Boost the power of your resume with this 1 great tip!

Boost the power of your resume! The key to successful resumes is to capture your accomplishments. But many people get lost in thinking that they have no accomplishments.

“I just did my job!”

In fact, the word accomplishment strikes terror in the heart of many job seekers. “I just did my job!” No, you didn’t just do your job if you really cared about your work!

Most employees will have accomplishments. Amazingly, I hear this even from top-level executives and management, “There’s nothing special about me…”

You need to stop thinking of the resume as a list of duties. When you do that, you rob the resume of its power.

So what then?

Here’s the tip I give many of my clients. You now have one strategy professional resume writers often use:

Boost your resume with  the CAR formula

What’s a CAR formula? CAR stands for Challenge, Action, Result.

  1. What is the challenge you faced?
  2. Which action did you take?
  3. Define the results?

Start asking yourself this and write down the answers. Do it for several scenarios. When you write your resume, you can actually leave the formula in or you can omit it and just think it through and write the answers. Either way, you will boost your resume and it will be more powerful.

Example: Construction Project Manager Resume

  • Blackstone Hospital Vertical Addition, Charlotte, NC – Project Manager. $23 million 3-story vertical addition to existing hospital with 52,820 square feet of new space for 52 patient rooms, including an infusion build-out as well as addition to central energy plant.

Challenge: Build 3-floor concrete structure expansion on top of working hospital.

Action: Extensively coordinated project to protect roof of existing hospital being renovated to become a patient floor with an initial budget based on existing structure and 2 structural drawings. Extended 5 existing elevators to provide access to the new floors and completed and certified 2 new elevators prior to removal of existing elevators.

Result: Hospital remained fully operational throughout construction without any disruption and turned over to owner in three phases, 1st floor 33 weeks, 2nd floor 35 weeks, and 3rd floor 37 weeks. Finished 10 days ahead of schedule with a planned $100,000 owner rebate due to effective cost containment and negotiations with suppliers and subcontractors.

You can do this for any field at any level of your career.

If you use it, your resume will be that much more powerful!

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4 Comments

  1. Mark Harai on April 15, 2011 at 2:00 pm

    These are great tips here Julie — off to share them with the community.

    Thanks Julie!



    • Julie Walraven on April 15, 2011 at 2:07 pm

      You are always Wonderful, Mark! Thank you so much!



  2. Julie Walraven on November 5, 2012 at 10:36 am

    Hi Haid, If you understand the process:
    What was the challenge?
    Was there no risk register?
    What did you do, Action taken?
    that might be the developed risk register for complex turnkey project.
    What was the result?
    Achieved top-ranked project delivery.

    To make this better, add metrics 5 days ahead of schedule or cost-savings of 35%…



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Julie Walraven, Design Resumes

Julie Walraven

Professional Resume Writer

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