The Green Business Executive Résumé

Excerpted from the upcoming book, “Tailoring the Green Suit: Empowering Yourself for an Executive Career in the New Green Economy” © 2010, Dan Smolen.

We know that hiring managers are most-predisposed to the best green-trained and educated executive talent. Understanding that a busy hiring manager may have an inches thick stack of résumés (to triage), he or she may give any of those documents a spare 25-second look-over.

There is no denying that good résumés elicit more-immediate and positive response while not-so-good résumés often get tossed in the circular file.

This document can open doors to a new job; understanding that it includes valuable real estate will help you make it a more-effective job-landing asset. Since your core objective is to get noticed by a green executive hiring-manager, you need to use that real estate well to communicate your express green business executive career objectives, key green accomplishments, green or sustainability-related training and education, the greenness of your work assignments, and metrics – lots of metrics.

A truly outstanding résumé will quantify your professional career accomplishments and help the hiring manager answer questions such as these:

• How much new business was the executive personally-responsible for generating in the previous year or year-to-date?
• How large is the executive’s current operating budget? How much has it grown in the past three years?
• How large is the executive’s head count? How much has the executive’s head count increased over the past three years?
• How much of the operating budget has the executive recouped? How much of the savings are attributable to the executive’s energy and resource conservation efforts?

But, how should you organize the information on your résumé? Should you present your information chronologically or according to function? Susan Ireland speaks to this issue. She is one of the U.S.’s foremost authorities on résumé-writing and the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Perfect Résumé (5th Edition) and Ready-Made Résumés software. She is a frequent blogger, a well-respected leader, and her website – SusanIreland.com – is an important destination for anyone needing sound résumé-writing advice.

Ireland says that “since the 1980s, résumés have gone through an evolution.” Back then, use of the chronological résumé as presentation-of-choice began to wane as MBA-earning business executives opted for the unorthodox functional résumé format. Where an old-school chronological résumé may have dryly answered - Where did the executive work and when did he or she work (there)? – the new format provided the executive the means to project uniqueness by detailing core-competencies, special or unusual skills, career goals, and motivations.

She recalls that by the 1990s, “it seemed as if the functional résumé was working, especially if the executive had work-history problems.” That is because the functional résumé could enable a business executive to shine while downplaying the absence of any key skills, a pattern of short (2 years or less) job assignments, or the presence of not-easily-explained timeline cavities. Yet, many hiring managers and executive recruiters grew suspicious of candidates relying on this type of presentation.

Now, Ireland says, most business executives favor a combination résumé format which provides chronological details but also showcases the executive’s skills, accreditations, and accomplishments.

When crafting your résumé, be mindful of the real estate agent’s mantra – the three most important considerations are LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION – for the details you need to communicate most, and most-effectively, should appear prominently on the first page.

Tailoring the Green Suit: Empowering Yourself for an Executive Career in the New Green Economy will be available online, and on booksellers’ shelves this spring.