In this, the third article in a series guiding IT leaders to find a role that matches both your interests and abilities, Heller CEO Martha Heller reviews six tips for crafting a resume that demonstrates how technical expertise and leadership skills translate into strategic gains.
Your resume is more than a list of your skills, accomplishments, and positions. It is a critical piece of marketing collateral. How you present your experience is almost as important as what experience you present. Hiring managers want to read about how you used your technical expertise and your leadership skills to advance your company’s strategic goals.
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See other parts of this Find Your Next Great CIO Job series
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The six tips below will help you prioritize how to present your accomplishments, the importance of brevity, staying on point, sharing achievement data, emphasizing more recent roles, explaining your strategic impact, your abilities to assemble a deep talent bench, and your experience with AI.
Here are our six tips for writing a great resume:
1. Keep it short!
Your resume should not be more than three pages. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how many jobs you’ve had. With your resume, you are demonstrating your ability to present information; don’t overdo it.
2. Limit non-contextualized information.
Too many job candidates waste precious real estate at the top of their resumes by including a long list of terms like “project management,” “team leadership,” or phrases like “drove costs down by 10 percent.” But because these statements appear before mention of any specific employer, they lack context and are meaningless. Feel free to make one solid branded statement at top of your resume: for example, “Turnaround technology leader with expertise in manufacturing.” Place all other content in the context of the companies you actually worked for.
3. Describe each organization and use metrics.
Whether your professional experiences have been with obscure companies or household names, always include a line that tells the reader what business the company is in, how many people it employs, its revenues and its global reach. When you describe your own role and accomplishments at that company, include metrics to indicate budget and headcount.
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4. Limit the detail on early roles.
Do hiring managers care what you did way back in 1999? Sure! They want to know who you worked for and what your job title was, but that’s about it. Save the detail for your most recent positions.
5. Stress business impact.
It is no easy feat to engineer and deploy a mobile solution, and companies will hire you based on your technology skills. But you’ll get a stronger reaction to your resume if you include how much new revenue your company earned, or market share was gained, or budget was saved, as a result of your technical work.
6. Demonstrate talent acquisition.
If you’ve built a team from scratch, or drove talent retention levels way up, cover it in your resume. Companies know that there is a war for good technical talent. If you’ve been winning that war in your current job, be sure to mention it.
7. Mix in AI.
The one thing businesses know about AI is that they don’t know enough about AI. Have you taken a vibe coding course? Have you started an AI Center of Excellence? Have you driven adoption of early commercial tools? Today, not having AI on your resume is like walking into an interview in bare feet.
