ARCHEUS: Claims and Credibility -- The Essence of Selling

Other advanced resume article:
Putting a Spin on Work Experience

Improve your ability to communicate the value you offer an employer with Gary Will's book How to Prepare for an Employment Interview -- now available by e-mail in Microsoft Word format.

Sample chapters:
2. Is Preparation Even Possible?

7. What You Need to Know About Business

14. Asking Questions -- An Essential and Overlooked Step

Claims and credibility -- the essence of selling

The message you're trying to communicate to an employer can be distilled to just two points:

Claims -- "Here's what I can do for you. Here's the value I can deliver to your organization."
Credibility -- "Here's why you should believe me."

You cover letter will usually focus on claims. The resume's role is to restate the substance of your claims and to provide the credibility needed to support them.

You must address both issues. Claims with no credibility are just unconvincing puffery. And your credibility cannot be interpreted until you specify how you propose to create value for the employer.

Credibility can only be established in context. To take an exaggerated example, your five years' experience in sales is vital in establishing credibility as a sales manager. Its value is less obvious in establishing credibility as a machine operator.

These days, everyone will tell you to focus on the employer when writing your resume even though you're writing about yourself. Knowing that this is what you're supposed to do is the easy part. The challenge is to pull it off.

Begin by thinking about the employer's needs, desires, and expectations, and follow a path back to yourself.

What do they want to achieve?
How will the work you see yourself doing help them achieve these objectives? To reach their goal, what will they need that you can provide?
How will their customers benefit? (Preferably the organization's customers, but possibly "internal" customers as well.)
What would someone who could do these things look like on paper?
What else might they want that you could do that they may not be expecting?

You don't get hired by describing your past. You get hired by painting a picture of the employer's future and making them believe that you can help them achieve it.

Your resume is organized in a way that makes it seem like it's about your past. To the casual reader, it's a list of what you've done. But this is an illusion. You take your source material from your past, but the focus is on the future -- the employer's desired future. Your resume shows the skills and experience that you have to offer to help your next employer achieve their objectives.

Once the reader has some understanding of how you propose to benefit their organization -- once your "claims" are stated, they can begin to interpret your credibility.

You create credibility by probing all aspects of your experience, abilities, traits, and beliefs for information that will support that claim. Credibility is established with specific details, provided in context so the reader can get a mental image of you.

You can also foster credibility through fresh, vivid expressions of beliefs and traits that will be perceived as more genuine than tired words taken out of a book. This is always "says you" material, but how you say it can make a big difference in whether it's believed.

How to Prepare For An Employment Interview
by Gary Will
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Claims and credibility -- the essence of selling

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