The long-tenured search strategy
‘N ineteen years,” Oliver Thompson says. “Nineteen years, one job and one company. I was let go about three months shy of my 20th work anniversary.”
Thompson, 44, 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 — were enough to stay there.”
Like many longtime employees, Thompson found himself on the wrong side of the balance sheet earlier this year. “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, a career adviser and former 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,” Boswell says. “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, Thompson 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 that once he began sending out resumes — OK, revised resumes, Thompson says — 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. “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,” Thompson says.
So an obituary instead of a birth announcement?
“Exactly,” he says. “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 rather than 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 customer-satisfaction surveys in which he received high marks, replacing 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 customer 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.”
Especially young companies, says Boswell. “There’s an expectation that startups hire the best and the brightest, but with those hirings comes another expectation — that they’ll move on to the next startup with a year,” she says.
To help alleviate those concerns, Boswell says prospective employees should express their enthusiasm for not only maintaining growth at a company but also building it from the ground up. “If I’m a new app provider and I want my users to have a successful experience with customer service, I’ll make sure that my customer-service team is headed by someone who has ample experience,” she says. “But I’d be cautious about hiring someone who emphasized that experience over a desire to create new experiences based on new models. I want someone who will show me that they’ve learned a lot but is focusing that knowledge in a new direction.”