per project basis focusing on responsibilities and useless information, you are subconsciously selling the product and not the person. What you can expect is that the reader will focus on determining if you are a superior product than the 20-50 similar product options (resumes) they have to choose from.

On the other hand a polished marketing document sells your personality and what makes you unique and worth the time meeting. It will present much of the same material; but this resume will focus on achieving stakeholder buy-in that you are above all the others. It will convince them that without question you not only can do the job, but you have the personality they seek as a part of their leadership team, and you are going to deliver the desired results while the other 20-50 people may or may not be able to do so.

A few ways to incorporate the personal approach into your resume are:
A: Give it a heading that tells people WHO and not what you are.
B2: Make it reader friendly so that all their checkpoints can be easily found
C: Give it a personality by avoiding overused resume templates and clichés.
D: Project yourself as more than qualified, show how you are “Best in Breed.’
E: Create a unique brand that focuses on how professional you are.
F: Choose your words, style and image carefully so you don’t look like a drone or a clone.
G: Don’t feel embarrassed if you can’t write a great resume. Be smart and get professional help.