resume advice Archives | The Glasshammer

Strong leadership skills are a hot commodity — adept leaders make things happen, promote and enhance a company’s vision, and elevate the performance of everyone they work with. Emphasizing your leadership abilities on your resume can help potential employers see the value you’d bring to their enterprise, and ultimately, make you a more attractive candidate.

A slick, well-organized resume is the first step to upping your profile as a leader, so choose a fresh template, and get ready to dive into the content.

Job searching can be draining, trying to get one of the highest paying jobs or even getting that interview, but you may be missing out on opportunities to craft each section of your resume so it reflects essential leadership skills, making it stand out among a sea of applications from similarly-experienced candidates.

Emphasizing crucial skills such as making tough decisions under pressure, guiding colleagues, or coming up with innovative ideas that shape the direction of projects can help propel your resume to the top of a company’s interview list. Below, we’ll go through 5 great ways to highlight leadership on your resume for maximum impact.

1. Include examples of coaching and mentorship

Experience in coaching or mentoring can make you more attractive to hiring managers because it shows your ability to enhance the performance of those around you.

As a starting point, note whether the job description uses specific mentorship-related keywords, such as ‘guide’ or ‘support.’ Mirroring the job description by incorporating these keywords into your resume summary or experience bullet points is a great move because it shows you have the exact skills they’re looking for and optimizes your resume for ATS software.

Then, add a few specific examples of coaching that demonstrate the impact of your mentorship. If you have metrics displaying results such as reduced employee turnover or improved employee satisfaction, now’s the time to mention them.

You can also outline positive outcomes for individuals to demonstrate your impact, such as your mentee receiving a promotion or meeting more KPIs.

2. Highlight the outcome of your projects or teams

Including measurable outcomes in your resume shows hiring managers that you don’t just lead — you lead effectively. Potential employers want to gauge the impact of your leadership on your company’s performance, so backing up your experience with hard data can help employers visualize your impact.

Examples of metrics to include in the experience or achievements sections of your resume include:

Increases in revenue, profit, or sales
Measurable improvements in team productivity
Enhanced employee or client satisfaction ratings
Improved employee retention
Time or resources saved as a result of streamlined workflows or processes

Even if you don’t have much hard data to work with, you can still use the examples above to guide you in making your resume’s experience section more results-focused so hiring managers can see your successes, not just your experiences.

3. Emphasize effective collaboration

A recent report on HR statistics found that effective teamwork and communication are two of the biggest skill gaps applicants struggle to match. While this applies to any role, effective collaboration is an especially appealing quality in a leader because it’s vital to ensuring team unity, performance, and productivity.

Managers must be able to delegate tasks effectively to ensure roles are clear and prevent workflow bottlenecks. If you have a good example of how your communication skills have improved your team’s ability to collaborate effectively, be sure to include it in the experience section of your resume.

Describe positive results after giving constructive feedback so potential employers can envision how you’ll ensure your colleagues’ growth and development. It could also be worth giving an example of how you’ve acted on feedback you received to demonstrate your ability to reflect and adapt.

4. Show you can lead a team or project remotely

According to McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey, over half of American workers are working remotely for at least part of the week. Remote leadership skills are in high demand as companies support their employees in maintaining a healthy work-life balance and ensure deliverables are met by a scattered workforce.

Demonstrating remote work skills and experience shows hiring managers you can help their company overcome these hurdles, particularly if you have experience managing a team or project in a remote setting. Even online part-time jobs like a virtual assistant or copywriter help you develop necessary skills to lead remotely.

Describe any strategies you’ve successfully employed to manage issues such as scheduling, employee development, or task management in your experience bullet points and include any quantifiable positive impacts.

5. Demonstrate your problem-solving skills

Problem-solving skills are an essential part of any successful leader’s toolkit because they allow you to identify and troubleshoot issues early, from less significant snags causing inefficiency to major problems threatening entire projects.

Providing examples of changes you’ve made to address a problem and their positive impact offers employers a clearer idea of your abilities than simply listing ‘problem-solving’ in your resume’s skills section. For example, you could add a bullet to your experience section outlining how you streamlined a key process and what difference it made to your team’s time management or productivity.

If you’re unsure where to start, abilities such as organization, effective planning, and critical analysis are strong examples of skills necessary for problem-solving and risk management.

Key Takeaway

Creating a leadership-focused resume involves more than simply listing your experience as a manager. Providing examples of how you applied leadership skills, adding performance metrics to experience bullet points, and enhancing your resume summary and skills section with the right keywords can help you communicate your career story more effectively and paint a compelling picture for potential employers.

By: Emily Crowley is a Senior Content Writer and Resume Expert at Resume Genius, where she loves helping job seekers overcome obstacles and advance their careers. She graduated from George Mason University with a degree in Foreign Language and Culture.

(The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).

Guest Contributed By Sharon Nir

Recruiters and hiring managers have unconscious and conscious bias and judgement based on employment intervals can be one of the greatest organizational impediments for success.

But if organizations attempted to understand black holes in employee resume the way astrophysicists strive to understand black holes in the universe, they could uncover concealed information about candidates that could prove valuable for the position, but might not be attained through interview, questionnaire or psychological assessment. Therefore, instead of distracting interviewers away from employment gaps, interviewees should pull future employers right into them.

Show you’re a good match

Many valuable organizational resources are consumed during the hiring process; therefore, organizations do their best to find the most promising candidates. One approach to an applicant’s assessment is based on the concept of “fit”. Three different types of “fit” exist— the first two are relatively easy to attain, the third is legendary. A person-organization fit is focused on how well an individual “fits” within the organizational culture. A person-job fit is focused on how well an individual “suits” the job he or she is hired to do in two aspects: personality and skills. The legendary option is the combination of the two in which a candidate demonstrates both organizational and job fit.

Candidate’s evaluation based on the level of “fit” is essential, because in many cases, it predicts the future success of the recruitment. In this context, the employers’ tendency to mind the gap could be explained by their look for “fitted” employees, which in their opinion translates to well-planned, long-term objectives achieved by following a gap-free career path. Additionally, employment gaps predominantly create a big question mark, and most organizations do everything they possibly can to avoid any kind of ambiguity. Therefore, the candidates have the responsibility to replace question marks with exclamation points and prove they are a perfect match for both the job and the organization.

Before you apply for a position, perform a thorough study of the company’s mindset. On the website, focus on the mission statement, values, and social responsibility initiatives or activities. Sign up for the company’s newsletter, which is a great resource for learning about the organizational culture, latest news, and employees’ appreciation. Additionally, search for recent articles about the company.

Then go back to your resume and elaborate about previous positions that are aligned with the organizational culture, mission, and social responsibility commitment at the expense of positions that are not. In the cover letter, explain how the skills and the experience you’ve gained during your employment gap would come in handy in the position for which you are applying. During the interview, gravitate the conversation towards the black holes and give specific examples of the way your core competencies, which you’ve acquired throughout the gap period can be valuable to the organization.

The past counts but the future is pertinent

The 21st century’s lifestyle dictates modifications. Gone are the days when people worked from nine-to-five, were mostly involved in physical labor, and remained in the same work place for forty years. Today, we live in a fast-paced, ever-changing business environment that promotes employment mobility and career transformations. In such eco-systems, employment gaps could be one of the best predictors of employees’ growth and future successes, because like in the universe, black holes exhibit a strong gravitational pull that could help evaluate candidates’ personalities beneficial to the position and the organization.

If you are an educated, skilled professional with employment gaps, you could contribute more to organizations than a similar candidate without gaps. You are the employee any smart forward-thinking organization would like to have. You are a curious, creative, risk-taking, self-directed, adaptive, agile, and adjustable individual who may exhibit unique problem-solving skills, which are powered by a situation analysis and a complex decision-making process.

The fact a skilled technical writer took off a year or two to write her debut novel and DJ-ed on the weekends to support her family presents a candidate who is responsible, creative, and dedicated to her mission. If an IT project manager traded her career for her family for a few years that should suggest she has her priorities straight, possesses a high-risk tolerance, and follows her values and beliefs. A successful art teacher in her 40s who took off a few years and returned to school to study architecture should give a clue this candidate has a vision, and she is unwilling to settle for anything less than what she can achieve.

Candidates with these exclusive core competencies are the catalysts of innovation and growth. They are organizations’ most-prized possessions, and most likely, they would be the ones to help the organization achieve and sustain the competitive advantage. Therefore, stop feeling inferior and instead display pride, and show you’re the organization’s legendary option as you fit both the job and the organization due to your unusual or creative career path.

A word to employers

Employers should keep in mind that hiring a candidate with employment intervals is anything but compromising. Important to remember is that a candidate with years of work experience from which she didn’t take on growth challenges is worthless to the organization, while a candidate with a modest experience from which she evolved and changed is invaluable.

About the author

Sharon Nir is the author of The Opposite of Comfortable: The Unlikely Choices of a Career Immigrant Woman (Viki Press/May 2016). Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, she holds a Bachelor of Art degree in Language and Literature from Tel Aviv University, and an MBA in Marketing and International Management from Northeastern University of Massachusetts. Sharon, her husband and two children reside in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Visit sharonnir.com and connect @sharonvnir and facebook.com/sharonvnir for more info.

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5 Ways to Highlight Your Leadership Skills on Your Resume