The job possibilities for impressive accounting and finance resumes are almost endless. There are many corporate accounting positions that are available to qualified candidates, including payroll, finance director, tax specialist, and accounts payable expert. A good accounting and finance resume can also open up doors to jobs with the government such as grant underwriting, forensic accounting, and budgeting. The list of duties found on an accounting and finance resume include monitoring revenue, tracking expenses, creating executive reports, and filing government forms. The more that you can show on your accounting and finance resume, the higher your salary will be. If you want the truly significant responsibilities with your account and finance resume, then you have to show that you’ve earned those responsibilities with your educational and professional background.
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An accounting and finance resume must include a four-year degree in accounting. In order to maximize your accounting and finance resume, you should also have an MBA or some equivalent business education as well. Given the many different options that an accounting and finance resume offers, it’s helpful to have a specific kind of training and education as part of your background. For example, if you’re trying to develop a strong accounting and finance resume in forensics, then an educational background in law enforcement would be appropriate. You’ll also want to pursue your CPA status to help enhance your accounting and finance resume.

1. Which skills are the best to list on an accounting resume?

Every accounting resume sample in our collection illustrates accounting skill sets to list in your resume if they apply to you. It is also crucial to look at the description of the job to which you are applying to identify the key skills employers want to see in applicants. If you possess those skills, display them prominently in your resume.

Such skills may include expertise in GAAP, auditing, or general ledger reconciliation. You may also want to showcase skills in accounts payable and receivable, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting.

2. How do you list references on an accounting resume?

The general practice today is to avoid listing references in your resume. The space in your resume is valuable, and it is best to use it to provide as much information as possible regarding your skills, experience, and accomplishments, as our accounting resume sample exemplifies. Have your references on hand to give to hiring managers upon request.

However, there is an exception to this rule. If employers ask in the open job’s listing for resumes that include references, create a section in your document for that purpose. Be sure to make advance contact with the people you plan to provide information for and get their permission to use them as references.

3. What sections should you include in your accounting resume?

The sections your resume needs may vary depending on your specific qualifications. Regardless, there are a few standard sections to include, as shown in each accounting resume sample that we offer. Your resume should begin with a professional summary statement or profile, or, if you are transitioning from another field into accounting or you recently graduated, an objective statement. It should also have skills, work experience, and education sections.

It may seem challenging to determine each section’s position and content within your document. Simplify the process with our effortless resume builder. Use it to create a resume in minutes.

4. How can you separate your accounting resume from other candidates’ resumes?

There are many ways to make your accounting resume stand out to hiring managers. First, make sure every section of your resume relates to the position to which you are applying. Use accounting keywords, particularly those you find in the position’s description, to capture employers’ attention.

Then, use your work experience section to not only describe previous responsibilities, but also show employers what you are capable of professionally. Use strong action words in every line and make your accomplishments memorable by describing them with percentages and other metrics. Use a relevant accounting resume sample to learn how to do this.

5. What goes in the header of an accounting resume?
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​As you study an accounting resume sample to learn how to write your summary, skills, experience, and education sections, don’t forget that your resume needs a professional header as well. Your header belongs at the top of your resume, either in the center of the page or next to the left or right margin.

Display your formal name first, leaving out unprofessional nicknames. Then list your current city and state. Follow with a professional email address that uses a current server. Include a telephone number that you access easily, but not your current work number.

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Revered Resumes uses only certified and experienced English-speaking resume writers, based in the United States. Many other firms outsource work to low-quality writers. We also utilize ATS technology to help prevent your resume from being rejected by online application bots. 

Our process is collaborative and each and every writer communicates with their clients directly to ensure they have all the relevant details and information needed to write a top-notch resume. Your resume is one of your most important career tools. But many professionals have no idea where to start, what to include, and what to leave off of their resumes. We can carefully craft your career story to target the job that you want to land.

We are dedicated to providing job seekers with quality career resources and resume writing at an affordable price. Now, professionals like you have a place to take their career stories and create their brands, starting with a great resume. Revered Resumes brings a matchless ability to always yield and further refine its world-class product, swift delivery, and first-rate customer service.

Have you ever seen the term CV listed on a job posting or career website and wondered what it means—and, more importantly—if you need to have one? CV stands for curriculum vitae, and while it’s similar to a resume, it’s not the same.

Usually an employer will state explicitly whether a CV or a resume is needed. In general, you would use them in the following situations:

CV: A CV is typically required when applying for international, academic, scientific, or research positions. For example, many teaching positions in higher education will require a CV to highlight academic experience.

Resume: A resume is the preferred format to apply for most jobs in the U.S. and Canada. Unless the application instructions specifically ask for a CV, you’ll need an updated resume for your job search.

Purpose of a CV and Resume

CV: Curriculum vitae is Latin for course of life, which aptly describes its purpose in the job market. Think of a CV as your professional and educational journey. It is a detailed chronological story that tells employers about the knowledge, experience, and accomplishments that made you, with a heavy focus on academics.

Resume: A resume is a concise document focused primarily on relevant work experience gained from previous jobs. Think of it as your professional marketing flyer. Its main purpose is to grab the attention of a hiring manager or human resource professional so that you are considered for an interview. It should be easily scannable and include details that set you apart from the competition.

Content and Order of a CV

​The content of your CV should appear in reverse-chronological order by section, starting with education and academic achievements followed by professional experience. Group this information into categories with subheads for easy reading.

Categories, in order of appearance:

Name and contact information
Education (degrees held, where they were earned, plus a summary of your academic background – a much more detailed account than what you would include on a resume, including your areas of focus and academic achievements)
Teaching experience
Research experience
Work experience (relevant work-related skills and accomplishments for each position)
Accomplishments (with sections for publications, presentations, awards, honors, affiliations, etc.)

Content and Order of a Resume

The content of your resume should appear in reverse-chronological order, starting with your most recent position followed by past jobs held. Usually education and achievements are last, but if you’re new to the field you might want to list your education first. Keep in mind that you don’t have to include all of your experience, just what’s relevant to the job or career path you seek.

Sections your resume should include, in order:

Name and contact information
Optional short summary paragraph
Work experience (where and when you worked and relevant work-related skills and accomplishments for each position)
Education (where you studied and degrees earned)
Optional sections (e.g. certifications/licenses, military experience, volunteer experience)

Length of a CV vs. a Resume

CV: Since a CV is a comprehensive chronical of your professional life, it is usually at least two pages long, and often more. There’s no limit to the length – you will want to make the document as long as it needs to be to capture your full education and career experience.

Resume: A resume is a one or two-page document, depending on the amount of relevant work experience you have.

Customizing a CV or Resume

Both CVs and resumes should be accurate representations of your experience and education.
You can customize either document based on where you are applying, what you know about the position, and/or relevant keywords and phrases from the job description.

To summarize, the main differences between a CV and a resume are:

Usage/purpose
Contents (topics, level of detail, organization)
Length
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A good way to remember the difference is to think of a CV as your professional and academic biography, whereas your resume is the CliffsNotes summary of your skills and achievements.

Your Administrative Support, Administrative Assistant, Receptionist and Office Manager Resume

Administrative Assistant or Office Assistant is a general term that covers many different business and administrative duties. It is used as an umbrella term for a person with a broad set of skills such as using software, maintaining filing systems, writing reports, organizing paperwork, and maintaining a collegial atmosphere.

The ideal office assistant resume will exhibit a variety of talents, such as managerial skills, organizational skills and data analysis and processing skills. Doing so will help you land a spot in the growing job market. Here are some ideas for improving your administrative support resume.

1. Emphasize Your Relevant Experience

The first thing an experienced Administrative Assistant will want to do is emphasis any previous work experience that can be translated to the position being applied for. Showing relevant and transferable experience is a key resume builder throughout the resume body. All companies are looking for specialized, focused and skilled employees. To capture the attention of HR, this resume begins immediately with a Professional Summary highlighting relevant professional and educational experiences.
The Professional Summary starts off with a statement of experience such as:

Office Assistant with 10+ years of experience handling confidential tasks and making routine office tasks as efficient as possible.

It also mentions keywords that indicate managerial material, company ROI potential and upward mobile talent:

Proven managerial experience and cost-cutting abilities, while maintaining high standards and achieving company goals.

2. Quantify Your Resume – Add Numbers

Additionally, this resume is packed full of quantified data, which proves the applicant’s achievements and worth to potential employers. Office assistants will want to numerically quantify points that lend to their reliability, efficiency, and management skills. This particular resume does this in both professional experiences. To get the job, you need an attractive and persuasive resume. Our experienced certified professional resume writers can take care of the hard resume writing, and format everything into HR-recommended resume styles.

You quantify your professional experience by including achievements in terms of dollar amounts. It is also a great way to catch the reader’s eye. For example:

Saved $24,000 in labor costs annually by implementing a streamlined automated database.

Another great way to quantify numerically is in terms of percentages, for example:

Consistently attained 95%+ customer satisfaction by ensuring the provision of exemplary service.

Additionally, include how many people you managed in numbers as well to give scope to the responsibility. For example:
 
Supervised and trained a staff of 3 regular clerks and 4 interns.

Adding quantification throughout an office assistant resume keeps the reader’s eye moving from experience to experience. Most importantly, it helps the hiring manager quickly grasp the scope of the applicant’s experiences.

The second experience continues quantifying in an excellent fashion, utilizing 3 more ways in which achievements can be proven. Adding a “+” to your estimated totals is a great way to show achievements, for example:

Supported all payroll activities for 60+ employees.

Include daily goals such as number of customers dealt with or calls taken such as is included in this example:

Answered incoming calls (avg. 40/day).
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Remember, no resume will get you a job if you turn in a document that's full of typos, dreadful design or grammatical errors. Accuracy is a key job skill for administrative assistants, and if you can't get your resume right, you're sending an automatic red flag to employers. Be honest, be succinct and avoid mistakes — and good luck.

As a sales professional, you know that first impressions are key. When you are looking for a new sales position at a top firm, your resume is often the first glance prospective employers see of you. It needs to be persuasive, professional, and on point. We are here to help make this happen! The following tips will help you create an outstanding sales resume, one sure to impress potential employers.

Craft Your Pitch

As with any introduction, your sales pitch will be the first thing you want to present. This is a short, sharp, punchy summary of the qualifications and key skills/core competencies you have to offer. Treat your top-third of your resume as your personal sales pitch. If it’s weak, not only will hiring managers doubt your abilities, but they will also stop reading your resume altogether. Provide something outstanding and you’ll be on your way to making the sale.

To ensure your summary is as persuasive as possible, treat it like a sales pitch to a potential client, highlighting features and benefits. The features are your skills, knowledge, and abilities, and the benefits are the results and achievements you can accomplish if you get hired.
You will also want to keep this section of your resume tailored to the job description. The skills you reference should incorporate the keywords from the job description and be related to the job posting to ensure your resume lands at or near the top of search results on Application Tracking Systems (ATS) and search engines.
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Highlight Essential Sales Skills
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The benefits of referencing essential sales skills in your resume are twofold. As mentioned, keywords from the job description will optimize your resume to pass ATS’s. But at the next stage, your resume will be read by recruiters and potentially hiring managers. By referencing skills in the recruiters’ own language, you make it obvious that you’re a great fit, helping you progress to interview stage. Here are some common essential skills and abilities you might include in your sales resume:

✦ Product Knowledge
✦ Client Acquisition & Retention
✦ Goal setting and forecasting
✦ Deal Closure
✦ Competitive Intelligence
✦ Market Penetration
✦ Territory Management

Showcase Your Results

While it’s easy to say you have certain skills, such as the ability to close sales, this won’t necessarily convince the hiring manager that your skills are genuine. To remove all doubt, support your skills with examples, achievements, and, where possible, actual numbers. As a sales professional, you need to focus on your results, targets, and other industry metrics. For example, you might reference generated revenue, unit sales, awards won or targets achieved. Try to be as specific as possible, and quantify your results with stats and facts, as recruiters will digest them better than words because they’re so to-the-point. Here are some examples of ways to phrase your skills and achievements on your resume:

✦ Averaged more than $3 million in annual sales.
✦ Met or exceeded all quotas, resulting in 80% revenue increase over 12 months

Showcasing your results in this way will prove to hiring managers that you’re a talented salesperson worth short-listing for an interview.

Perfect, Polish & Proofread

The last step is to perfect and polish your resume to ensure it’s flawless. In any sales role, the requirement for effective, professional communication is paramount. Your resume must reflect these characteristics. Take some time to carefully proofread your resume. You can get quite far with Word’s own spell-checker and tools like Grammarly. However, a more human approach is likely to catch all your typos, grammatical errors, and awkward phrasings. For example, writing “our” instead of “out” might be wrong in context, but to a spell-checker it’s correct. Reading your resume aloud is a great way to quickly identify errors. Also, make sure your resume is proofread by at least two other people to catch every mistake.

In addition to reading well, your resume must also look the part to ensure clean, clear communication. Start by using an easy-to-read font such as Arial or Calibri and signal each section of your resume with a bold heading. Keep your formatting consistent throughout to maintain a professional appearance. Ultimately, your sales resume is no different than pitching to prospective leads, so  it should come as second nature. If you keep your resume up to date with the latest metrics, punchy and persuasive content, and an immaculate finish, there’s no reason it won’t impress your prospective employers.

​Executive resumes are generally read by high-level recruiters, CEOs, COOs, CFOs, or Board Members. They want to know how you will help them solve their future business problems through cost savings, process improvements and revenue generation. However, nearly 90% of executive resumes do not answer that question.

Your brand and value proposition must align through all of your executive career search documents and you must showcase your quantifiable achievements. This sends a clear and consistent message across your executive resume. Whether on a LinkedIn profile, a website, or a resume, you must establish your brand. Defining your personal brand and developing content for your resume, establishes the foundation for all your personal marketing materials.

It is essential that you have an engaging and professional format, depending upon the type of company you will apply to, you will want a format that aligns with your target company’s culture. If you are applying to Apple, for example, you may desire a simple yet innovative format with a bit of color. If you are applying to a top financial institution, you may want to go with a traditional black and white format.
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Let our professional writers streamline this process for you. We will research your target company or position and consult with you to gather all of your relevant achievements to showcase throughout your executive career search documents. Contact us today to find out how we can optimize and propel your job search.

​What Should Your Accounting & Finance Resume Look Like?
​If you know people that work in accounting and finance, you know they love working with numbers, are highly analytical and detail-oriented and love to solve problems. One thing they may struggle with is being able to put their achievements down in words. Writing a resume may be somewhat of a challenge for someone who specializes in analyzing data and executing calculations. Here are some tips to ensure your accounting or finance resume will stand out among the competition.
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Even during times when unemployment rates for accounting and finance professionals are near all-time lows, it is still a competitive market for job seekers. Senior managers in a recent survey conducted by Robert Half said that they typically receive 40 resumes for every open position, and they spend 12 minutes per resume looking for candidates to interview. Generally, recruiters will spend even less time, about 30 seconds, skimming resumes to send over to hiring managers for review, only glancing briefly at the top one third of each resume.

Therefore, the first impression you want to make on a hiring manager is that you have what companies want, so you will need to make those 30 seconds count. When you write your accounting resume or you will want to closely follow the recommendations below:

1. Employ honesty and integrity when describing the scope of your prior role and any quantifiable information you share. At the top of your resume, highlight your skills and experience in an executive summary to convey your most impressive achievements. Present your career accomplishments and focus on what you achieved in each of your positions. In the education section, if you’ve been working in accounting for several years, you don’t need as much emphasis as if you were newly graduated. If you have work experience, place your education below your jobs, however, if you are a recent college grad and looking to transition into an accounting or financial role, you can put your education above your experience and highlight some of your relevant courses.

2. Be sure to proofread your document(s) a few times to ensure accuracy and grammar. Have someone you trust review, edit and check the document for spelling errors or typos. Having a second set of eyes can sometimes help catch things you may miss. You wouldn’t want to send out any resume blunders, such as one that describes yourself as “familiar with all faucets of accounting,” as if you were an accountant by day and plumber by night. Or listing “thieves well in high-pressure environments” as one of your core qualifications. It also helps to print out your resume for closer review, take a break and return with a fresh set of eyes.

3. Assess terminology that might be understood within the firm where you worked but has no meaning to an outsider who reads your resume. Watch for jargon and acronyms, too, and if the skills you used at your previous position aren’t transferable to the one you’re applying for, don’t give them space on your resume. Try to find words and phrases that can describe these terms in general accounting lingo that will be understood by new and prospective employers.

4. Make sure your skills match what’s in the job description. Most job postings for accountants include technical, software and interpersonal requirements. As you scrutinize your resume, ask yourself how well it matches the elements of the job description and if it conveys the match clearly and early in the document.
 
5. Showcase your achievements with numbers, whenever possible. How many invoices did you prepare and send out each week? Were you able to save your employer time by reducing the month-end close process and if so, how did you achieve that? How much time did you save? Were you successful in collecting on a severely past due account? If so, state how you did that and how much you were able to collect. Some achievements may not be possible to quantify but are still worth noting. For example, we recently wrote a resume for a Financial Analyst who aided in the development of a new database that automated the account reconciliation process. While the candidate couldn’t say how much money they saved exactly, they were able to state that they reduced the process from several days down to a few hours, freeing up several analysts to take on other projects.

6. Identify some keywords that the employer might be looking for, and try to use them in context, if they honestly describe your abilities. This resume tip will help resume-filtering software or Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) find you when they’re scanning resumes. Even small and midsize organizations are beginning to use automated screening tools due to the sheer volume of applications received, and larger firms often use them to narrow the pool of resumes to be reviewed.

7. What about the length of the resume? Many applicants for accounting and finance roles often want to know how they can fit everything in their background if they should stick to the one-page sample they often see. In a recent Accountemps survey, 46% of senior managers said they prefer a one-page resume for staff-level candidates, while 47% said two pages is an ideal length. For executive roles, half of managers cited two pages as acceptable, while 21% were most receptive to one page. Our recommendation is that a two-page resume is acceptable if you have five or more years of experience.

For additional feedback or to find out how we can help get your resume tailored for your next position, visit www.reveredresumes.com.​

​On average, a corporate job opening receives roughly 300 applications. In order to stay in the running for an interview, you’ll need a great resume. Even if you have impressive work experience and the perfect skill set for the posted position, one simple resume mistake can get you rejected. Below is some advice on a few of the most common resume mistakes I see and what you can do to prevent them.
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​1. Objective Statements
This is more of a personal preference, but I think objective statements on resumes are unnecessary. It should be understood that when you apply for a job, your objective is to land the job. Instead of an objective statement, I’d rather see a professional overview or summary that talks about the highlights of your career.

With that being said, if you decide to include an objective statement, you should know that this is an area in which I commonly find mistakes. I cannot tell you how many resumes I have thrown into the trash for having an objective statement that says, “Obtain job at [wrong company name]” or “Relocate to [a city the company is not in].” If you choose to include an objective statement, make sure that any identifying information is tailored to fit the correct company.

2. Including Too Much Information
Another mistake I see consistently is trying to pack every experience or job you’ve ever held on your resume. Rather than the full novel of your career, your resume should be a synopsis. The idea that resumes should never be longer than one page is outdated, but your resume still should not take me an hour to read. No resume can (or should) include every possible duty and achievement in a job seeker’s life. Instead, summarize your career by highlighting the best and most relevant parts.

3. Your Information Is Difficult to Find
The next mistake you might be making on your resume is forcing the reviewer to work too hard to find the information they’re looking for. An experienced hiring manager is going to spend less than 30 seconds reviewing each resume. If they don’t find what they’re looking for in a matter of seconds, they might move on to the next resume.
With this in mind, make sure to list the most important information first. Your name, professional summary, and most current job title should all be placed at the top of the page. In addition to this, use a layout that makes relevant information easy to find. I advocate using reverse chronological order to list jobs and bullet points for job highlights rather than paragraph format.

4. Not Tailoring Your Resume to the Position
A big mistake that will hurt you during your job search is not tailoring your resume to the position. It’s a good idea to have a “master” resume file, but it is not smart to use the same resume for every application. The positions you’re applying for will probably have similar duties and qualifications, but each company will almost certainly place more emphasis on specific skills and experience than the others do.

​www.reveredresumes.com