Resume hints for "Consultative Employees"

My resume has always been a problem with recruiters and hiring managers. I have purposefully created a career that will situate me as an expert in all areas of a company - from strategy to product management to development engineering to marketing to sales to project management to operations to customer service. My intention has been and is to learn all aspects of a company in order to be an effective and efficient corporate leader. I truly believe that hands-on experience hones your skills to manage teams in a variety of situations and with assorted personalities.

This type of career development has lead me to be a "generalist" or what I call a "consultative employee".

It is very hard for a company to know how to hire a consultative employee (CE) and facilitate that career path. First, when a company wants a specific role filled, they typically want a professional who has picked that role as their career and dedicated themselves to pursuing that expertise. Second, once hired, as the CE proves success for the area they hired, the company doesn't want to move the CE to another department to share and expand talents and knowledge. Companies like stability - rightfully so. They want you to continue managing a department you have been successful in so they don't have to worry about it and can concentrate on other problem areas.

There are the rare companies who have understood that advantage of taking a successful CE change agent and moving them around to other areas to continue to solve the company problems like they have proven with the first department. These are typically start-ups and small boutique firms.

Unfortunately, the CE career strategy does create a neat resume problem. :) There cannot be a singular job purpose because of the consultative nature of the career path. As we know, consultants do anything and everything in the needs spectrum. Statistics show that employers will only spend about 15 seconds initially reviewing your resume. If the information they want to see doesn’t fly off the page in that short amount of time or meet the criteria of their optical scanning software, you’re out of the race. It is very difficult to show a widely diverse background effectively in 15 seconds.

I vastly prefer one verses multiple resumes. As a consultative employee, my resume needs to clearly define my career the way I planned it. My story is one that conveys my expertise in multiple areas, my flexibility to any and all needs a company has, and my willingness to jump into any role and perform it with gusto.

Most CEs enjoy fixing problems - setting up new departments and successfully maturing them, creating new processes for competitive advantage, managing an existing troubled team and turning it around to the most effective and efficient team in the organization, and/or defining and managing a multi-faceted project. How this is different from other kinds of employees is that consultative employees do that all at the same time. What CEs need to convey is how a company can hire them for one thing and also get the advantage of a total package leader who can assist in various areas of a company.

Resumes have a typical format - professional summary, professional background, education, certifications/awards, and training. For CEs, how this is written will be different than how others write theirs. For instance, the summary may be more like an executive summary - a little longer than normal to describe work philosophies and advantages of hiring a consultative employee. The professional background may make the resume longer than the traditional one-two page resume.

Stepping out the of box is what we do every day so don't be afraid of doing that when writing your resume.