Resumes in Australia and Accomplishments for Tax Accountant

Can you add a bullet highlighting your success rate when you predict success? What metrics are used as part of the performace objectives in your industry? Imagine you just had a killer year ... what made it so good and how did you do it? Hope that helps get you some more ideas - Sam

My MT one-pager works pretty darn well in Australia.  My wife used a MT resume with extra white-space to make it two pages in Australia and received job offers here too. 

I am tempted to make make my one-page MT resume 2-3 pages in Australia, mostly through the addition of whitespace and more 'verbose' responsibilities for my positions -- multi-paragraph descriptions rather than a single prose style paragraph. 

 The MT recommendation on content -- job positions, responsibilities, accomplishments -- should still stand.

The wife just completed a successful job search using both MT one pagers and a 1.5 pager that was mostly extra whitespace.

During the search:

- A couple of external recruiters commented that they "loved" her one page resume (none of the external recruiters gave any negative feedback and she had no problems getting interviews)

- An internal recruiter at a big-four accounting firm commented on the whitespace 1.5 pager "it's not very often that a resume excites me like this one" with (she recieved an offer)

- During a second interview the boss of the hiring manager asked for a copy of her resume after assuming the one pager was just a summary done by the recruiter (she didn't get an offer, don't know if the one pager had a impact)

- An outplacement consultant (wife was redundant after an M&A) recommended 2-3 pages resume

We find that we get more feedback from Australia than anywhere else that members using the one page format we recommend were asked to change it before submitting to a recruiter or a hiring manager. It's not that the one page resume won't work, or isn't right: more, I think, that the australians are used to seeing longer resumes and more likely to ask for it to be changed. I think knowing what we know now, I'd change that line in the Resume Workbook to: "The only places we know where one page resumes are not (yet) universally accepted are Australia and academia".

The advantage of the one page resume is that it forces you to think about your roles in terms of responsibilities and accomplishments. That formula answers the universal questions 'what have you done' and 'how well have you done it'. Those questions are as valid in Australia as elsewhere.

Don't add anything, just make the text bigger and add some white space. In our experience, that's enough. (It looks like that is borne out here by everyone's experience)

To address your second question about accomplishments, there's a couple of questions I ask which help me get to the root of an accomplishment.

What was the result for the company?
Why did I do this?
How did I know I'd done it well?
What would I have to have done to get fired?

In your example of assisting with the preparation of advice to Company X on issue Y:

What was the result for the company? Did it meet a service deadline or requirement? Did it get paid a service fee, or get follow on work from that customer? Did it lead to other business from other customers?

Why did you do this? Because it's a requirement of your contract? To prevent a lawsuit? To gain additional revenue?

How did you know it's done well? Because it met a standard? Because the customer said so? Because you got paid for it? Because it was on time and budget?

What would I have to done to get fired? Provided inaccurate information? Not done the work to standard or on time?

Once you have the answer to your questions, you can create the accomplishment. For example:

Assisted in achievement of on-time accurate delivery of advice by researching issue X
Contributed to $3M additional revenue by researching issue X for customer Y, leading to follow on work.
Delivered 80 pages of research on issue X on time, budget and to standard.

In your second example, the fact that the objection was unsuccessful doesn't necessarily matter - did you deliver your part on time and budget? Did it meet the requirements of an objection? If it did, base your accomplishment around that.

"Drafted an objection to an ATO amended assessment issued to Company X" where the objection was ultimately unsuccessful but we had previously advised the client that their prospects for success were not great.

I hope that helps,

Wendii

The writer giving the great information about the Australia and the Academia where one page resume never being accepted for the post of the accountants.

Birmingham Accountants

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