How Adding Length To An Executive Resume Can Make It Stronger

You’ve probably developed a long list of accomplishments and skills by the time you’ve reached the executive level. But even if you’ve got a tremendous amount of experience, sometimes it doesn’t translate particularly well to your resume.

Executives need a resume that represents all of their accomplishments from the entire span of their careers. If you don’t have quite enough length to your resume, here’s a look at a few ways to stretch it out.

Tell Your Story

One way that you can stretch out your mini executive resume is to tell a story. While many resumes are typically thought of as dry documents (and cover letters are meant for storytelling), there are ways to sneak a story into yours. This is especially true for executive resumes for the same rules don’t apply as for career levels.

There are a number of ways to tell your story, including defining who you are and what you want to accomplish in your executive profile, which replaces the objective/summary of qualifications. Also, you can tell 2-3 sentence stories as you define each one of your accomplishments with who, what, when, where, why and how information.

Include Every Detail

One habit that most workers get into early in their careers that seems to be hard to get out of is thoroughly keeping track of accomplishments every step of the way. Most times we’re too busy working to even notice what we’ve done. Later, we lose information about a certain accomplishment, as it’s difficult to reconstruct something from memory alone after a long period of time.

The only problem with this “non-strategy” of recordkeeping is that when it comes time to include these events in a resume, all of the details are all but lost. So we end up including basic descriptions instead of describing each event as it truly occurred. When trying to stretch out an executive resume, it’s much better to be drawing on real notes, as it makes it possible to add in verifiable facts that give legitimate strength and length to the document. Take some time to pause occasionally and write down the important aspects of accomplishments–the sooner, the better.

Try to Avoid Half Pages

That nagging half page can be a major annoyance when working on your resume. It seems that just when you’re putting the last few bits of information in the document, an entire section shifts to a new page, leaving you with a partial page to deal with. This means you either have to subtract information, or add new details.

In a concise executive resume, this isn’t easy to do. You can, however, use your word processor to eliminate those half pages by slightly changing the margins and adjusting the size of the font, subtracting or adding a half number to the font size. You can use different fonts, too, but make sure that it doesn’t make the resume look unprofessional. A consistent font is extremely important, so pay attention to the aesthetics of the resume.

Every little thing counts when you’re creating your resume, and length is no exception. While you’re spending time updating and making little resume changes, don’t ignore the resume’s length or you’ll be missing a great opportunity.