Interview Tips >Listing Your Benefits – Putting Only Your Best Information on a Resume
Barbara Pewterschmidt: “Honey, we’re rich again! I divorced Ted Turner and took half his money. We own half of CNN!”
Carter Pewterschmidt: “Hooray!”
Barbara Pewterschmidt: “And TNT.”
Carter Pewterschmidt: “…Neat.”
Earlier we wrote about the importance of limiting the amount of information on a resume. Your resume is designed to sell yourself – it is a sales document with you as the product. When you create your resume, you need to ask yourself: Will this information make the employer want to hire me more. If the answer is yes, you put it in. If it is anything from “no” to “probably not,” you take it out.
Most resumes have a lot of wasted information. Applicants put jobs that have no importance to the employer, accomplishments that are irrelevant, and so many clichés you wonder if they didn’t just get their resume from a random cliché generator.
Yet even resumes that understand the importance of good information often make mistakes. One of the most common mistakes is to list “features” of the product (you) that, while they make you look like a better employee, that effect is marginal at best.
How to Sell Your Features
More does not necessarily mean better. In fact, it can be worse. Let’s look at this using a product example. Say that you are looking to buy a cereal, and you look online to see the cereal’s benefits. There are two product descriptions, both for the same project. Which of these makes you want to buy the product more?
Product Description 1:
- 100% of your daily value of 27 vitamins and minerals.
- Tastes delicious.
- Made with organic ingredients.
Product Description 2:
- 100% of your daily value of 27 vitamins and minerals.
- Tastes delicious.
- Made with organic ingredients.
- Corn was milled using most modern technological equipment.
- Staff that milled corn recently got salary raises.
- Hand washing stations at manufacturing facility are well maintained.
- Shipping coordinators are handpicked for memory and reliability.
- Cereal is only shipped to retail companies with good business ratings.
- Cereal bags are clear so the cereal can be seen when the box is opened.
- Box tops are designed to rip open easily….
Reviewing the Two Sales Descriptions
Both the first and second description are designed to sell you the same product. Yet the second description lists off dozens of additional benefits. Knowing that the staff is well paid and that the box tops open easily is nice. The question, though, is do you really care? Does that additional information actually make you want to buy that product more? For most people, the answer is “no.” The first three benefits were enough to sell the product, and the rest is superfluous information.
Possible Downsides of Listing Many Unimportant Benefits
Still, even though the benefits are clearly useless information for most people, there may be the occasional person that sees those extra benefits and goes “okay, this is a cereal I can get behind.” So the question is: Is there any harm to listing that many benefits, even if they are only of minimal importance?
The answer is yes. There are a lot of possible downsides to listing that much information. The most common negatives include:
- Most important benefits are skimmed over, because the interviewer is short on time.
- Most important benefits are forgotten after a less important benefit is read.
- Most important benefits seem less important because they are part of a sea of uselessness.
- Interviewer is bored with you, confused, and forgets your best qualities.
There are a lot of reasons that listing many benefits that aren’t that relevant to the employer do more harm than good. For every one or two employers that think all of that information is useful, there are 100’s of others that don’t, and the ones that do think it is useful will still probably be impressed by your few best points.
Turning This Information Into Action
The key point to all of this is that when you write your resume, every single item you put in (your accomplishments, your education – even your employers) must do the best possible job selling yourself to the employer. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t go in the resume, even if that information is still a mild benefit.
Take Away Tips
- More is not always better.
- Limit your information to only your best sales points.
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