With college graduation season well underway, many young people will be diving into the workforce. As such, many will also be writing their resumes for the first time in hopes of catching recruiters and hiring managers’ attention.
If you’re one of these young hopefuls — or, if you’re just gearing up to apply for a new role, make sure to include some of the keywords from the job description that are relevant to your own experience and to quantify your accomplishments in internships or previous jobs with numbers.
There’s one more line worth including under each experience that could give recruiters a sense of your history. “I think it’s really helpful to have an anchor statement,” says James Hudson, an HR executive who’s headed talent acquisition at companies like Nike and Levi Strauss & Co.
Here’s what the line is and why you should include it.
‘Fintech company with half a billion dollars in revenue’
An anchor statement shows up under your job title and the company you worked for. It succinctly describes that company.
Depending on where you worked, it could say something like, “fintech company with half a billion dollars in revenue and 3,000 employees,” says Hudson as an example. Or, “$250 billion market cap, 80,000 employees, operations in 100 countries worldwide.”
For household name companies like Amazon, you can hyperlink the company name to its main website. “But even for consumer-facing brands,” says Hudson, “it can be helpful to put the anchor statement because, yeah, sure, everyone’s heard of Nike or Apple, but most people probably don’t know how big those companies are.”
‘So much of your resume is about putting you in context’
The idea behind including this line is to give recruiters a sense of what these companies were like on the inside.
“So much of your resume is about putting you in context,” Hudson says, adding that, “the recruiter needs to know the size and scope of your responsibilities because being a product manager in Amazon is entirely different from being a product manager at a startup.”
At a startup, where operations are scrappy, you may have needed to take on work beyond the scope of the role’s typical responsibilities. At a larger company with more resources, your responsibilities may have been narrower but you may have gotten a better sense of how to do them as a result. A larger company, especially one with operations around the world, may have also taught you how to “navigate a complex global environment,” says Hudson.
Hiring managers will ultimately decide if your experience is relevant, but “you’re trying to share as much information that helps locate you in the context of your professional journey in as short a period of time as possible,” says Hudson. The anchor statement will help with exactly that.
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