Your Worth in Position

A well-written scope paragraph will go a long way toward convincing most prospective employers that you are capable of doing the job that needs to be done. By describing the role you played in your last company, you provide your next boss with a feeling of confidence that you could, perhaps, play a similar role in his company. But your prospective boss surely wants more than to know you are capable. He wants the person finally selected for the position to do an exceptional job with it-better than could be done by all the other capable candidates. And that's where your worth points come in.

In a resume, obviously, you can't relate your worth points with quite the same detail as when you relate your specific contributions during an interview. The reader of your resume just wouldn't sit still long enough for you to do this. So you need to write your worth points in a special telegraphic way that gets your basic message across fast, and is at the same time memorable and dramatic. Remarkably enough, you can reduce your worth point to only two sentences with a little practice. In the first, you:

1. State specifically what you did, and
   
2. Why you did it (in general terms)
   
   
   

Another way of stating it is this. Your first sentence:

1. Should reveal the tangible, concrete action you took and
   
2. The overall objective of this action.
   

The second sentence should:

1. State the specific result of your action, plus
   
2. Any secondary results that ensued from the first.
   

The second sentence is the "payoff," clear and simple. The most effective worth points waste no words. The actions you undertook, the results that you achieved should be specific, tangible, understandable, translatable to the needs of the employer, and presented in the minimum number of words possible. As you write each worth point, imagine, if you will, that your resume is a telegram. Every word costs you money so only include those that are essential. Here are several examples to guide you.

In two brief sentences the worth points the above job-seekers use establish them as persons whose areas of responsibility operate more effectively and efficiently than they did before each of the people arrived on board. Combined, the scope paragraph plus a worth point paragraph (following it) are like a one-two punch. To use another analogy, the scope paragraph is like your balance sheet. It gives your prospective boss a picture of where you are at each point in your career. The worth point that follows is like your income statement. It shows the changes that have taken place since you assumed your position.

At this point you may have several questions: "What if there are a great many worth points I could include underneath each of my scope paragraphs. Which should I use? How many should I include?" The right worth points to include are the ones that best support your candidacy for the job objective you've stated at the top of your resume. If you can think of ten worth points from your current position and only two or three really demonstrate your ability to take on the job you're going after, they're the only ones to include! In a tightly written resume irrelevant worth points don't do a thing except distract your prospective employer, interrupting the consistent line of proof you offer of your ability to get done the job you want him to believe you can get done.

As for the number of worth points to include, it makes good sense to provide more for recent jobs than for former ones since it creates the impression that you are able to get more done today than you could in the past. There are several exceptions to this rule, however. If you've held one position far longer than another, you may want to include more worth points for the longer-duration job than for the shorter one. Similarly, if your current position is less relevant to the job objective you're going after than a former one, it pays to include more worth-points from the former position. And you can leave off the two-sentence worth point paragraph entirely for your earlier positions that are not immediately relevant to the job you presently seek. In this situation, your inclusion of "earlier" positions is just to account for where you have been, not to add proof of your ability to take on the job you are seeking. So your title and, perhaps, an abbreviated scope paragraph is more than enough.