Executive Resume Tips: How to Add Metrics To your Chief Executive Officer Resume

There are several components that go into an effective executive resume. These include the visual professional polish, appropriate branding and content. And content not only needs to be organized in a way that allows the reader to skim and digest your details fluidly, it can be written in a way that clearly communicates your leadership capabilities as a CEO. Here are a couple ways to consider:

Write to the position you want next.

In your executive resume, start to contextualize what you want next. Some of my clients want to Interim Executive Positions with private equity firms. Some want SVP roles in multi-billion-dollar, multinational corporations. Other clients want to step into other industries or step up from a CFO or COO position, into a CEO position. Your focus of direction affects your executive resume and the changes you make to it – in every way.
So if you are writing to Interim / turnaround roles, you will want to highlight your past successes with turnarounds, revitalizations, mergers, acquisitions and reorganizations.

If you are writing to a different title in a much larger company, you will want to think expansively and accentuate the most P&L you have ever managed, the most geographical oversight you have had and the teams you have led. Focus on your metrics. The money you have made or saved a company and the things you have achieved is your strongest motivator to a larger employer and will help you make the jump from where you are to what you want to step into. If you want to step into a Chief Executive Officer role from a Chief Operating Officer or Chief Financial Officer role, consider focusing on companies with a P&L at or slightly lower that your past experiences and emphasize your strategic leadership initiatives.

Lead with your metrics.

Leaders / CEO’s don’t write about their activities or responsibilities in their C-Level executive resumes– they write about what happens when they lead those activities. When you think about your accomplishments that support and align with the position you want moving forward, make sure to write about your accomplishments in three parts: the challenge, what you did and then what the impact (or anticipated impact) is or was. When you have completed this, form the beginning of your bullet something like
this:

• Led a 12-month turnaround from years of $4M deficits to $200M revenue....

Your details after the bullet should not be bolded. Only bold the beginning of the bullet that has to do with your result. This way, your reader will quickly absorb all your results in succession at the cursory glance. This will peg the overall impression of your capabilities and your leadership as a Chief Executive Officer, at a very high level.

What if you don’t have exact metrics?

First, remember that your executive resume isn’t a legal document. What you are trying to do is give your readers a general sense of scale as to your accomplishments. If you cant remember if you, for example, drove $50M or $52M of revenue in a particular year, you can always call and consult a colleague. If that is not an option you can use a tilde after your metric or simply say approximately or in excess of …

I hope these tips will help you evaluate your current resume and provide a relatively easy method for structuring your CEO Resume for maximum impact.