Excerpted from Take Charge of Your Healthcare Management Career by Kenneth R. White and J. Stephen Lindsey (Health Administration Press, 2015) LESSON 42 Build Your Résumé Résumés are merely facilitation tools to get you to the interview, so be careful about spending a great deal of time preparing a perfect document. Your real emphasis should be on networking. If you can get your résumé grade up to a C, you have done what you need to do at that point you need to move on to and focus on networking. Remember: Network, or not work! J. Larry Tyler, FACHE, FHFA, FAAHC, CMPE, chairman and CEO, Tyler & Company, Atlanta, Georgia A résumé s sole purpose its only reason for existing is to get you an interview with a prospective employer. And given the weight of its single, critical role, you d be wise to put some degree of thought, effort, and creativity into it. Your résumé should succinctly tell your story and clearly demonstrate how you can help employers solve the problems they re experiencing. Both of those components are equally important. But before all that, consider what you need to do to get the kind of job you want. As you accomplish the tasks needed to achieve your professional goals, be sure to include those skills on your résumé as experience, education, and accomplishments. As you map out that plan on paper, in your mind, and verbally with others, you should find that you ve got a lot of bragging points. Here are a few tips as you create or revisit your résumé: 239
Consider its style. As with dress, writing, and oral presentation, style matters. The historical résumé a format that offers a timeline tally of your education, professional experience, accomplishments, skills, and awards in chronological order (most recent first) is the résumé style most commonly used in healthcare. This kind of résumé is what most employers are looking for. If you ve got a curriculum vitae style résumé, as most academics and physicians do, consider reformatting it if you re interviewing for an executive or management position. Even if you re a physician executive, use the historical style. Anything else will feel dissonant and possibly opaque to your interviewers. It also may mean that the interview door remains tightly shut. Keep it accessible. Quantify your work and results. Populate your résumé with work that achieved measurable results. If you re not currently doing work that s quantifiable in some way, volunteer for such projects. Doing so will reap dividends when it s time to update your résumé. Have you helped reduce a hospital s infection rate? Led initiatives in diabetes education and nutrition counseling in the community? Improved customer service? Supervised a large staff, engaged in populating certain staffing areas, or overseen national research grants as part of your job? If so, quantify what you ve done. Consider the power of saying, for example, that you ve led a project that reduced hospital infection rates by 5 percent over two years. Figure out how to capture your work in this way and capitalize on it. Use action words. You didn t just have a staff of 30; you led a staff of 30 direct reports. You weren t just responsible for sales, nurse hires, or imaging; you increased sales by 15 percent over the previous year, spurred an 8 percent 240 Take Charge of Your Healthcare Management Career
growth in imaging volume between 2013 and 2014, and recruited two dozen nurses to populate eight units, bringing each unit up by 25 percent and to proper staffing levels. Consider these points, too: You need only one résumé, so don t spend a huge amount of time crafting different résumés for different positions that highlight and showcase different talents. The majority of your time is best spent networking. You don t need to state a career objective in your résumé you can do so in a cover letter or during an interview. Remember that the purpose of the résumé is to provide a profile snapshot. More critical is how you leverage your network so that your résumé gets funneled to the right person and lands you that interview. Always keep your résumé to a single page, adding a second page only after you gain considerable experience. More important than its length is covering the most important points concisely. Include all of your jobs in chronological order, starting with the most recent. Jobs you held more than ten years ago and temporary work may be listed without detail. If you worked several jobs during college, you can group them together. List the dates (month and year) of your education and graduation, your major and minor, and any honors. Your degree should be listed exactly as it is on your diploma. For example, if you earned a master of science degree in health administration but your diploma says only master of science, that is what you put on your résumé not MSHA, a term that can be tricky or confusing. Lesson 42: Build Your Résumé 241
Don t forget to list internships, fellowships, and research you ve assisted with, especially if you re an early careerist. Provide three to five bullet points for each work entry. Emphasize your most recent experience by including more detail. Your prospective employer will look most closely at and be most interested in what s happened lately. For each entry, balance responsibilities with accomplishments that can be quantified. Ask yourself the questions How did I add value? and What will I be remembered for? Your work entries should not read like a job description! Never attach a picture to your résumé. Never overstate your role or accomplishments. If you were a summer intern and helped design an orientation program for new physicians, do not say that you were in charge of new-physician orientation. Make sure your résumé has absolutely perfect spelling and grammar. Even if it makes you feel awkward, have someone whom you trust proofread your résumé for errors. Errors = no interview. Don t embarrass yourself be sure it s right. Everyone has a unique opinion about résumés, interviews, and cover letters but know that no matter what, the classic approach is best. Beware of asking too many people for advice or heeding oddball recommendations to get noticed in an ocean of applicants. In the end, who and what you are and where you come from will be your best selling points. Your résumé gets the door open a crack; the rest is all you. EXERCISE 1 Pull out the résumé that you completed in college or for your last job interview, and update it. 242 Take Charge of Your Healthcare Management Career
EXERCISE 2 Ask someone to critique your résumé and to give you feedback on ways to improve it. RESOURCE Tyler, J. L. 2011. Tyler s Guide: The Healthcare Executive s Job Search, fourth edition. Chicago: Health Administration Press. Lesson 42: Build Your Résumé 243