Powered by MOMENTUM MEDIA
Highlighting key achievements from your career history is a powerful way to demonstrate your capability to a future employer, enabling them to determine if you can contribute to their organisation if you successfully secure a role, writes Ruth Beran.
It is also a crucial way to stand out, particularly if an employer is comparing you with other candidates who only list role responsibilities or key skills.
Structure your achievements
The STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) technique provides a useful scaffold for communicating key achievements in your cover letter, resumé or your responses to interview questions:
Quantify your achievements
Adding metrics to achievements highlights their scale and how you contributed to, or supported, a project or initiative. Achievements can also tap into a range of different competencies. For example:
o How many areas of law/employees/offices does your employer have?
o How many employees work for your clients/stakeholders?
o How many offices do your clients/stakeholders have?
o How many people are in your team? (Demonstrates teamwork)
Figures provide extra context, particularly if your employer is not widely known, but note that larger is not always better; for example, experience in a suburban law firm may offer more responsibility and broader exposure to different areas of law than in a top-tier firm.
If you are unsure of the exact numbers, you can approximate, but note that your figures may be double-checked with your referees.
Demonstrate your value in interviews
Providing metrics and details together in a succinct example can give an interviewer an indication of the scope of work that was undertaken in a particular role.
So, details (in bold below) could help answer the behavioural question: Can you give an example of when you used your communication skills to work with multiple stakeholders on a project?
As a legal officer for the past two years at the Attorney-General’s Department, I worked in a team of four to provide legal research and advice for the development of a new piece of legislation: the Good Example Bill. As part of the team, I liaised with 12 external stakeholders and worked internally with our policy section to help analyse over 200 community submissions. I also worked closely with parliamentary counsel who drafted the bill. The process took nearly 24 months and incorporated the feedback from six other government stakeholders and all relevant sectors of the community. The bill is now before Parliament and is likely to pass into law by July this year.
Demonstrate your value in resumés
When listing achievements in your resumé, use dot points under each position in your experience section. Three to five dot points are ideal as dense blocks of text can be difficult to read.
A good way to write accomplishments is result-and-then-cause (i.e., result BY action). For example, having played an instrumental role in a $150,000 settlement for an international commercial client [insert name if the settlement is public knowledge] by providing timely legal research
Achievements in resumés are mini-STAR examples, where the situation is given by the job and employer, then followed by, for example:
Resumes should always be tailored for the role you are applying for. This includes removing more generic achievements to make way for relevant, quantified achievements.
While it is good to use quantified achievements, non-metric achievements can also demonstrate your value in resumés, such as: