Have you made yourself the STAR of your career story or do you languish in anonymity and prioritize your employer over yourself?
Don’t make your employer the main focus of your career journey! When you create your resume, try not to highlight the name of each employer in bold or all caps. While people do look for the names of your employers, they care more about the roles you’ve had.
Use accomplishment-focused bullet points, or what I refer to as STAR stories. Future employers care less about your job duties and more about what you contributed to your career. Capture the reader’s attention by including brief, impactful bullet statements that highlight the effects you had in each role, ideally using metrics to show the positive results you achieved for the company or client.
Here’s an example of how you can write to make yourself the STAR of your career:
Introduced Six Sigma and lean methodologies to extract $750,000 in production costs and boost daily output by 60% while maintaining a 99.5% quality rating and 100% on time delivery.
In the age of digital recruitment, starring in your resume isn’t enough. You also need to be the STAR of your online reputation. More and more companies, and all executive recruiters that I know, use the Internet to find or vet candidates. If they entered your name in a Google search, would they uncover your profile or would the response be “search not found”?
At a minimum, create a profile on LinkedIn then use the helpful online prompts to expand your online content until you achieve a LinkedIn “All-STAR” profile rating. Three key elements of an “All-STAR” profile ranking include: a business appropriate profile picture; a complete career history replicating the STAR stories from your resume; and at least 3 recommendations from people in your network who can eloquently speak to the positive impact you made.
Future possibilities are endless when you seize every opportunity to make yourself the STAR of your career story.