A job title is a noun. In terms of your professional life, it is what you are. If you want to unlock more opportunities, level up in your creative career, and maybe even feel better about yourself, we suggest thinking in verbs and focusing less on what you are and more on what you do.
When you’re reworking your creative resume or embarking on a new creative job search, it may benefit you to place less emphasis on the job titles you’ve held and more on the responsibilities you upheld. Go beyond the title and get to the real story.
Let’s Be Clear
Silicon Valley startup culture – with all its innovations, disruptions, and eccentricities – has been a big influence on the culture of work for over a decade. As part of its subversion of old corporate power structures, it created enormous fiscal wealth, along with a wealth of strange and often blatantly inflated new job titles, as many Senior Road Warrior Marketing Interns and Wizards of Lightbulb Moments might attest.
The most extreme (lampooned well on HBO) are now running their course, leaving a lot of these Chief Thought Providers and Digital Overlords struggling to explain what it was they actually did.
Specificity kills ambiguity. Even if you’ve had some odd job titles in the past, you can strengthen your resume by emphasizing your day-to-day activities, larger objectives, and concrete contributions. Show your solid skills and concentrated work ethic. Eliminate jargon and explain your work in the most literal terms you can think of.
If you’re having trouble with this, work with an experienced creative recruiter to rephrase your resume and highlight real accomplishments that hiring managers will understand.
Quantify Accomplishments
When you write about your responsibilities, show that you took them seriously by connecting to the results you generated.
If you were in charge of a campaign or a project, be sure to mention its goals and how you achieved them. Especially if you delivered it in three days ahead of time or 25% below the requested budget, or with results that exceeded expectations by a factor of four. (Specific numbers and metrics, if applicable, are always good.)
Share Your Journey
Since our early days, humans have made sense of reality through storytelling and the metaphor of travel. Your resume should suggest a narrative arc, a journey from there, to here, to the next opportunity you’re angling for.
You can use classic story structures to show how you overcame adversity, built on your past experiences and achievements, and evolved. This will make it easier for recruiters and hiring managers to picture you in a new position that represents a logical progression.
When your terminology is clear and purposeful, your career can be grand and glorious, and you can conjure many more lightbulb moments into watershed moments.
At Artisan Creative, we help creative professionals surpass their own expectations. Contact us today to learn more.
We hope you’ve enjoyed the 535th issue of our a.blog.