People love stories. Stories sell! So, if you’re a candidate trying to sell yourself or an employer trying to sell your company and your job you really need to have stories about your successes. People always remember stories.<\/p>\n
But if stories sell, numbers tell! This seems to be one of the hardest but most simple ideas to communicate to people, especially jobseekers. People love to see and hear numbers. Job seekers who know how to use numbers to their advantage in their cover letters, on their r\u00e9sum\u00e9s and especially in their interviews, always have a phenomenal advantage.<\/p>\n
People always sound more authoritative and sure of themselves when they use numbers to demonstrate their successes. This is especially true when it comes to any individual impact on increase in revenue and\/or profits or decrease in overhead.<\/p>\n
Getting in the habit of \u201cproving\u201d your success with the stories you tell in the interviewing process with numbers really sets you apart from others. It\u2019s one thing to say in the interview that \u201cI am\/was a really good performer.\u201d It\u2019s another thing to state, \u201cI am\/was a really great performer because:<\/p>\n
\u2022 \u201cI decreased bad debt 35%.
\n\u2022 \u201cI was 130% of sales quota this year, 125% last year, and 150% the year before that.
\n\u2022 \u201cI decreased shrinkage 28%.
\n\u2022 \u201cI was able to decrease payroll costs by 10% while increasing production 7%.
\n\u2022 \u201cI saved the company $123,000 in inventory costs.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure you get the idea by now. You can even combine stories and numbers by explaining in the story how the numbers were reached. People will remember your story better when it\u2019s reinforced by numbers. When you have the numbers on your r\u00e9sum\u00e9 they often lead to great stories.<\/p>\n
I get between 75 and 100 resumes a day. The gobbledygook and fluff that I see in 98% of these resumes is astounding. Every time I read, “good written and oral communication skills,” I just want to throw up. It doesn’t get any dumber than that. The numbers also need to be significant. “Increasing sales by 2%” is useless. I would also recommend bolding your numbers<\/strong>\u00a0so that they stand out.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Remember that your resume doesn’t really get\u00a0read.\u00a0<\/em>It gets scanned. <\/em>The people scanning the resume are simply looking for three or four things:\u00a0Who did you work for?\u00a0<\/em>(Do I know what they do?)\u00a0What did you do?\u00a0<\/em>(Do I understand exactly the job this person did?)\u00a0How long were they there?\u00a0<\/em>(Simply the dates.) And,\u00a0How well did they do… What was their performance?\u00a0<\/em>(And there is no better way to communicate your performance than by stating numbers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People love stories. Stories sell! So, if you’re a candidate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n