A Finance Resume Revamp

Jan Jobseeker (name withheld for confidentiality) had a solid professional background, but the organization and content of her previous resume were haphazard and two-dimensional. She had laid out her basic job descriptions and then listed one accomplishment for each position. You don’t hold a job for seven years and only have one accomplishment to brag about, as we all know. Jan was not selling the entire package of benefits she provided to employers.

In this section, we explain how we went about optimizing Jan’s resume. If you believe a free resume rewrite would be beneficial to you, please visit our partner Leet Resumes.

Profile Expansion

The first change we made to the new finance resume was to expand the profile section from a single sentence to a more detailed description of her background and expertise. We also added a job headline, or branding line, for greater clarity and focus, so recruiters would know right away where she “fits.” Recruiters need to know what a client does right away; leaving them guessing or being vague only hurts the resume’s impact.

Improving Searchability

We also added a core competency section to the new profile. This included relevant skill sets and functions to pique the reader’s interest and enrich the keywords for databases. These keywords were purposefully chosen to make her background applicable to a wide range of industries, rather than creating a pigeonhole by focusing on a small set of industries from her previous experience. The order of the core competencies was given consideration, with more complex skills at the top of the section and less complex skills at the bottom.

Using Qualitative Versus Quantitative

The old resume’s content was boring and uninspiring. The single achievement for each position had been written in the verbose goal/action/result (GAR) style, which did not work well for her content because it was mostly qualitative. The GAR style is somewhat outdated, but it works well with metrics when used. We changed the accomplishments to bullet points and expanded them to show how she added value to each position.

Instilling Management Capabilities

We provided additional information on major duties and highlights for the most recent position. While the old resume was three pages long, it was actually rather short on meaty content. Throughout her first two positions, we prioritized her higher-level management skills over more hands-on (and less impressive) finance and accounting responsibilities. The wording was also boosted by removing the passive voice and incorporating strong verbs and vivid descriptions.

Creating an Efficient Hierarchy

On the old resume, the education and licensures section appeared disorganized in both organization and appearance. We reorganized and reformatted the content to emphasize her MBA first and separated the CPA into its own category. We also removed the degrees’ dates because they were all more than ten years old.

Timeline Reduction

The employment timeline was significantly shortened. Jan’s experience descriptions dated all the way back to 1981. We removed ten years to keep the information as current as possible and to avoid her being tagged for her age during the screening stage.

Success Through Re-formatting

The old resume’s formatting and visual appearance were plain and inconsistent. Headers, for example, did not stand out enough to guide the reader through the document, and font styles varied. We used bold to draw attention to key items such as job titles and created a much smoother, professional appearance. Furthermore, the dense paragraph format was replaced with a mix of text and bulleted statements. The previous resume was a loose three-page document, but through material selection and formatting, we transformed it into a tighter, more organized design that was a full two pages.

The end result is a much more appealing document that does a much better job of describing what Jan accomplished over the course of her car