Executive Resume Example

Many executives opt for a two page resume to showcase all their accomplishments. However, a one page resume is a great option for communicating your qualifications concisely. In fact, even Elon Musk’s resume can be condensed to one short page.

1. Write a standout resume introduction. A resume introduction will be similar to a persuasive elevator pitch to hiring managers*.
2. Achievements must be highlighted in the first part of your resume. As an executive, your achievements will be under scrutiny. Make sure they stand out.
3. Your skills must be concise and informative. Try to put your skills in distinctive sections tailored to your targeted position.

* (Disclaimer: typically the Board of Directors, majority shareholders, venture capital investors,  committees, HR Directors, and/or headhunters will be in charge of assessing an executive candidate and their resume. For this article, we will use the term “hiring manager.”)

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) — Resume Writing Tips

As a CEO, you are at the helm of an entire organization and guide the long-term performance of your enterprise. Responsible for the fiscal and operational performance of the company, you report to a Board of Directors. In this capacity, you will act as the figurehead and leader for all internal operations and are the public face of the company.

You are strongly focused on the overall growth, expansion, and financial health of the organization you serve. You are organized, methodical, and decisive, with a proven ability to correctly read the market you operate in.

Your task — and it’s not a simple one — is to translate and compress your numerous achievements and skills into a two- to three-page resume. To the greatest extent possible, you need to come up with the most relevant examples of these traits to include in your resume.

First Impressions: Win Hiring Managers in the First Section

The first part of any executive resume should be broken down into three distinct sections.

1. Resume Introduction
2. Demonstrated Achievements
3. Core Competencies

This candidate knows the first section of their resume is the most important section. They have made a visible, balanced, and exceptionally eye-catching header. Their professional title is large and easy to see. Indeed, this resume instills confidence fit for a CEO.

1. Write a Strong Resume Introduction

The Resume Introduction, also known as the Career Summary, is a snapshot of a candidate’s career that is compelling, informative, and concise—like an elevator pitch. As the first impression of the entire resume, the summary is specifically written to increase reader interest and entice them to analyze the resume deeper.

Here is how this candidate did it:

• They describe an ability to build successful companies over a 20-year career
• They showcase areas of expertise in the tech world
• They conclude with core acumen in business generation

This is the model professional summary for an executive resume. It is concise, focused, and error free. Yet this powerfully written section does not reveal too much information too soon, making a great case for the interested hiring manager to examine the rest of the document.

2. Quantify Your Achievements Section

Your achievements should be highly visible with their own section. In this section, you will need to convince a hiring manager that you are capable of delivering numerical growth in the role.

One of the best ways to demonstrate this is by quantifying your past achievements. Actually, this is easier than you think: we have an easy to implement a formula that will help you quantify your achievements.

The formula is structured like this:

• [action verb] + [area of business] + [company name] + [quantifiable metric/result]

This is demonstrated in the sample resume in the following points:

• “Expanded market share for Intraserve, Inc. data access service from 30 percent to 47 percent over two years, increasing profit margins by 40 percent.”

This simple and effective formula is a win-win: it simultaneously buttresses a powerful career summary and builds even more interest in the hiring manager.

3. Build Your Core Competencies

Listing core competencies on your resume is key for closing off the first third of an executive resume. Closely examine the candidate’s ability to hit each core competency you would expect from a CEO:

This section supports both the career summary and demonstrated achievements sections by adding much-needed scope in the form of keywords.

The candidate strategically chose keywords that would condense his essential skills into 12 check marks, which helps a hiring manager quickly grasp his core abilities and also help his resume pass Applicant Tracking Software (ATS).

Aesthetically speaking, the section is visually appealing and lends order to the document’s style and formatting via three columns of uniform proportions.

CIO: Executive Resume Example

• Candidate has numerous accomplishments in three different industries
• Candidate has focused their skills on key areas
• Candidate has provided numerous technical skills related to their targeted job

Click Here to Download This | MS Word CIO Resume

CIO Resume (Text Format)

Chief Information Officer – Resume Writing Tips

As a Chief Information Officer (CIO), you are the chief technical executive of an organization, responsible for the performance of the ‘server’ side of technical operations. You build and maintain the technical means to achieve all company goals. You not only oversee the entire IT department but are also a business leader. You work closely with the CTO, CEO, and other upper management personnel to design programs that successfully produce revenue-generating architecture.

You are an expert technical architect and often feel equally at home in administrative, engineering, and business environments. You are a skilled facilitator of talent, able to harness teams to believe in their vision and forge new pathways and products.

With years of experience over a long career, writing a CIO resume can be a challenge. What should you leave in, and what should you leave out?

Here is an excellent sample to help guide the process.

Maintain a Hiring Manager’s Interest

The resume sample has a strong ability to maintain a reader’s interest over the course of the entire document. Section by section, this CIO’s resume instills a sense of professionalism and trust that this client will be a strong fit in an executive role.

Below is a breakdown of why this resume is considered ideal:

Resume Introduction

This candidate begins by offering excellent descriptions of their four key areas of strength: Business Generation, Operations Management, Entrepreneurship, and Security.

Each description is supported by a descriptive blurb designed to provide crucial details and build credibility. It is also an effective and structured breakdown of her valuable skills. See below:

Notice how the candidate doesn’t deliver the summary as block text, but in separate sentences. This formatting style helps readers properly digest new information.

There is another benefit to this format style: its clarity demonstrates her eye for detail and logic — after all, would a hiring manager ever hire a sloppy executive?

Key accomplishments

Don’t be shy about your achievements — this your time to shine. The candidate successfully showcases the breadth of their experience in three different fields: education, private, and government in a clear and concise manner.

For example, they wrote the following:

These passages show the candidate has a history of building successful ventures that also have a social impact. This is the content quality you expect from a CIO.

These two opening sections are an excellent way to begin a resume.

Professional Experience

Your professional experience section is the heart of your resume, so be sure to pay close attention to making this section informative and compelling

At this point, the candidate has done a great job of building interest. Now hiring managers will want to know more about this person — next, she has to complete the sale.

Action verbs

First things first: begin each sentence with an action verb. Action verbs are the building blocks of your work experience and are helpful in transforming your executive resume into a powerful document. A massive list of action verbs can be found here.

Here’s how it’s done in the resume sample:

• “Implement new learning management system used by 99 percent of 3500 courses every semester.”
• “Identified opportunities and provided thought leadership on the creation of event driven, configurable interfaces and worked with vendors through successful design and delivery.”
• “Discovered opportunities and presented solutions that increased revenues over $13 million per year.”

Implement, identified, and discovered are great action words.  The candidate uses an appropriate action verb that allows the hiring manager to know exactly how the candidate approaches a problem and solve its challenges.

Quantify Your Job Duties

Don’t just provide a long list of duties you performed, add detail and quantify your duties with numbers. Whenever possible add data to your bullet points.

For example, the candidate quantified their experience in the following ways:

“Created enterprise software suite to assist business process flows, event flows, and GUI frames with over $110 million in revenue.”

“Oversee staff of 15 IT managers and specialists with a $10 million budget.”

Just as important, you will need to make your quantified information match the requirements and scope of your targeted job.

Technical Skills, keep them short, keep them targeted

The candidate has kept the hiring manager’s interest up to this point, but they still have one last challenge. CIOs need to include technical skills in their resumes.

In the candidate’s technical skills section, they have listed: 

They undoubtedly know more skills than listed, but they have strategically chosen to keep the section targeted, informative, and to the point. The formatting of this candidate’s section actually invites the reader to navigate through each domain of expertise.

As you write your executive resume, try to adopt some of this sample’s strengths into your own resume. If you implement these tips into your own resume, we guarantee you’ll generate more interest and land more interviews.

CTO Resume Sample

• Candidate is a successful entrepreneur that has built numerous products and founded a company
• Candidate has framed their accomplishments in an effective way
• Candidate has solid experience in machine learning, virtual reality, and computer graphics

Click Here to Download This | MS Word CTO Resume

CTO Resume (Text Format)

Chief Technology Officer – Resume Writing Tips

A Chief Technology Officer’s (CTO) role is to create and innovate. You are a technology pioneer responsible for ensuring a company is making great products for their customers. You are the driver behind the commercialization of technology.

You develop coherent platforms backed up with useful features on a variety of digital channels. Your importance in companies is rising due to the fact that users are demanding increasingly sophisticated products. You are business intuitive and contribute cost-effective solutions to your creative architectures.

A proper executive resume for these roles needs to showcase the candidate’s ability to implement change across an organization, successfully champion its products, build strong connections in the tech industry, and genuinely understand what its users want.

The candidate highlights their experience in three excellent ways:

Core Competencies & Passing the “Eye-Test”

Every resume is subject to a quick “eye-test” – a quick glance-by-glance evaluation of your resume. As a first impression, the test goes a long way in making or breaking your candidacy. So which factors help you pass this challenge and invite a hiring manager to read your resume?

According to our research, hiring managers spend an average of 6–30 seconds evaluating a candidate’s resume. It’s crucial to win over the hiring manager in those first moments.

A core competency section is a key foundation in helping you pass this test. The candidate’s core competencies are comprised of a dozen skills optimized to their targeted position.

See the sample below:

This is a clean representation of the candidate’s core skills. A hiring manager will able to quickly ascertain what skills the candidate brings to the table — provided those skills are targeted for the job. The faster you can convey relevant skills to the hiring manager the better your odds of passing the “eye test”.

Use of Quantifiable Data

This candidate’s resume includes numerous sections of quantifiable data that show they are ready for a new challenge.

Take for example the line, “Responsible for delivering 15 products in less than two years with proven revenue growth of over $300 million.” This accomplishment provides data to back up the claim that he is a successful CTO.

Other examples of quantifiable data can be given via revenue and growth numbers, the number of personnel managed and/or products delivered, or any other type of numerical metric.

Another effective way to discuss achievements is through factual anecdotes (sometimes not every accomplishment can be expressed via numbers). Look at the way the candidate discussed this achievement,

“Responsible for overseeing team to produce world’s first self-editing video using machine learning technology, resulting in numerous patents.”

The statement is powerful enough even without numbers.

Emphasis on Achievements

You need to place emphasis on your achievements in your resume to get results on the job market. This executive resume sample has effectively showcased the candidate’s impressive achievements in the work experience section.

For example, this sample includes their key achievements before their key duties. By doing so, the candidate immediately asserts their results-driven work style, rather than duty-bound work style.

Also, the font of the key achievements section is slightly larger than the key duties section. The two sections also use different bullet point styles. All of these formatting choices help draw the hiring manager’s eye directly to their achievements. See the sample below.

This is a highly achievement-oriented way to build your resume. By stating achievements before duties, the candidate knows that a hiring manager will be even more interested, impressed, and focused on their key duties.

Formatted Achievements with Readers in Mind

Resume formatting has one purpose: to make your work experience readable and memorable. Putting in some effort into your formatting will give the hiring manager a positive opinion of your candidacy – “Wow this person has their act together!” Odds are, the hiring manager will carry that positivity over into the interview.

The candidate’s resume is a good example of clear and strategic formatting for the following reasons.

1. The resume is divided into four distinct sections: name and information, resume introduction, professional experience, and education and technical skills. Clear sectioning is essential for readability.
2. The consistent use of italics and bolding, left/center/right alignment, and font size makes it easy for a hiring manager to quickly assess your resume. Make sure you keep your job title, company name, dates, location, and work experience in their respective formats throughout the resume.