IT Resume Makeover: Don’t downplay your success

In this Resume Makeover, Donald Burns, helps a senior marketing executive, Alice Gaines (name changed for this article), simplify her resume to tell a story about how she earned four major promotions over her 16-year marketing career with one company. The challenge for Burns was to not only list the titles in a way that made sense to hiring managers, but also to demonstrate how each promotion came with new responsibilities and skills.

Burns quickly noticed that Gaines downplayed her extensive marketing experience on her resume. Gaines says that, because she lacked a college degree, she felt she wasn’t qualified for executive positions, so she opted to leave her role as senior vice president off her resume entirely. However, Burns knew Gaines’ 20 years of experience and time as an executive were more than enough to impress hiring managers and qualify her for future executive positions in marketing; he decided to make it the focus of his makeover.

[ Download original marketing VP resume ]

Ditch vague phrases

In the original version of her resume, Gaines stated that she is a “well-travelled professional with over 10 years of comprehensive experience,” but Burns says statements like that — while true — can apply to plenty of people. And since you want to keep your resume as concise and to the point as possible, including unnecessary language simply wastes valuable space.

Instead, Burns was able to condense the same idea into a few key phrases, such as “energetic, hard-working contributor,” and “makes an immediate and positive impact for every employer.” In the end, it gives a better idea of who Gaines is as an employee and what she will bring to the table. After that, he made sure to list her most marketable skills at the very top of the resume, such as “e-commerce, product management, fluent Spanish and publishing,” to quickly grab the attention of a hiring manager.

Experience over degree

Gaines was concerned that her lack of a college degree might impact her resume — but Burns was quick to assure her that her 20 years of experience spoke volumes. He says that — typically speaking — as long as you aren’t aiming for a career in law, medicine or finance, a lack of a degree can be easily made up for with experience, skills and networking.

And Gaines had completed plenty of higher education courses, most notably by gaining credits at a nearby college, which Burns decided to include under the education portion of her resume. Even if you didn’t graduate from a program, he says you can still include any completed courses and skills gained from your credits earned.

Ignore bad advice

Burns eventually discovered that the reason Gaines left her most impressive roles off her resume was because, at some point, a recruiter had mentioned to Gaines that she should downplay those roles or she might risk “pricing herself out of the market.” Burns, however, greatly disagreed with this tactic — “diminishing your experience is always a bad idea,” he says, “it looks like you never accomplished anything.”

Rather than downplay her extensive, and impressive, background in marketing, Burns made it the highlight of her entire resume. The final result tells a story of someone who worked her way up the ladder over 16 years to become a senior vice president of marketing.

“When Alice shows her full progression at [her last company], she looks like a promotable, high-value employee,” he says.

[ Download the new Marketing VP resume ]

Alice agreed that she was “disqualifying herself” to potential hiring managers, and underplaying her skills and expertise when she should have been highlighting them. While rewriting your resume can ultimately feel time consuming and even frustrating, Gaines says, it was “a well-needed process.” She says Burns pushed her to view her career in a different light, which she says “made me think about things I could do differently during future job searches.”

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