It happens often for entrepreneurs to become paid employees. However, such people do not know how to make a resume properly in order to attract the attention of potential employers.
What is important to understand about the family business and resume?
- They can be entrepreneurs with experience in team management, or they can be freelancers who actually work alone.
- These people often apply for senior positions. When a person has already had the general manager position, he is looking for a similar status.
- These people rarely know how to write a resume because they don’t need it.
- First of all, they will look for work among friends, but even there will be asked for a resume.
So how can you help someone with experience to master specific tasks and create products from scratch to write a resume?
What is important to include when you write a resume?
When you start writing a resume on your own, you may find it rather difficult, which is why you can pay professional to write my resume. It is easy to hire someone and say write my resume and there are many professionals working for a company with a team of best writers providing resume writing services.
- Name, contact details (no need to write about marital status). A link to your personal website or a link to your LinkedIn profile.
- The title of your position is exactly the same as in the description of the vacancy you are applying for. For example, here is the Global Head of Operations, or it could just be a COO (Chief Operations Officer). This will immediately increase your chances because they are being selected for keywords.
- A paragraph that reflects the result of your work as a leader (or a master of your craft) over a long period of time. This is the standard thing and here you need to formulate what kind of professional you have become thanks to the totality of your achievements.
- The list at the beginning (see screen above) presents the key competencies (which match what a particular employer is looking for). It’s a good idea for a resume. This section can be structured separately as Core Competences.
Below is another example of what competencies can be identified.
Please note that the competencies are presented before the “Work experience” section. Many applicants use similar wording for other purposes that is, in the bullets in the “work experience” section.
There is a list of “competencies” including “cross-cultural talent training and development”.
It is not clear from this how well a person is able to organize these processes. Anything that starts with a noun is not a result. This is an opinion about their own competencies. Experts advise to formulate achievements in verbs, and not to connect your own competencies and skills with specific positions.
How to add work experience to a resume? Show non-obvious skills first. Many entrepreneurs do not realize how much in-demand skills they have. For example, the vast majority of those who are self-employed can:
- They sell their own product or service. This skill must be indicated in the resume and confirmed by quantitative targets (amounts, sales, average bill, number of customers);
- select a team for tasks (as soon as a startup begins to grow, the founder himself carefully selects people for the team, but often does not attach importance to the importance of this skill). It makes sense to write in your resume how many people you hired, their results, how long they worked with you, how they grew, and so on;
- achieve maximum results with the minimum budget. Many entrepreneurs start out without a team or budget and yet complete tasks that large companies would not even take on without the resources. Out-of-the-box and flexible thinking can be shown in the resume using the example of completed tasks when no budget;
- fix what doesn’t work or works poorly. This is the quality of those who created something of their own. When a company is looking for a leader, there is usually only one question for the perfect candidate: “Can this person solve our problems?” (that is, correct the situation). It is recommended that entrepreneurs reflect on their experience and formulate what processes they can correct and show results in numbers.
What is desirable to indicate in the resume for the position of Head
- Team results (not just yours). For example, how many people on your team got promoted?
- If you were invited to projects because specialists like you are rare, write “hand-picked by XYZ firm to direct the strategic integration of the $ 350M integration of ….”
- Give a definition of “leadership qualities” in concrete terms. For example, the qualities of a leader include the skill to formulate tasks with high quality, to distribute roles in the team in accordance with the individual characteristics of each employee, to manage the team so that tasks are completed on time and do not stretch the budget. Common phrases such as “leadership skills”, “team management”, “department work organization”, “effective collaboration control”, “strategic decision making” are completely avoidable in the resume, because they lack specificity
Examples of achievement statements for entrepreneurs and freelancers
For IT
Typical candidate wording: “Working on a deep tech startup that would double the capacity of the company.”
Improved wording: Roadmapped a deep tech start-up from strategic planning to on-time, on-budget rollout in 1 year. Outcome: Doubled data processing capacity and increased revenue by $ 42M.
For sales
Typical wording: “Commercial director in manufacturing companies. Development of measures to expand sales markets and increase sales ”.
Improved wording: “Reversed the performance of 4 mid-size companies from negative to up to + $ 124M in 18 months.”
For designers, copywriters, illustrators and others
If that were the case, consider which audience was reading your content? Or how many T-shirts were produced with your print? Be sure to include links to your work and portfolio.
One more tip: use bullet points differently
There is no need to list job responsibilities, especially since entrepreneurs rarely write them down for themselves. List what you did (not did), use bullets for that. For example, like this:
On the right, in the blue block, key skills (personnel management, identification, analysis and minimization of risks) and achievements (staff turnover – 2%, increase in employee productivity by 24%, platform expansion to $ 28M) are displayed.
More things to remember
- In the case of executive positions, it is allowed to make two pages of a resume instead of one.
- Only the experience of the last 10-15 years is important. If you have earlier experience that is relevant to the position, make a separate prior experience section.
- Write the words impact, achievements or accomplishments right after the name of the position. In other words, focus on achievements and list them in bullets.