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Let’s imagine that you are Vice President of Business Development and you are looking for a switched-on new sales executive to join the company. You receive five Curriculum Vitae (aka resumes) from head-hunters with the following headlines:-
- Attended Sales Master Class training last year
- Passed the company sales training course with distinction
- Worked as a Sales Executive for two years
- Achieved 50% growth over target in product sales last year
- Doubled company net profit to two million dollars within twelve months
Which one of these candidates would you like to see first? Or indeed see at all?
Unless you have paranoid concerns that the new candidate will immediately take over your job, then my money is on number 5, and maybe you’d also talk to candidate 4 for comparison.
Although there are many variables affecting this, not least how the rest of their CV reads and how the interview goes, this example shows clearly how we value measureable success over merely doing the job, and doing the job over merely training.
In my role as Managing Director of the Business Evaluation Centre, I see so many CVs where people tell me what they are doing and maybe what they’re responsible for, but rarely any quantifiable measure of their success. But in senior positions of any business we are forced to look at the financial aspects to keep it alive and to grow, and it all ultimately boils down to what we get for our spending – our Return On Investment (ROI).
ROI then is the ultimate measure of business success. Without a positive return on what we put in to a company we can’t be in business for long, and that then is why as Vice President of Business Development, or in any other senior position, we are looking for a way to measure success.
According to the ROI Institute – the US-based research organisation and creators of the Phillips ROI Methodology®, there are in fact five basic levels of data that we need to consider – reaction and planned action, learning and confidence, application and implementation, business impact, and Return On Investment. Put simply, if someone is enthusiastic (reaction) and they know what to do (learning) and they get on and do it (application), then there must be a change in results (impact) which we can – with skills – translate into a financial figure (ROI).
Look again at the five CVs; can you see the correlation?
Providing information at the right level then is key to effective communications, and measuring it properly is vital. Of course the Phillips ROI Methodology® is more complicated than mentioned here, however senior people in any company need to know the numbers and the ROI, which is why candidate 5, on the face of it, is most likely to get the interview.
So aspects of best practice business processes such as the Phillips ROI Methodology® can be as pertinent to job seekers creating their CV as they are to cost centre holders, line managers, senior corporate executives and board directors. It’s all about credible measurement and presenting the right information in the right way to the right person.
Next time you are applying for your dream job then, think first about what the hiring executives want to hear and consider a “Level 5 CV”.
