Building The Perfect Resume – It’s A Piece Of Cake

For those who are thinking of moving on and finding their next accounting position, the first job most of us have to do is to build our resume.

Sounds simple enough, right? After all, you will be writing about someone you know very well – you!

However, many a strong candidate faces a version of writer’s block when it comes to selling themselves on paper. Sure, we can all list our career history in chronological order, and state what our tile was etc… but when we are building a resume, we need to include certain details about our accomplishments in each role we have held so far in our careers. Accomplishments that will help to set us aside from the competition and open doors to interviews for us, either with recruiters or with potential employers, or maybe even both.

So how can we do this without over selling ourselves?

I look at a resume and see it as a three-tier wedding cake.

Layer #1: The Top Tier Of The Cake: Your Career Focus

The top layer of the cake is your career focus—the starting point of any great resume.

Think of a focused resume as the opposite of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ resume. Employers – and recruiters - are suspicious of candidates whose resumes don’t focus on any one particular objective.

They assume the candidate doesn’t know what he or she wants to do with their professional career, and are likely to be less focused than those who do.

An example of a great career focus might be something like: “To join a public accounting firm where the needs of the client are of paramount importance, where individuals are provided with opportunities to learn new skills and grow as the firm grows and ultimately to become a partner in a firm that adds value to clients and creates work/life balance for the firm’s members.”

Layer #2: The Cake’s Middle Section: Your Unique Selling Points.

The middle part of the cake is made up of the unique selling points that support your career focus.
Your selling points are all the qualifications that make you a strong candidate for your particular career focus or objective, or an ideal individual for a particular firm.

For example: the selling points of a tax professional might consist of “Completed CICA In-Depth tax course parts 1,2 and 3” “Created high level tax mitigation plans for high net worth individuals, their estates and the companies they own”.

Whereas if you are a corporate recovery specialist, looking to join a CRI team, you will want to be quite specific about your achievements to date in that field.

Whatever your career focus, determine the best selling points you have that would help to prove that you match (or exceed) the qualifications and experience needed for the position.

Try to make it personal too. What will your next employer get, and benefit from (such as your great client development skills) that they just cannot get in anyone else? This section should basically scream “I am the one for the job!”

Layer #3: The Base of The Cake: Your Professional & Career Accomplishments To Date.

The largest part of the cake is the base, it supports the other layers above. Likewise, your professional accomplishments should also be the largest part of your resume.

So now it’s time to be more specific. What precisely is it that you will bring to the table? If you are a Manager, what is your management style? How do you motivate individuals and teams and what examples can you quote that will make a recruiter sit up and take notice? Quantifiable achievements are always more impressive. For example: ‘Created a tax mitigation plan saving $300,000 for client X’ is much more powerful than ‘Created a strong team spirit within the firm’.

Not that team spirit is not important, but the first example is quantifiable.

If the’ team spirit’ example could be restated as “Created a strong team spirit by turning around a team recovering less than 40% of their time from clients to one that recovered in excess of 90%, with many cases of write-ups (to the tune of $86,000 last year) instead of write-offs.” Then it comes across as a much more impressive achievement.

As you might already have gathered, this is not a time or place for modesty. However, neither is it a place for exaggeration or hot air.
Honesty is always the best policy, but of course we do want to show ourselves in the best possible light in order to be asked in for interview.

Layer #4 – The Ornaments on top of the cake

When I said it was a three layer cake, I was not including this little bonus: Ever seen a wedding cake without the happy couple depicted on top? Of course not, it is a very rare thing to see a cake without some form of decoration, and your resume should be not exception.
However, the type of decoration I mean here, is a simple summary at the very top of the first page, after your name, address etc, and your career focus or objective, then you should consider a few bullet pointed extracts from the rest of the resume to highlight the major points you want the reader to see and understand about you.

A covering letter (something that as a recruiter, I see fewer and fewer of these days) is another place where one can ‘sell’ themselves and provide more details on certain skills, experiences, or other attributes that should secure an interview.

Thinking of your resume as a three-layered cake will help you to break down the complexity of your career history and simplify your resume content into a concise, comprehensive marketing document that will demand the attention of your next employer, either directly or through a recruiter.

Building a decent resume does require some thought and consideration, and please check for grammar and use a spell checker before sending it out to the unsuspecting recruiters and employers looking for talent.
It’s not rocket science, it’s mostly common sense, but of course the problem with common sense these days is that it isn’t that common!