What attracts someone about a person’s background? Meeting or knowing a famous celebrity? Their travels?
What puts you in awe about a person? Their clothes? Their car? Their accomplishments?
What perks up your ears when you hear a story? An elevator pitch?
I had a resume client years ago screaming over the phone at me that they wanted to use the cut-and-paste verbiage found on the Internet yet within the same breath they were saying that they couldn’t find a job. Their resume was in front of me on my computer as I explained that in storytelling people want details. They want what makes a person, a situation, their background, unique. The cut-and-paste “detail oriented” does nothing for one’s story. What does it truly mean to be “detail oriented”? Each individual’s “detail oriented” differs from the next individual’s “detail oriented” depending on their unique path and experiences.
This same resume client asked me to also downplay and/or remove their numbers altogether. They were not the first, nor the last that I’ve had this conversation with. I’ve worked with clients who have been in charge of up to a billion, yes, a billion dollars worth of transactions and yet they refuse to have that shown on their resumes. I’ve had clients who have run big box stores, attorneys’ offices, restaurants, daycare centers, online retail stores, to name a few. The first question I usually ask them is how much money they closed out with daily, weekly, monthly and/or how large their transactions were.
It is shocking how many people don’t know or won’t provide an answer. Some fear people will be jealous of them, at minimum. Others have told me this is irrelevant and future employers don’t care. (I respectfully beg to differ.) Most of the time after a long conversation we talk about the pros versus the cons of not sharing. The people who reach out early, knowing change is in the wind, I always encourage them to start keeping track of and researching their numbers. One’s numbers make one unique. They also directly show responsibility. If a person has been tasked with supervising 50 employees, opening and closing a business, and closing out $500,000 in daily transactions, this shows an amazing amount of daily responsibility and tenacity. This doesn’t even add in all of the customer or client interactions. Doing the math, if they work 51 weeks of the year, that is about $179,000,000 a year that they have been directly responsible for. Who wouldn’t want this person for an employee?
One of my recent clients had a family member take out all of her numbers from the resume I wrote for her. I asked her where her numbers were when she showed me the “rewrite”, that was simply what I had given her in another format and minus her numbers. I was sitting across from her in a cafe and I asked her again, where are your numbers? Her relative had taken out the twenty-plus client accounts she was responsible for overseeing and added that she was an “accounts clerk”. I asked how she can have that title and not the number of accounts. Wouldn’t that be the first question she is asked in an interview? Would a potential employer think she was lying without her number of accounts or her position?
There have been numerous examples of this with many of my clients I’ve worked with. Not a day goes by when I hear someone can’t find employment and I always ask, do they know their numbers?
If anything, one small habit to begin at any time is to record in a safe space your numbers on a daily or weekly basis and begin putting these into your conversations. We all occasionally get caught off guard, even I do sometimes, yet keeping a regular running tally is helpful when least expected. It’s also nice to open the document and look at what one has accomplished, especially on a bad day, and knowing the information is readily available next time you need it.
This is a contributed blog post by Angela Capinera, CEO of Your Mind in Bloom, LLC. Angela is heading into her fourteenth year as an official CEO, having been helping people for 20+ years. When not running her business, Angela is involved with her local community. She can be reached at 203-414-5176 or found on the web.
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