Time well spent:
A long tenure at one company may require a specific job-search strategy
Oliver Thompson says he worked as an account manager for a fitness equipment company for nearly two decades. “It was my first job out of school,” he says. “I never really put together a resume or even thought about looking for another job because I really liked what I did and the people I worked with. I just assumed those reasons — and the fact that I was good at my job — was enough to stay there.”
Like many long-time employees, Thompson, 47, found himself on the wrong side of the balance sheet a few years ago. “I was a casualty of consolidation,” he says. “There were people in another office doing what I did, and they were doing it for much less money.”
While companies often claim they base personnel decisions on a variety of areas, you can usually check out the financial bottom line to see if they’re telling the truth, says Tina Boswell, an analyst with the U.S. Department of Labor. “In large corporations, all the good feelings in the world can’t make up for a loss of revenue or overspending in a certain area,” says Boswell. “If you look deep enough, every employee-retention decision that doesn’t directly
relate to performance comes down to dollars.”
Experience for hire
After the shock of being consolidated out of his position wore off, Thomspon says he entered the job market with a new sense of purpose. “I realized there were a lot of things I didn’t necessarily like at my former job but I put up with them because I liked my situation,” he says. “I guess you call that complacency.”
And despite hearing differently from friends who had suffered similar fates, Thompson says once he began sending out resumes — OK, revised resumes — he had no problem hearing from potential employers. “My first resume was a bust because it was all about my experience and what I had accomplished,” he says. “Luckily, my severance
included five sessions with a career coach and the first thing she did was tell me my resume was total crap.”
Not quite in those terms, Thompson admits, but she had nothing nice to say about it,” he says. “She told me — and rightfully so, I had to admit after being initially shocked — that my resume was like a historic document, nothing about the future.”
So, an obituary instead of a birth announcement? “Exactly,” says Thompson. “I just assumed your resume was supposed to sum up all of your experience but when all that experience comes from one company, it can come across as a history lesson.”
His resume, Thompson’s career coach argued, should be used as a preface, like an introduction to a book. “We worked on it our next two meetings and I went back and really looked at what I did in my former job and milked everything out of it that I could,” Thompson says.
Into the future
One quick fix meant Thompson’s top-of-the-resume summary of his skills was revised to focus on his value to his potential employers, not vaguely dwell on previous accomplishments: “I am the perfect liaison between your client and your company, the essential facilitator who works with your sales, production, delivery and maintenance teams to ensure 100-percent customer satisfaction, resulting in increased sales and revenue” replaced “With 18 years of experience, I consistently helped customers achieve their goals.”
Thompson removed references to specific customersatisfaction surveys, in which he received high marks,
and replaced them with a singular statement that reflected not just the overall tone of the glowing comments and reviews he received from clients, but also the total amount of revenue those clients brought to his previous employer. “Backing up a statement about your proficiency with actual numbers is always a good idea,” says resume writer Susan
Cora. “Tell me your customers love you and I think ‘are you going to tell me they hate you?’ Show me the amount of money that customers love helped produce instead. That’s how you get my attention.”
Bottom-line benefits
Cora says employees with years of experience at one company can use that to their advantage. “Not many employers are concerned with loyalty these days because they know they’ll lose people to the highest bidder but they still place a value in employees who will stick it out for a few years,” she says. “It’s costly to train employees so bringing in someone with a resume that includes six jobs in five years is a risk. Hiring someone who sees the value
in a long-term work relationship can help companies with stability.”