An executive resume is usually not the best-written resume on the market, even though the candidate has the most experience. The leader has so much diverse experience that they either over-flood their resume with every detail or they under-sell themselves.
More executives ask for resume feedback than we can answer one by one. That’s the reason we created The 10-Second Executive Resume Test, a free self-assessment that lets you evaluate your resume through a headhunter’s eyes. Before you take the test, this guide explains how a headhunter reads a resume and what to look for in your own.
A Recruiter Scans Resumes Before Reading
A headhunter doesn’t start by reading every bullet on your resume. Your experience matters a great deal, and the first pass is a quick scan for the handful of signals that show whether you could be right for the role at hand. Your resume doesn’t need to include everything you’ve ever done. Its first job is to earn a closer read.
One of the most common ways a resume loses that attention is by burying its strongest accomplishment deep on the page, which we cover in Why Recruiters Stop Reading Your Resume After One Line.
The Five Questions a Headhunter Asks of An Executive Resume
Whatever the role, a recruiter scanning a senior resume is looking for answers to the same five questions.
- Who are you professionally? Your professional identity should be clear within seconds. A reader should see Controller, Director of Tax, or VP of Human Resources without having to work it out from a list of duties.
- What level do you operate at? At the executive level, recruiters look for scope, leadership, and decision-making. A resume that reads as a list of tasks suggests a lower level than the one you are targeting.
- What have you accomplished? Outcomes carry more weight than responsibilities. Describing what changed because you were in the role says more than describing what the role was.
- How big or complex has your responsibility been? Scale gives every accomplishment its meaning. Revenue, budget, team size, number of locations, and business units all help a recruiter judge how much you have managed.
- Where could I place you? A recruiter needs to know which kind of search you fit. A clear position makes that decision easy, and a resume built to fit every role makes it harder.
Findability Matters Too
Before a headhunter can scan your executive resume, they have to find you, and that search is driven by keywords. Headhunters commonly use paid recruiting tools on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn’s own documentation for its Recruiter product shows how those searches work. Recruiters can search by job title, company, and skills, combine terms with Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT, and mark terms as must-haves. When a term is a must-have, it has to appear in the profile for that candidate to show up in the results.
That makes the words on your profile and resume part of your visibility. LinkedIn’s data also shows the effect of one simple step: members who list at least one skill receive up to 2x more profile views and connection requests and up to 4x more messages, according to the LinkedIn Talent Blog.
If you work in finance or accounting, the credentials and skills recruiters search for are worth stating plainly. Our guides to the accounting certifications and licenses employers look for and the key skills every financial manager needs cover the credentials and skills to include, and our 12-Step Guide for LinkedIn Profile Optimization walks through the rest of your profile.
How to Check Your Own Executive Resume
Read your resume the way a headhunter would, giving it about ten seconds. Then ask whether a stranger could answer the five questions above without searching for the answers. If any of them takes effort, that’s the place to start.
The 10-Second Executive Resume Test turns this process into a checklist. It covers the 10 things we look for when we review senior and executive resumes. You give yourself one point for each check you pass, and you finish with a score that shows where your resume is working and where it may be leaving opportunities on the table.
Make the First Few Seconds Count
A resume is a marketing document for your career. We’ve met outstanding executives with underwhelming resumes, and polished resumes that didn’t reflect the strength of the person behind them. That’s why we believe hiring decisions should never rest on a resume alone. Still, a resume often decides whether you get the opportunity to have the conversation, so it’s worth making sure it does its job in the first few seconds.
Ready to see how yours measures up? Take the free 10-Second Executive Resume Test and find out where your resume is losing time.
