Building a Resume: Strengthen Your Experience Section by Asking these Simple Questions

The hardest work in building a resume comes in properly developing your experience section.

On the soft skills inventory page, I give an example of how to take a very general skill description (“excellent communication skills”) and break it down into more specific categories (5 highly-regarded talents) and then into a much larger number of soft “sub-skills.”

Building a Resume: Focusing on Sub-Skills

It’s really these “sub-skills” that matter most to employers and that we can best use where it counts the most on our resume – in what I call the “detailed descriptions of accomplishments” within our experience section.

The question is: How?

How can we quickly and easily take something that’s so large and general and break it down into naturally small-bite-sized chunks? To get more specific about exactly what we mean?

Building a Resume: Two Quick and Easy Methods

I want to share with you two quick and easy methods to help you to further build your resume by strengthening your knowledge, awareness and confidence about your previous work experience and qualifications.

You can use these simple techniques in building a resume for so many different kinds of “big skills,” but I’m going to focus on teamwork skills or the issue of what it means to be a “team player.”

The term “team player” is another buzz phrase that we throw into our resumes and throw around in our interviews, but we rarely explain what it really means about our work performance, or how we can use our teamwork skills to help prospective employers.

On the other hand, when we do explain it properly we get a lot more credit for it from employers. We also tend to feel more confident in our job search because it helps us to build more awareness and memory of our skills and accomplishments.

“Team player” is a similar term to the “excellent communication skills” example that I gave on the soft skills inventory page – both are too general and vague to be of any value when stated on their own without additional specific sub-skills.

General statements like this need this additional evidence of accomplishment to back them up and give them strong credibility.

And one way to add this evidence of accomplishment is through using the STAR technique.

Building a Resume: The STAR Technique

The situation-task-action-result (STAR) formula or technique is best known in interview preparation, practice and presentation but is also very useful in developing the experience section of your resume as well as the 3rd paragraph of your cover letter.

Pretend that you’re sitting in an interview, and one of the two interviewers present asks you the following question:

“Please give us an actual example from your past work history of when you helped out your teammates in a professional crisis or time of need.”

Given that this is a “behavioral question,” you take a few moments to think, and then begin answering it using this STAR structure or format to describe:

S = Situation
a) At what company or organization were you working, and in which town/city and state/country?

b) During what years?

T = Task
c) What task, assignment or project were you asked to complete?

OR

What regular duties were you asked to perform?

A = Action
d) What specific actions did you take to successfully complete the project, that clearly, obviously and powerfully demonstrated both your teamwork skills?

R = Result
e) What was the specific successful outcome of your actions?

f) What longer-term positive impact did your actions have upon the team or organization you worked for?

Take a few minutes now to think about what the best example of teamwork skills is from your work history. Make some rough or point form notes before we continue.

If applicable to your occupation, use numbers or statistics to support your example whenever possible.

Building a Resume: How Do I Know that I’m ...?

An even more basic exercise for building your resume is to simply ask yourself the question, “How do I know... ?” when you want to break a larger skill down into its smaller components.

Pretend you have a friend who likes to debate points with you or to argue. You’re hanging out at a cafe with your friend one Sunday afternoon and you nonchalantly tell her that you’re applying for a job that requires great teamwork skills and you know that this job is perfect for you.

Your friend already knows that you have great soft skills, but can’t resist playing “devil’s advocate” with you. With a look of playful mischief on her face, your friend retorts,

“Prove it to me! How do you know that you’ve got such great teamwork skills? Name me three, and they’d better be good ones!

You’re up to the challenge, and you offer her three great teamwork skills that you’ve used effectively in the past. How do you respond to your friend? Take a few minutes now to think of and write down these three demonstrations of your ability to be a “team player.”

Your friend listens carefully to your response – you confront her with your examples of your three teamwork skills. But now she wants to know more. She acts like she doesn’t believe you. She snorts,

“Sounds great, but how do I know that you’ve actually used those skills in a stressful, fast-paced workplace? Give me examples of when you’ve used them, and then maybe I’ll believe you!”

Strange as it sounds, your friend’s “prove it to me” approach mirrors the skeptical attitude taken by many employers – and with good reason. Employers want strong, substantial evidence or proof from your work or volunteer history for every statement you make in support of your application and candidacy.

How do you respond to your friend’s forceful request for specific evidence? Take a few minutes now to write down descriptions of three specific instances from your work or volunteer history in which you used your teamwork skills effectively to help others.

Just write down whatever ideas come up. Or if you get stuck, use the STAR format above to help you complete this exercise as well.

Then, consider adding this new content to your resume and using it in your cover letter, interviews and networking activities wherever it naturally fits in.

Building a Resume: Provide "Courtroom-Quality Evidence” to Employers

Another way you could use your imagination to stimulate your memory and creativity in this way is to pretend that you’re a witness in a court case.

Think of the sort of “courtroom quality evidence” that judges and lawyers require to be convinced of the truth about a case.

In this court case, what’s being carefully examined is your resume, your qualifications and your work history as they relate to your ability to be a “team player.”

Use the same questioning format as for your imaginary friend in the cafe scenario above, and see how much valuable specific information you collect.

This is the same quality of evidence that employers prefer when you seek to convince them about your skills and accomplishments in your resume, cover letter and interview.

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