Tips to Lengthen Your Executive Resume

When you’ve reached the executive level, you’ve probably had a career full of successful accomplishments. However, it’s not uncommon for your massive list to not translate well on the resume, leaving it too short.

Executives need a resume that represents all of their accomplishments from the entire span of their careers. If you don’t have quite enough length to your resume, here’s a look at a few ways to stretch it out.

Tell Your Story

One way that you can stretch out your mini executive resume is to tell a story. While many resumes are typically thought of as dry documents (and cover letters are meant for storytelling), there are ways to sneak a story into yours. This is especially true for executive resumes for the same rules don’t apply as for career levels.

There are a number of ways to tell your story, including defining who you are and what you want to accomplish in your executive profile, which replaces the objective/summary of qualifications. Also, you can tell 2-3 sentence stories as you define each one of your accomplishments with who, what, when, where, why and how information.

Include Every Detail

One habit that most workers get into early in their careers that seems to be hard to get out of is thoroughly keeping track of accomplishments every step of the way. Most times we’re too busy working to even notice what we’ve done. When it comes time to write a resume, we’re often at a loss when trying to explain an accomplishment that happened a long, long time ago.

The only problem with this “non-strategy” of recordkeeping is that when it comes time to include these events in a resume, all of the details are all but lost. So we end up including basic descriptions instead of describing each event as it truly occurred. In your case, remembering everything that occurred per accomplishment can help immensely when trying to stretch out the resume. Take some time to pause occasionally and write down the important aspects of accomplishments–the sooner, the better.

Try to Avoid Half Pages

That nagging half page can be a major annoyance when working on your resume. It seems that just when you’re putting the last few bits of information in the document, an entire section shifts to a new page, leaving you with a partial page to deal with. This means you either have to subtract information, or add new details.

In a concise executive resume, this isn’t easy to do. By employing some old tricks like changing the font size by half points and experimenting with different margins, though, you’ll be able to get rid of that half page. You can use different fonts, too, but make sure that it doesn’t make the resume look unprofessional. Don’t switch the font around too much within the document, though, as you need to have a consistent look.

Every little thing counts when you’re creating your resume, and length is no exception. Be sure to pay some attention to the length of your resume; it may end up making a bigger difference than other your other tweaks and changes.