3 Important Factors In Your Executive Resume

Executive Resumes

3 important factors in your executive resume
When was the last time you carefully assessed your executive resume? Perhaps you should take a look at your resume, and see if it is “on target” for the 3 important factors that every “executive” resume has:

  1. Your executive resume is your image. Impressions are formed, wrongly or rightly, about your professionalism, abilities, and more. Everything plays into “image”, much of it subconsciously. The color of the paper, choice of font, style and standard of writing, organization of information, and more, form a picture of who you are as a prospective employee.
  2. Your executive resume is your calling cardThis is how a prospective employer refreshes their memory about the facts concerning you and your potential for their organization. This is how that prospective employer has the information needed to contact you when they want to call you in for an interview. Everything on your executive resume should be accurate, up to date, and easy to find.
  3. Your executive resume is your responsibility. Even if you hire a professional resume service, yours is the final say in the finished product that is distributed. The level of professionalism and polish of the executive resume reflect the candidate for the top jobs. That candidate — YOU — are assumed to have approved every detail of your resume.

Because these important factors are a reality in every resume, it is highly important that your executive resume is “on target” as reaching the goal of a professional executive standard. Executive positions do require a higher standard of resume, one that is worth the higher compensation such positions are paid. It is your responsibility to make sure that the “image” and “calling card” in your resume meet these higher standards.

How A Professional Resume Defines Your Image

Professional Resumes

work from home resume
When you are out searching for a job it is very likely that you will never even see your potential employers, let alone meet them, until you get an interview. You will be giving your professional resume and applications to receptionists and other employees.

While you want to provide an image of who you are, you do not want to look unprofessional. You may feel like a fun and whimsical font is a better representation of your personality. That’s fine for informal or recreational documents, but not for your professional resume. Your font should serve two purposes: it should make your resume look professional and it should be easy to read. Using a font that does this will bring your resume–and your image–up a notch.
You may also want to avoid clip art or picture images in your resume. I once received a resume to critique that had dollar signs ($) where all the ‘S’s were and little clip art images of dollar bills throughout the document. While I got the meaning (the client was in finance), it was very distracting and, okay, very tacky-looking. Keep it clean, crisp and concise.
Try not to write a resume novel. Your potential employers are reading through stacks of resumes and they want to be able to look and see immediately what makes one candidate better than another. Keeping it to a couple of pages will help keep the hiring manager from either rolling their eyes at your resume, or falling asleep.
Hopefully, these simple tips will help you understand why your professional resume is so important to creating your image and they will give you an idea of how to go about creating a professional resume that provides an image that employers want to have working for them.