Resumes & Demonstration Statements
Learning Objectives
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- understand how to prepare a targeted and persuasive resume
- understand the information required in each section of a resume
- know how to create effective demonstration statements
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Introduction
A résumé is the central document of your job application because it is what employers focus on most when judging an applicant’s suitability for doing the job they’re hiring for. Does the candidate have the right combination of core and soft skills to do that job? Did they acquire those skills with the right combination of education, employment, and other experience? Are they able to put a document together in a clear, concise, correct, organized, and reader-friendly way?
The Resume
Can you get to an interview without a resume? In most cases, the résumé is key to the hiring process. Sometimes one writing mistake—even just one little typo can take you out of the running, so you don’t proceed to the oral component (the interview). Employers demand perfection in the résumé for the following reasons:
- When the hiring manager’s task is to whittle down a pile of a hundred applications to about five for interviews, even one writing mistake in a résumé gives them the reason they’re looking for to dump the résumé in the shredder, thinning out the pile a little further.
- A perfect résumé speaks volumes about how conscientious a job applicant can be about the quality of work the applicant will do. If a résumé is poorly written, the employer can safely expect a similarly poor quality of work if the applicant became an employee.
Employer expectations are high and rising. Gone are the days where a printed résumé was all you were responsible for. Today you must also project a professional image online in whatever employers find when they Google-search you—because they almost certainly will. Even your electronically submitted résumé must be written with a consideration of the electronic filters employers use to scan applications and pre-select only those that truly answer the job posting’s call. This section will help you increase your chances of getting to interview for the job you’ve been training so hard for by writing a résumé that meets employer expectations.
Assess Your Skills and Qualifications
The first step to putting together a winning résumé is to list your employable skills and qualifications. Which of your qualities make you hireable? If these don’t come immediately to mind or the wording eludes you, a good place to start is the learning outcomes of your current academic program. These describe the skills that industry employers have said graduates must have to be considered for hire. Many of these skills are noted in the learning outcomes of your college courses.
Of course, you can’t possibly put all of these on a résumé because the full list would include too many, be too detailed, and would be worded in a manner unsuitable for a résumé. At this point, however, what’s important is that you begin a master list of such skills that you can tailor for the résumé when you see what skills and duties employers list in their job postings. Matching the skills you have with those employers want is the key to a successful application.
In addition to program-specific skills, you can also add a range of other skills. Get started by asking yourself the following questions:
- What specific computer programs am I good at? Do I have examples of work I can show an employer of how I’ve used them at an intermediate or advanced level?
- Do I work well with others? Have I demonstrated this with my employment experience or with volunteer or extracurricular activities such as league sports or clubs?
- Am I better at following instructions or giving them? Am I destined for leadership roles? What proof can I offer up either way?
- Can I read, write, and converse in another language besides English? At what level of proficiency?
- Am I a quick learner? Am I a creative thinker? Can I think of specific instances as proof of my answers to these questions if asked in a job interview?
- Am I a good communicator in both written and spoken situations? What evidence can I offer employers of my proficiency in both?[1]
Not only will a few pages of notes in answer to these questions help you get started preparing résumés and cover letters, but they will also help you prepare for the job interview later.
Developing Your Resume
To be competitive in any fierce job competition, a generic résumé—i.e., the kind that you made a hundred copies of to get your first job and handed out to every shop on the street that had a “Help Wanted” sign in the window—just isn’t going to cut it. Your best chance of succeeding is to make your job search documents stand out with superior quality, knowing that your application will be just one of dozens, perhaps even hundreds, vying for interview spots. Along with those marred by glaring errors, generic résumés are the first to go into the shredder.
A targeted résumé, however, is tailored to present what the job posting asks for. An employer’s job posting is a wish-list of all the skills and qualifications that would set up the applicant for success in the position advertised and reflects the selection criteria the employer applies to every job application. The employer expects that each section of the resume will prove the applicant is perfect for the job, as well as meet general expectations for quality of writing—clarity, conciseness, correctness, and accuracy—as well as document readability and organization.
You have three options for types of résumé based on your situation and what the employer wants, each defined by how they organize the content:
1. Chronological résumé (actually reverse chronological order): For each experience section (Education, Employment, and Related), this résumé lists your professional activities starting with the present or latest (most recent) at the top and your first (oldest) at the bottom. A key feature is a column with date ranges in months and years beside each educational program, job, and relevant activity you’ve done. This presents the hiring manager with a snapshot of where you’re at right now in your professional development, how you got there, and where you came from.
Reverse-chronological résumés can be revealing in ways that might not cast you in an entirely positive light. Exclusively short-term employment and significant gaps in your work and educational history will raise red flags [2]. However, there are alternative ways of organizing a résumé.
2. Functional (a.k.a. competency- or skills-based) résumé: Rather than organize the résumé around experience sections measured out in months and years, the functional résumé makes important skills the subheadings. The bullet points that follow explain in more detail what each skill entails, how it was acquired through training or education, and how it was practiced and applied professionally. The functional résumé is ideal if you have questionable gaps or durations in your employment or educational history because it omits or de-emphasizes date ranges.
3. Combination functional and reverse-chronological résumé: This is the most popular form and the basis for the guide on targeted résumé parts given below. It uses the reverse-chronological format for the standard experience sections showcasing the applicant’s educational and employment history but adds a Skills and Qualifications Summary at the beginning to highlight the applicant’s abilities and credentials that match what the job posting asked for.
Some employers have strong preferences for one résumé type. Helpful employers will specify which they prefer in the job posting. If not, however, your only recourse is to contact the company and ask what their preferences are. Rather than cheating, this shows that you care enough about meeting employer expectations to be proactive on the communication front. Use a standard email address like yourfirstname.lastname@emailprovider.com
Resume Sections
Let’s look in detail at how you can make your résumé meet common (but not necessarily all) employer expectations in all parts of a combination reverse-chronological/functional targeted résumé.
Contact Information. The personal information header appears at the top of the document. Use your full legal name in a font a little larger than the body of the resume. Below or beside your name, add your contact information, which may include your mailing address, phone number, and email address. Physical addresses are now considered optional in resumes. Whatever phone number you give, ensure that the personalized message that a caller hears if they’re sent to voicemail is a professional one. Also, don’t use your work email address unless your current employer is okay with you using it to look for work elsewhere, and do be sure to use a professional email address with your name in it. Finally, include the link to a personal website such as your LinkedIn profile and/or online portfolio if possible.
Skills and/or Qualification Summary. This section is important in declaring in one neat package the major skills and qualifications that match those in the job posting. If the job ad lists four main skills—let’s call them skills “ABCD”—the candidates who list skills ABCD in this section will have the best chance of getting an interview because they frontload their résumé with all the top-priority items the employer seeks. Doing this shows you can follow instructions and says to the employer, “I read your job posting and am confident that I’m what you’re looking for.”
Your Skills and/or Qualifications Summary section helps you pass the filter that many employers use to scan electronically submitted applications to ensure they’ve used enough of the job posting’s key words. If your application fails to mirror exactly the key terms listed throughout the job posting, the employer might not even see yours.
Dividing the Skills and Qualifications Summary into sub-lists related to categories of the job will increase your chances of meeting the employer’s approval. To use this highly prized real estate on the page effectively, consider arranging your skills in bulleted sub-lists or columns; a couple could be for job-specific technical skill sets, another for transferrable soft skills. Only do this, however, if you’re sure that your application formatting won’t be electronically filtered out. Some of the online application services will convert résumés into scannable formats, often scrambling text into an unreadable mess.
The key to demonstrating accomplishments and skills in a resume is through effective demonstration statements to “show” employers what you have done. See the section below for more details on how to create effective demonstration statements.
Table 3.1 provides an example of how to organize a table with categories highlighting your job skills.
| Programming Language | Software | Interpersonal |
|---|---|---|
| 3 years’ advanced proficiency in C++2 years’ intermediate use of C# | 3 years’ advanced proficiency with 3ds Max | Excellent leadership and teamwork skills |
| 1 year of familiarity with OpenGL | 5 years’ functional proficiency with Photoshop2 years’ familiarity with Java | Advanced writing and presentation skills
Fully bilingual (reading, writing, speaking) in English and French |
Employment Experience. The Employment Experience section follows the same format as the Education section. List your jobs in reverse-chronological order with your current (or most recent) job first and your earliest last. List the month/year date ranges in the same position as in the Education section. The months are important because a date range such as “2015-2016” is misleading if you worked a few weeks before and after New Year’s, whereas “Dec. 2015 – Jan. 2016” honestly indicates seasonal work. Figure 3.2 presents a sample employment experience section.
At the beginning of your working life, include whatever jobs you’ve done (except perhaps newspaper or flyer delivery) but make them relevant by adding transferrable skills as subpoints underneath. While you should omit task-specific skills, definitely list transferrable skills (e.g., teamwork) that match those listed in the job posting. As you can also see in the Figure each bullet-point skill begins with an action verb for consistent parallelism, the verb for the present job is in the present tense, and those for the past job are consistently past-tense verbs. Use clear, high-impact action verbs such as the following:
| Achieved Analyzed Approved Averaged Collaborated Constructed Contributed Converted |
Coordinated Corrected Delegated Designed Directed Enabled Engineered Established |
Expanded Expedited Facilitated Grew Implemented Improved Increased Initiated |
Innovated Introduced Investigated Managed Organized Overhauled Pioneered Prioritized |
Provided Reduced Represented Resolved Restructured Reviewed Revitalized Screened |
Served Spearheaded Spurred Streamlined Strengthened Supervised Targeted Transformed |
Fleshed out into bullet-point descriptions of skills, called demonstration statements or skills statements, in a three-part verb + object + prepositional phrase structure, some of the above action verbs may look like the following:
- Collaborated with team members consistently in working groups improving departmental processes
- Streamlined collaborative report-writing processes by switching to Google Docs
- Organized annual awards dinner celebration for a department of 150 employees
- Designed 13 internal feedback forms in the company intranet for multiple departments
- Secured government program funding successfully for eight departmental initiatives
Focusing on quantifiable achievements with actual numerical figures and place adverbs after the verb rather than begin points with them (e.g., not Consistently collaborated with team members) so that you always lead with verbs.[3]
To make your accomplishments more concrete, structure them according to the following formula for demonstration statements.
DEmonstration statements
How can you demonstrate, meaning “show” rather than “tell,” what you’ve done in a resume? Employers like to see accomplishments and skills clearly stated in a resume. If you can show that you accomplished X as measured by doing Y and Z, you can demonstrate your skills and accomplishments in a resume. You can do this by using demonstration statements, which are sometimes called skills statements.
Even if your job is a grocery store cashier, you can quantify your achievements and put them in perspective. Instead of “Processed customer purchases at the checkout,” saying “Served 85 customers per day with 100% accuracy compared to the store average of 70 customers at 90% accuracy” demonstrates your focus on achieving outstanding excellence with regard to KPIs (key performance indicators), which hiring managers will love [4].
These bulleted demonstration statements should be used in the Skills and/or Qualifications Summary and under each employment entry. These statements can take a little work to prepare, but it’s well worth it. The formula above can help.
For example, compare these before and after examples based on using the formula above.
- BEFORE: Organized a fundraising event at NSCC
| VERB/ACTION | OBJECT/WHAT | HOW (MUCH/MANY) | WHEN | WHERE/FOR WHOM | OUTCOME
|
|
Organized
|
a fundraising event | as part of the Student Association at the Nova Scotia Community College | over a four-month period | for Christmas Daddies | that raised over $8,000 |
- AFTER: Organized a fundraising event as part of the Student Association at the Nova Scotia Community College for Christmas Daddies that raised over $8,000 over a four-month period.
Education.
The gold standard of experience that employers want to see in a résumé is that you’ve previously done the job you’re applying for—just for another employer[5]. This means that you can carry on in the new position with minimal training. If that’s the case, you certainly want to place your Employment Experience section above your Education section. Otherwise, recent college graduates should lead with their more relevant Education section, appealing to employers hiring for potential rather than for experience, until they get that industry work experience.
In the education section, include a list with an entry for each your education experiences/accomplishments, including Diplomas/Degrees/Certificates, the year in which you obtained them, or the dates in which you are currently completing them, the name of the school/intuition, and the location (city and province) for each. You can include information on post-secondary courses as well, even if you haven’t completed them, simply identify the start and end dates. You can continue to include your high school information if you have not yet completed post-secondary such as college or university. Information on relevant courses or notable achievement can be included as a bullet point underneath each entry if relevant.
Lastly, if you are in a career transition and your education is not related to your current goal or your education over qualifies you, you can consider calling this section “Related Education” and provide only the education that is pertinent to the job requirements.
SOURCE: Education – Resume Sections – Be the Boss of Your Career: A Complete Guide for Students & Grads (pressbooks.pub)
References. In the context of the résumé, references are former employers who can vouch for you as a quality employee when asked by the employer you’ve applied to. Typically, you will simply say “References available upon request” under the heading “References” as the last line of the resume. Some recruiters say that is not necessary now because it’s a given that you will provide references upon request.
Your references should in a separate page with the same style and font as your resume and include your contact information at the top like the resume. Three or four references is best, and each must be someone who was in a position of authority over you, such as a manager or supervisor. If you do not have enough employment experience to provide supervisory references, consider including others who can speak about your work in some capacity such as former teachers, coaches, and those from volunteer roles. It is important that you briefly note the capacity in which they are providing a reference under their entry in your list. For example, add “High School Soccer Coach” or something similar so employers know that you didn’t work for these people.
Lastly, list your references in order of what you expect to be the most enthusiastic endorsement down to the least. Do not include coworkers, friends, or family members among your references.
Each reference must contain the following pieces of information:
- Full name in bold, followed by a comma and the reference’s official job title capitalized (e.g., Manager, Supervisor, CEO, or Franchise Owner)
- Company or organization they represent (or represented when you worked under them, though they’ve since moved on to another company) in plain style.
- Phone number as employers checking references prefer to call, rather than email, so they can have a quick back-and-forth conversation about the candidate.
- Email address to allow the for the potential employer to set up a time for a phone call with the reference or to ask for details in writing if a phone call is somehow difficult or impossible (e.g., time-zone differences or international calling charges).
It’s very important that you confirm with your references that they will provide you with a strong endorsement (use those words when you ask) if called upon by a potential employer. Don’t be afraid to ask. You must ask a reference before including them in your list out of professional courtesy. Providing references is part of a manager’s or supervisor’s job. They got to where they are on the strength of their former employers’ references, and there’s a “pay it forward” principle motivating them to do the same for the employees under them. If they don’t believe in your potential, they’ll likely be honest in advising you to ask someone else.
Example Resumes
These are some examples of resumes that demonstrate most of what was explained above, but keep in mind examples are always just that. Examples may not be ideal for you and your situation and may not be perfect for your course requirments.
Business-Admin-2.pdf (pressbooks.pub)
Culinary-Management.pdf (pressbooks.pub)
Human-Resources.pdf (pressbooks.pub)
Event-Planning.pdf (pressbooks.pub)
Office-Admin-Executive.pdf (pressbooks.pub)
Review
Exercises
Write a targeted résumé for the job posting you chose. Moving forward, you can use this as a model for how to excerpt a targeted résumé from your generic CV.
References
Block, L. (2014, September 29). My personal formula for a winning resume. LinkedIn. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140929001534-24454816-my-personal-formula-for-a-better-resume
Bortot, L. (2021, January 1). Resume samples. Pressbooks. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/bethebossofyourcareer/chapter/resume-samples-building-construction-technician/
Business Insider. (2016). A business insider reveals what an a perfect resume looks like [Video]. Youtube. https://www.thejobnetwork.com/this-is-why-your-resume-was-rejected-infographic/
Guffey, M. E., Loewy, D., Almonte, R. (2016). Essentials of business communication (8th Can. Ed.). Toronto: Nelson.
Guffey, M., Loewry, D., & Griffin, E. (2019). Business communication: Process and product (6th ed.). Toronto, ON: Nelson Education. Retrieved from http://www.cengage.com/cgi-wadsworth/course_products_wp.pl?fid=M20b&product_isbn_issn=9780176531393&template=NELSON
Liu, J. (n.d.). This is why your resume was rejected [Infographic]. The job network. Retrieved from https://www.thejobnetwork.com/this-is-why-your-resume-was-rejected-infographic/
Vandegriend, K. (2017, November 30). Hiring manager resume pet peeves, must-haves, and red flags. Career Story. Retrieved from http://careerstory.ca/blog/2017/hiring-manager-resume-pet-peeves-must-haves-and-red-flags
CHAPTER ATTRIBUTION
Unit 48: Resumes and Cover Letters – Communication@Work (senecacollege.ca) @ Work Seneca Edition
Resume Samples – Be the Boss of Your Career: A Complete Guide for Students & Grads (pressbooks.pub)
- (Guffey, Loewy, & Almonte, 2016, pp. 377-378) ↵
- (Vandegriend, 2017) ↵
- (Guffey, Loewy, & Almonte, 2016, p. 387). ↵
- (Block, 2014) ↵
- (Vandegriend, 2017) ↵