Senior-level resumes are meant to facilitate a conversation that expands upon a candidate’s depth of experience. However, many senior-level professionals treat their resume as a comprehensive biography, including all past professional experience, redundant job duties, and erroneous certifications. An inflated resume is kitsch, denoting a potentially successful candidate as desperate, or simply out-of-touch.
Here are a few tips to cut down a six-page resume to a concise, impactful pitch that allows the candidate to elaborate and further develop upon their own experiences in the interview.
Tailored to the Position
A strong senior-level resume should be hyper-focused to present a concentrated view of a candidate’s relevant experience, skills, and awards. Every point within a resume should be directly connected to the open role. The most recent form of experience should have the longest description—as it’s the most pertinent—and all that follow should shorten in length successively, building a visual hierarchy within the resume. In following this method, an experience that is outside of recent history will take up less space and therefore be less noticeable.
The perfect resume is skimmable, leading to conversations with much more depth than any one-sided description could provide. Basing the core of a resume in facts and hard evidence addresses both of these points. A grounded fact-based resume presents a solid idea of the candidate’s achievement and proportionally their experience/skill. Presenting stats prompts the hiring manager to understand how the candidate may have achieved these numbers or derived them, leading a deeper conversation.
Contact Information
As customary, a name, phone number, and email address are required, however, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to add an online portfolio or LinkedIn profile to the document. Leaving out links to your online persona could build suspicion in the hiring manager, and directly hinders a candidate’s ability to position themselves as more relatable or qualified. LinkedIn specifically allows a candidate to show tangibility that they are actively engaged in the developments within the industry. A portfolio, while less necessary for most roles, can add concrete value to the experience listed.
Personal Statement
The personal statement serves as the core differentiator, creating a succinct view into a candidate’s concentration. The core value within the personal statement should be supplemented with achievements and statistical benchmarks to develop an instantly perceivable form of experience. The personal statement is vital, as it sets the pace for the rest of the resume and interview.
Overall, a senior-level resume serves to create a situation for the candidate to pitch themselves effectively. A succinct, pointed, and deliberate resume presents a focused view of the candidate to the hiring manager. Supporting information helps ground the candidate’s experience in what they read, post, and publish, and a personal statement sets a clear and well-established understanding of the candidate’s prime competencies. In whole, a senior-level resume is necessary to set a perfect silhouette of a competent professional.