The first thing I ask clients to send me before a first meeting is the current version of their resume. This helps me gain context about their professional background in advance, and assess gaps in how they’re presenting their career story to external audiences. While format may come up as an area for improvement, my feedback tends to live without two key areas: scope and impact.
Scope refers to the scale of your work. How many people served or managed? How many users? What was the budget? Even if I’m not familiar with your employer or job title, including a clear scope of work in your resume will help catch me up.
Impact refers to the problems that you solved. How much money have you raised or saved? How many new contracts have you closed on? How much growth in student achievement? How many teacher vacancies did you fill or processes did you simplify?
Sometimes, my clients feel scope is going to be so obvious to employers in their field that they never consider collecting or communicating those numbers, but that’s a missed opportunity that can cost you in a job search. Sharing scope can build credibility quickly and allow employers to imagine you within their setting. It provides relevant context and paints a picture for external audiences. For example, overseeing a program within a public school system serving 200,000 students is a much different context than overseeing a program within a stand-alone charter school with 150 kids.
My clients who struggle the most with communicating their impact struggle for the following reasons:
-They cite “humility” as a barrier to “taking credit” for something that was a collective effort. If you did the thing, talk about the thing! If it was collective, specify which aspect of the work you led/collaborated on versus writing that you did the whole thing! As I always say "humility" won’t get you hired (especially when used as a reason to not claim any strengths, wins, etc. - you’re asking hiring managers to just assume you can do the work without providing any proof points!).
-They don’t have access to data. Perhaps they worked for an employer that didn’t keep dashboards or make data regularly available to staff. First, think of this as a lesson for your future self - don’t wait for others to share data/progress with you, start tracking it on your own! Second, ask current/former colleagues to work with you to cobble together numbers or refer to publicly available reports from your previous organizations’ fundraising teams or state of the organization literature.
Taking some time to audit your current resume and LinkedIn profile for scope and impact is a great strategy as you’re considering a job search or already engaged in searching. Every bullet on your resume is an opportunity to share the problems you solved for employers, with metrics to serve as proof.
