How can you keep your resume from being drab, dull, ho-hum, weak, or boring? Follow these expert secrets and you will have a resume that is accurate, credible, and professional while communicating your true value and worth to an employer.

1. Be specific. When describing your job activities, include examples of specific things you have done that have been valuable to your organization. Be brief with general statements and generous with stories and examples. Your resume will be more credible and more powerful because you can back up your statement of qualifications.

Here’s an example. “Contributed strategies to increase customer loyalty and drive revenue growth” — tell the specific story: “Developed monthly customer focused newsletter providing investment advice and trading strategies. Increased trading activity and generated significant referral business that added 11% incremental business in 2004 and directly contributed to record year.”

2. Add numbers. As you can see in the previous example, it’s important to document your successes by measuring results. This is how you know your efforts were successful. Take a look at the various aspects of your job and see if you can show an improvement, then add numbers or percentages that are proof of your capabilities.

Every organization has criteria for success. Find out what matters to your organization, then document how you have helped them to be successful. Consider these areas of measurement that are meaningful to most companies:
* Revenue or sales growth
* Profit increase
* Cost control
* Efficiency improvement
* Productivity increase
* Waste reduction
* Activity increase
* Market-share growth
* Decrease in competition

3. Let your personality shine through. Your resume should be as unique as you are. One way to do that is by including your specific stories, as discussed above. Another is to share information about how you achieve results. Do you do it by persuading or convincing others? By inspiring your team? By sheer hard work and dogged persistence? Mention these kinds of traits in your stories and in your Summary/Introduction, and you will have a resume that is like nobody else’s.

Consider the difference:
(A) * Gained more than $400,000 in new business.
(B) * Relentlessly cold-called every new business start-up in the county, making as many as 20 cold calls per day for six weeks. As a result, gained more than $400,000 in new business — more than twice as much as any other sales rep in the office.

Here’s another example:
(A) * Led successful membership drive that met all chapter goals for new pledges.
(B) * Provided inspirational leadership to a dedicated membership team. Gained their support for new ways of approaching pledges; kept spirits high during intense three-week pledge period that often involved 12-hour days. Achieved 100% of membership goals for the first time in 8 years.

Most job seekers make the mistake of including too much detail about job duties in their resumes. Keep in mind, job duties are the same for anyone who holds that job. What makes you unique are the activities and achievements you contributed while you held that job.

Employers want to know that you will be successful working for them. What better way to prove it than by sharing stories that are specific, filled with hard proof (numbers), and indicate how you achieved your results?