Take Flight With a Business-Lyrical Resume
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So many resumes are flat – out of tune and uninspiring compositions. If you've read one "goal-oriented sales producer's" resume, you've read a million.

Instead of dampening your writing muse with a plethora of requirements that dull, consider the value of a musically inclined communication.

A business-lyrical resume is a metric and results-focused a cappella that breaks out into a chorus from time to time. It should sing with melodic stories that compel emotion and intellectual connection and forge a bond with your target reader.

Harmonizing your resume stories with an equal blend of hard and soft skills as well as integrating metrics with influence, problem resolving and process transformation skills will more quickly consummate interview conversations.

How you do this is by rolling up your intellectual and creative sleeves and conducting organized career brainstorming.
  • Find a Quiet Space – a porch surrounded by inspiring foliage; a room where you are embraced by solitude; a cushy seat at your favorite desk.
  • Research Your Audience. Visit Manta, Glassdoor, business journals, LinkedIn and a plethora of other resources to start unearthing facts, figures and cultural nuances of your target reader.
  • Begin Brain Dump of career challenges you faced, the very specific actions you took to meet those challenges as well as the results you achieved in quantifiable terms.
  • Vivify Your Details. Jot down the time that the team lost inertia and you stepped in with an idea that spurred a rebound. Or, what about the time you saw your boss struggling with a deadline and offered to take a bundle of tasks off his plate. Expand upon your steps to help increase your manager's productivity and meet deadlines, and how this helped achieve bigger and broader office, regional or company-wide goals. How about the client who angrily emailed she was ready to jump ship, but you saved the day by appeasing through added value problem solving? Dump those detail from your mind to the page.
  • Differentiate Yourself. As importantly, vet out what strengths you employed throughout the process. Are you an apt influencer, a deep intellectual analyzer, a prolific written communicator or presenter, someone who works well solitarily or in teams (or both)? Weave those assets intuitively and colorfully into your stories.
  • Take Flight! While headlines must sing, so must the copy that supports them. Seek out opportunities to punctuate bullets and paragraphs with bold rhythms and undulations. Create a drumbeat of how you do what you do so well. Extend beyond the norm and be the facilitator of career notes expressed organically and emphatically.
The point is, abandon (initially, at least) resume writing limitations and liberate yourself as a personal marketing agent. Author a colorful, bold concerto. Quit comparing and contrasting the disputable and conflicting resume advice for a day or two and focus your energies on orchestrating your symphony onto a blank page.