IT Resume Makeover: Presentation Dictates Response

Even at the CIO or executive level, many candidates struggle to position their accomplishments in a way that will grab the attention of recruiters and hiring managers. John Chavner had an exceptional career and most recently held a number of contract positions consulting for CIOs, but the structure of his resume read “senior IT project guy” and not the “executive IT leader” he truly was.

“While I have always had positive feedback on my resume, this makeover process for me was about getting the presentation of the content positioned for today’s marketplace. A favorite saying I once heard rings true in this case, ‘Presentation will dictate response’,” says Chavner.

“When I first saw John’s old resume, I could tell that he had great experience and solid achievements, but he didn’t seem to meet the expectations that companies have for senior technology leaders or CIOs. I had to spend more time reading through it than most decision-makers do on the initial pass, and infer some of the things that weren’t addressed in the resume, but that are important to companies today,” says Stephen Van Vreede, personal brand strategist and job search agent for IT, Technical and STEM careers with ITTechExec and job search coach and employment blogger at NoddlePlace. Van Vreede is also the co-author of the upcoming book, “Uncommon: Common Sense but Uncommon Knowledge From Today’s Leading Entrepreneurs and Professionals to Help You Lead an Extraordinary Life of Health, Wealth and Success.”

John Chavner’s Old Resume

An Unconventional Approach

To start, Van Vreede threw conventional resume wisdom out the window, and developed two documents to highlight Chavner’s expertise and acknowledgements and to make the information much easier for decision makers to digest.

The first document was Chavner’s resume, but in addition, there were specific projects to which Chavner wanted to draw attention, including a stint as a CIO for SkyFiber. Van Vreede created a Project highlights document that included additional background and details of Chavner’s three most important initiatives, which will help to provide richer context about his career, knowledge and achievements.

Resetting the Tone

Van Vreede also tackled some other issues with the overall tone and focus, starting with the summary section at the top. Though the old resume emphasized that Chavner is “highly respected” and “globally experienced,” those traits aren’t the most important ones to highlight in an executive-level resume, Van Vreede says.

“To boost the initial perception hiring executives would have of John, we developed a ‘Here’s what I can do for you’ line that showcases John’s ability to transform technology, scale the infrastructure for growth, and drive business enablement. To support this positioning statement, we added content to the profile featuring John’s ability and philosophy for global team leadership and technology innovation,” says Van Vreede.

He also added a “Qualifications” text box to call out key elements of his business and technology leadership background. Finally, to cap things off and really drive home the point that John is a visionary leader with an ability to translate high-level strategies into actionable IT plans, Van Vreede incorporated two quotes from recommendations from Chavner’s LinkedIn profile.

Rewriting Work History

The second issue Van Vreede tackled was reorganization of Chavner’s work history. The information as originally presented made it seem that Chavner was something of a job-hopper, which doesn’t play very well with hiring managers, recruiters and HR folks. But that impression was misleading; Chavner had a number of high-profile consulting projects that fell under his CIO consulting practice — a major career accomplishment.

“Because of the way John presented his recent consulting projects, in addition to the one-year CIO role at SkyFiber, the timeline seemed choppy,” says Van Vreede. He resolved the issue by creating an umbrella entry covering the past four years running his CIO consulting practice, and included his two main engagements, with GE Oil & Gas and DNV GL, as subsets of the main job entry.

“This greatly improved the flow of his entire chronology and enabled us to bring the CIO job title and description for SkyFiber onto page one so that it wasn’t buried,” Van Vreede says.

By taking a similar approach to his other past consulting roles, Van Vreede was able to keep the resume length to two pages, which is a much more manageable size for readers. The addition of the more detailed, supporting document gives Chavner a way to go into more granular detail about the scope and context of his work and further engage any recruiters, hiring managers or HR pros looking at his work history.

“Most decision-makers don’t spend enough time reading a two-page resume in full, much less a resume that’s much longer. So they are not likely to go back and re-read the resume until right before or actually during the interview. John now has something he can send to an interviewer after contact has been made but before an interview has taken place. Because the interviewer is already invested in John, they are likely to take additional time to review this new portfolio document. Before he even gets to the interview, John has significantly differentiated himself from other candidates with both the materials he presented and the manner in which he delivered them,” Van Vreede says.

Emphasizing Achievements

A third area of focus was a lack of emphasis on achievements, which Van Vreede addressed by creating categories under which to list certain types of achievements, instead of a densely bulleted list that was too difficult to read.

“The bullet points that John originally included were more like a list of project types. The exception was his position at SkyFiber, which had the opposite issue — too many bullets to draw the reader in. The titles for these categories were carefully chosen to also tell John’s story, and we stuck to a set number of bullets under each category so nothing got lost,” Van Vreede says.

In a few areas, sub-bullets were created to communicate additional information about the project or achievement so that the main bullet didn’t extend past two or three lines of text, which could be discouraging to the reader, Van Vreede says.

Once the necessary revisions were made, Van Vreede devoted time to helping Chavner update his LinkedIn profile to reflect the changes in the resume and further highlight key projects and accomplishments. Now, Chavner says he has an impressive portfolio that organizes and presents his achievements in a fresh, relevant manner that’s better aligned and congruent with his professional goals.

Despite Chavner’s best efforts at putting together his own resume, he was thrilled to have professional assistance as his current consulting gig came to a close. Writing a personal document like a resume can be challenging, but having an objective, professional opinion from an expert in the field can help ensure that a candidate is making the best presentation they can of their career and their accomplishments, Chavner says.

Link to New Resume

Link to Project Highlights

Final Thoughts

“I figured my resume was something I should just be able to do on my own. But the finished results exceeded my expectations, which was surprising. While I had no preconceived ideas of what the completed document should look like, I did not know that Stephen could organize such a radical transformation with the same basic information. He was able to tell my story better than I was. My resume is now a proper marketing document and not just a list of facts and numbers,” Chavner says.

Related video: Don’t ignore ‘ancient history’