It’s easier said than done to create a great resume when you’re under pressure to get it done. If you’ve had a longer career and you’ve spent a lot of time working your way up, this can be especially true, as it’s often difficult to focus your resume in a way that shows your success.

But, of course, ultimately there’s no excuse for having a subpar executive resume. If you’re stuck, take a look at a few of these tips to help improve your executive resume writing skills.

 

Define a Clear Target

One of the first things you want to do when organizing your executive resume is to define a clear target. It’s always vital to look at a company’s goals, mission, and history in order to develop a personalized approach. Otherwise, you can’t expect to speak effectively about why you’re the ideal candidate.

 

Make Sure to Brand Yourself

At this point, you should be known for contributing something to your field. Whether you’re an expert in the world of communications, or can’t be stopped in the medical field, people should know you for your work. To prove that you’re a potentially valuable investment, you want to show this branding of yourself in your executive resume. You want to zoom in on those attributes that showcase your leadership skills, while illuminating your “it” factor; what makes that employer need you and only you.

 

Include a Success Story or Two

Again, at your level, you should be known for having accomplished a lot. You want your successes to shine through in your resume. As you know, many successes present themselves with challenges, so showing how these challenges were dealt with can be very beneficial.

 

Leave Room for White Space

When writing an executive resume, it’s often difficult to find a balance between including the right amount of information and leaving enough white space so that BlackBerry email cruisers won’t be overwhelmed with information. Use the most valuable information in your resume to create short, on-brand statements in order to develop a balanced, easily scannable executive resume. Potential employers will like an executive resume with a lot of content that’s still easy to read and scannable.

 

Edit and Re-edit

There is absolutely no excuse for having misspelled words or grammatical errors in your resume at the executive level. If you’re not the best speller or grammar buff, you most definitely should have everyone you can think of edit your resume to avoid the embarrassment of being overlooked for something so elementary.

 

Avoid Too Many Pages

You may have a lot of information you’d like to include in your resume due to your extensive experience; however, as you know, managers are busy people with little time to read pages of accomplishments. So instead of writing five pages of details about yourself, try cutting it down to two pages and only including essential personal branding and marketing information.

Hopefully these tips (and your short breather) have helped to give you some focus as you write your executive resume. Now it’s time to write the best resume you’ve ever laid eyes on.

Tags: career, employment, executive job search, executive resume, Job Search

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Resume. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.