Tips to Lengthen Your Executive Resume

By the time you reach the executive level, you have undoubtedly racked up a ton of skills and accomplishments. However, it’s not uncommon for your massive list to not translate well on the resume, leaving it too short.

As an executive, you want to make sure that your resume fully represents what you’ve managed to accomplish over the years. So if yours isn’t long enough, here are some tips to help you stretch it out.

Tell Your Story

One way that you can stretch out your mini 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. Then, before we know it, the moment is long gone, and we can’t remember much of anything about it.

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. So as mentioned in the previous section, it’s good to take time to think of who, what, when, where, why and how it was necessary to accomplish this great feat.

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 resume, this isn’t easy to do. However, there are a few remedies that you can take advantage of including tweaking the margins of the document, as well as adjusting the font size in half numbers (doing this actually can make a huge difference). Also you can change the font style as long as it’s still professional. Just remember as you make these adjustments to maintain the same font consistency you had in your original version.

Every little thing counts when you’re creating your resume, and length is no exception. So as you think of all the tweaking you need to do, don’t forget to add length to your list as well.