When creating your resume, it can be difficult to determine what information to highlight and what to disregard. To do this, consider what, specifically, the employer is looking for and what would convince the hiring team that you’ve got it.
To help you in crafting your high-impact sales resume, check out the list below of three mistakes to avoid.
Describing your job, not your accomplishments
Presumably, the #1 mistake in resumes across all industries is to write yourself a job description instead of a resume. Although it’s important to provide a framework of the type of job you had, you can’t stop there.
Beyond providing context to the position you held, dive deeper into the ways that you made the role your own or left an impact on the company. Try highlighting big wins such as:
- your largest sale
- a challenging situation you managed
- how (and by how much) you met or exceeded quotas
- the number of new accounts you brought on
- the growth within your current accounts
- the volume of new products you launched
Avoid providing the reader of your resume with information that could be found through a Google search of your job title. Instead, show what sets you apart from everyone else.
Including outdated or irrelevant information
Be selective about what information you choose to include based off of how relevant and recent it is. Avoid including content that isn’t significant for the industry or position that you’re targeting. You can also leave off certain positions, or allocate little space to them, if they don’t contribute to your persuasive argument that you would be a good fit for the role.
Spend time evaluating the job description to determine what’s most important to the company and for the position, then optimize your resume with information that relates to those specifications. Including too much content, especially if it’s not helping to persuade your reader, is a mistake because the most important information will likely get lost in the crowd.
Generalizing or overstating your achievements
When describing your accomplishments in each role, be specific as possible with numbers, dollar amounts, and percentages. Including this level of detail, as opposed to generalizations, bolsters the persuasiveness of your resume because the quantifiable information stands as proof that you’ve actually achieved the things you’re claiming.
When writing with this type of content, however, it can be tempting to overstate or “round up,” which is a severe misstep that could end up costing you the job. You should certainly be strategic in what information is included, and how it’s presented, but must always remain completely honest in your resume.