A Resume that Sells
Debbie Morrison • September 22, 2021

A Resume that Sells


There’s something that distinguishes a good resume from a bad one (and can turn a good resume into a great one). While it’s fairly simple in theory, it can be difficult in practice because it involves thinking about your resume in a fundamentally different way than you may be used to.

 

The concept is this: your resume is a sales document, not a biography.

 

I’ll lay out what this means for your resume momentarily. But first – for the non-salespeople reading – let me give you a crash course in sales theory. (If you are in sales, bear with me and keep reading, because the most difficult product to sell is yourself, and this will help you do that.)

 

In sales, one can sell using the features of a product or service, or its benefits. While most people in sales would agree that the more important of the two is benefits, it’s not an either/or question. Both are important. It’s just that the features are only important to the extent that they give the buyer the benefit they’re looking for.

 

By way of example, think about the last time you bought a car. If you did your research, you probably looked at the features: seating and cargo capacity, safety features, fuel economy, comfort and convenience accessories. But was that really what you were buying? I’d bet not. You were interested in interior room... because you were thinking about the times you’d have passengers and stuff along for the ride. You were interested in safety... because if an accident happens, you want to protect yourself and the people with you. You’re interested in the ‘bells and whistles’... because they make long drives more comfortable (and sure, because some of them are just fun to have).

 

The same holds true for any major purchase. You want to know the specs of the smartphone you’re buying, but only because they allow you to do the things you need and want to do with that device. You may look at the picture and sound quality of a big screen TV, but what you’re really thinking about is the quality of the movie-night experiences you’ll have with friends and family.

 

Far too many people write their resumes as they’d write a spec sheet for a car, a phone, or a TV. Your work experiences, the responsibilities you’ve held in various roles; those are your ‘features’. Not that they’re not important – they are. But only to the extent that they demonstrate the benefits you’ll bring to a prospective employer. A comprehensive list of tasks and duties may accurately reflect what you did in your previous jobs, but it doesn’t do much to sell you as a potential new hire.

 

When writing or updating your resume, think first like a salesperson. What is the ‘customer’ (in this case, a potential employer) really looking for? What value are they hoping to get from bringing on someone new? What benefit will they be looking for you to provide? In some cases, the answer to these questions are fairly easy. Hiring a new salesperson should generate more revenue. Hiring a new manager for a team should mean better results from the people on that team, and perhaps less staff turnover.

 

Every part of your resume can be viewed through that lens. When you describe a previous job, you don’t have a ‘biographical responsibility’ to mention every single thing you did in that role. Selling yourself means focusing in on the aspects of your work that brought the most value to your previous employer and are of most relevance to your next employer; providing more detail about those, and less about things that are less directly related.

 

This also means that at a certain point in your career, you can start leaving some things off entirely. If you’ve been in your field for about ten years or more, for example, you no longer need to include much detail about jobs you held previously that aren’t related to your career, or even to include those jobs at all. (Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t include jobs you held years ago, it just means you should only include the details about them that help to sell you as a candidate, and the value you bring to a company.)

 

Your academic background – even if it’s not related to your current career – should usually be included because attaining a degree or a certification shows intelligence, commitment, and a willingness to work hard. That said, any additional continuing education courses only need to be included if they’re directly tied to the value you would bring to a new employer.

 

This shift to a sales mindset is also why tracking and listing specific achievements on your resume is so important. Unlike a list of responsibilities, accomplishments – particularly those that are quantifiable, expressed in percentages, dollar figures and the like – underscore how you benefited your previous employers. Which, in turn, helps a prospective employer see how you’d benefit them.

 

In the end, you may end up with a resume that has less quantity, but that’s fine: quality is what counts. Getting rid of less relevant content that doesn’t sell the benefit you’d offer as a new hire is decluttering. The reader is left with the content that really shows what you can do for them.

 

Does your resume read more like a biography, or like a sales pitch? If you’re not sure how to approach this, we’d be happy to provide some pointers. Send us your resume today, and let us help make sure it sells you as well as your experience deserves.

Your Culture Report Won’t Show You This

By John Elliott • June 6, 2025
On paper, they were fully resourced. No complaints logged. No formal red flags. Delivery metrics holding steady. But behind closed doors, the signs were there. Delays. Fatigue. Silence in meetings where pushback used to live. And a growing sense that key people were leaning out, emotionally, if not yet physically. When the cracks finally showed, the conclusion was predictable: “We need more people.” But that wasn’t the real problem. The problem was trust. And most organisations never see it until it’s too late. The Hidden Cost of Disengagement In Gallup’s 2023 global workplace report , only 23% of employees worldwide reported being actively engaged at work. A staggering 59% identified as “quiet quitting”, psychologically detached, going through the motions, doing only what their job description demands. Source: Gallup Global Workplace Report 2023 Disengagement is expensive. But it’s also quiet. It doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. It doesn’t send a Slack message. Disengagement isn’t new, just silenced. And in executive teams, it looks different. It looks like polite agreement in strategy meetings. It looks like leaders shielding their teams from unrealistic demands, instead of confronting the system causing them. It looks like performance metrics still being met… while people emotionally check out. The issue isn’t always capability. It’s safety. Psychological, political, and professional. Many senior leaders don’t raise concerns, not because the problem isn’t real, but because they don’t believe they’ll be heard, supported, or protected if they do. And this is where the failure begins. The Leadership Lie No One Talks About We talk a lot about leadership capability. About experience, commercial acumen, execution strength. But we don’t talk enough about context. Every leadership hire walks into a culture they didn’t create. They inherit unwritten rules, quiet alliances, and legacy power structures. If those dynamics are broken, or if trust is fractured at the top, no amount of capability will compensate. According to a 2022 Deloitte mid-market survey, 64% of executives said culture was their top strategic priority. But only 27% said they actually measured it in a meaningful way. We say culture matters. But we rarely structure around it. And so new leaders walk in with pressure to perform, but little real insight into what the role will cost them emotionally, politically, or personally. We Don’t Hire for Trust. And It Shows. In executive search, the conversation is often dominated by pedigree and “fit.” But fit is often a euphemism for sameness. And sameness doesn't build trust, it maintains comfort. We rarely ask: Does this leader know how to build trust vertically and horizontally? Can they operate in a low-trust environment without becoming complicit? Will they challenge inherited silence, or unconsciously uphold it? Instead, we hire for confidence and clarity, traits that often mask what’s broken, rather than reveal it. And when those hires fail? We call it a mismatch. Or we cite the usual: “lack of alignment,” “wasn’t the right time,” “they didn’t land well with the team.” But the truth is often uglier: They were never set up to succeed. And no one told them until it was too late. The Cultural Infrastructure Is Missing One of the most damaging myths in leadership hiring is that great leaders will “make it work.” That if they’re tough enough, experienced enough, skilled enough, they’ll overcome any organisational dysfunction. But high-performance isn’t just personal. It’s systemic. It requires psychological safety. A clear mandate. The backing to make hard decisions. The freedom to speak the truth before it becomes a PR problem. When that infrastructure isn’t there, when the real power dynamics are unspoken, good leaders stop speaking too. And the silence spreads. What Trust Breakdown Really Looks Like Often, the signs of a trust breakdown don’t show up in dramatic ways. They surface subtly in patterns of underperformance that are easy to misread or excuse. You start to notice project delays, but no one flags the root cause. Teams keep things moving, quietly compensating for the bottlenecks rather than surfacing them. Not because they’re careless, but because they’ve learned that early honesty doesn’t always earn support. New leaders hesitate to make bold calls. Not because they lack conviction, but because the last time they did, they were left exposed. Board reports look flawless. Metrics track nicely. But spend five minutes on the floor, and the energy tells a different story. These are not resource issues. They’re relationship issues. And the data backs it. According to Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report , just 23% of employees worldwide are actively engaged. Worse, around 60% are “quiet quitting.” That’s not just disengagement. It’s people doing only what’s safe, only what’s required, because trust has quietly eroded. Gallup also found that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, a staggering figure that reinforces just how pivotal leadership trust is. When people don’t feel psychologically safe, they shut down. Not dramatically. Quietly. Invisibly. What’s breaking isn’t the org chart. It’s the ability to speak plainly and be heard. And by the time it’s visible? The damage is already done, and someone calls for a restructure. “Low engagement is estimated to cost the global economy $8.8 trillion, 9% of global GDP.” Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2023 So What’s the Real Takeaway? If you’re seeing performance issues, before you jump to headcount, ask a different question: Do the leaders in this business feel safe enough to tell the truth? Because if they don’t, the data you’re reading isn’t real. And if they do, but you’re not acting on it, then they’ll stop telling you. Leadership doesn’t fail in obvious ways anymore. It fails in the gap between what people know and what they’re allowed to say. And the price of that silence? Missed opportunity. Reputational damage. Cultural decay. Sometimes, the problem isn’t who you hired. It’s what you’ve made it unsafe to say.

The Energy’s Gone, But Everything Still Looks Fine

By John Elliott • May 27, 2025
Why Culture Decay in FMCG Is a Silent Threat to Performance It doesn’t start with resignations. It starts with something much quieter. A head of operations stops raising small problems in weekly meetings. A sales lead no longer defends a risky new SKU. A team member who used to push ideas now just delivers what they’re asked. Nothing breaks. Nothing explodes. It just... slows. And from the outside, everything still looks fine. The illusion of stability In food and beverage manufacturing, where teams run lean and pressure is constant, performance often becomes the proxy for culture. If products are shipping, if margins are intact, if reviews are clean, the assumption is: we're good. But that assumption is dangerous. According to Gallup's 2023 global workplace report, only 23% of employees worldwide are actively engaged, while a staggering 59% are "quiet quitting ", doing just enough to get by, with no emotional investment. And in Australia? Engagement has declined three years in a row. In a mid-market FMCG business, those numbers rarely show up on dashboards. But they show up in other ways: New ideas stall at the concept phase Team members stop challenging assumptions Execution becomes rigid instead of agile Everyone is "aligned" but no one is energised And by the time the board sees a drop in revenue, the belief that once drove the business is already gone. The emotional cost of cultural silence One thing we don’t talk about enough is what this does to leadership. When energy drains, leaders often become isolated. Not because they want to be, but because the organisation has lost the instinct to challenge, question, or stretch. I’ve seen CEOs second-guessing themselves in rooms full of agreement. Seen GMs miss red flags because nobody wanted to be "the problem". Seen founders mistake quiet delivery for deep buy-in. The emotional toll of unspoken disengagement is real. You’re surrounded by people doing their jobs. But no one’s really in it with you. And eventually, leaders stop stretching too. We train people to disengage without realising it Here’s the contradiction that most organisations won’t admit: We say we want initiative, but we reward obedience. The safest people get promoted The optimists get extra work The truth-tellers get labelled difficult So people learn to conserve energy. They learn not to challenge ideas that won’t land. They learn not to flag risks that won’t be heard. And over time, they stop showing up with their full selves. This isn't resistance. It's protection. And it becomes the default when innovation is punished, risk isn't buffered, and "alignment" becomes code for silence. Boards rarely see it in time Boards don’t ask about belief. They ask about performance. But belief is what drives performance. When culture begins to fade, it doesn't look like chaos. It looks like calm. It looks like compliance. But underneath, the organisation is hollowing out. By the time a board notices the energy is gone, it’s often because the financials have turned, and by then, the people who could've helped reverse the trend have already left. In a 2022 Deloitte study on mid-market leadership, 64% of executives said culture was their top priority, yet only 27% said they measured it with any rigour . If you don’t track it, you won’t protect it. And if you don’t protect it, don’t be surprised when it disappears. The real risk: you might not get it back Here’s what no one likes to admit: Not all cultures recover. You can try rebrands. You can run engagement campaigns. You can roll out leadership frameworks and off-sites and feedback platforms. But if belief has been neglected for too long, the quiet ones you depended on, the culture carriers, the stretchers, the informal leaders, they’re already checked out. Some have left. Some are still there physically but not emotionally. And some have started coaching others to play it safe. Once that happens, you're not rebuilding. You're replacing. So what do you do? Don’t listen for noise. Listen for absence. Absence of challenge. Absence of stretch. Absence of belief. Ask yourself: When was the last time someone in the business pushed back? Not rudely, but bravely? When did someone offer an idea that made others uncomfortable? When did a leader admit they were unsure and ask for help? Those are your indicators. Because healthy culture isn’t silent. It’s alive. It vibrates with tension, disagreement, contribution and care. If everything looks fine, but no one’s really leaning in? That’s your problem. And by the time it shows up in the numbers,t might already be too late.