When applying for a job, your interviewer is interested in one thing, and one thing only. What have you done for your previous employers? That doesn’t mean they want to know what your role was. They do, but more importantly, they want to know what sort of impact you had. What did you accomplish while you were there? What problems did you solve? What value did you deliver? If you really want a job, you need to be prepared to show that impact clearly to future employers.
It’s important to have quantitative data but also communicate what the real impact was on the business. Here are two things you can do to make sure future employers can fully understand your successes.
Use Context to Explain Your Successes
Your resume is often your one chance to paint employers a picture of who you are and what you are capable of as an employee. The numbers matter. The bullets matter. The bolded text matters. But the one thing many candidates forget is the framing of their successes. Context also matters. You need to frame the image of your work achievements in a way that provides the context that explains how you’ve exceeded your job performance goals. The facts alone won’t build your case. An employer needs to know what the problems were that required solving, what challenges you were able to help the business overcome.
It’s when you put the facts into a favorable context, that’s when you are really on your way to crafting a winning resume that communicates what value you bring to a company. Think about it, if you succeeded in a role where only a few challenges were present to impede your success, that success doesn’t mean as much. If you just say “I sold X in 2018” it fails to communicate what that means for your businesses’ bottom line. Instead, if you say “I sold X in 2018, beating 2017 results by almost 40%” that drives home what an accomplishment the sales were. Without that context, a reader just won’t know the difference.
Choose the Right Frame of Reference
Just as you are tasked with the challenge of providing a meaningful context for employers to understand your past impact, you also need to be careful to help them look at your experience through the right frame of reference. The last thing you want your interviewer to have to do when reviewing your application is to guess the value of your achievements. They need to be easy to understand and clear to see so that employers don’t question the relative merit of your success. There are many frames of reference you might use to explain your work accomplishments. Make sure to pick those most relevant to your experience and the company where you’re hoping to land a new job.
To do this you could draw on your company size or location as a starting point. What was your service area, yearly revenue, and the total number of clients or employees? You might cite past results in terms of sales, investments, productivity or even savings. This all provides the necessary reference points an employer needs to understand your contributions.
Show Your Impact to Energy Services Group International
Show how you can be a true impact and asset for your next employer. Reach out to the ESGI team today to work with our power generation recruiters!
