One Change to Make in Your Resume and Cover Letter to Get More Interviews

If you're working on a resume or a cover letter for school administrator jobs like principal or assistant principal or something central office like director or superintendent, there's one change you can make that'll make all the difference.

Turn your duties into accomplishments.

This is the number one piece of advice I've given my clients over the last six years as I've looked at hundreds of resumes and cover letters to help them become more competitive and to help the candidate get an interview more often.

If you will simply turn your duties that you've listed on your resume and cover letter into accomplishments, you will find that you get a much better response.

See here is the thing.

Here's why it doesn't make a lot of sense to list your duties on your resume.

But I see this all the time.

Everybody else who's had your same job has done the same duties, right?

Pretty much everybody's duties are the same.

If you're a principal, you've evaluated teachers.

If you're an assistant principal, you've done discipline and dealt with transportation.

Everybody's duties are very similar.

But your accomplishments are unique to you.

Your specific accomplishments are like no one else's.

Even if you've done many of the same things, taken many of the same actions, fulfilled many of the same responsibilities, your specific accomplishments are unique to you.

And that is what you've got to highlight in your resume and cover letter.

So a couple of quick examples here.

If you have a duty on your resume, like handle discipline for all ninth grade students.

Well, probably a lot of people have done something similar, but you are unique.

And one way that you handled that might've been something like this.

If you say, I led a restorative justice initiative, reducing office referrals by 23% and reducing out of school suspensions by 57%.

from such and such date to such and such date, that is going to really jump out at the reader and you are going to be much more likely to get an interview as a result.

Another example, if you are a principal and you have evaluated teachers, well, so has everybody else.

And if you put evaluated teachers according to the district policy and process on your resume, that's not going to really stand out very much.

If instead you talk about what you changed, what you did differently, like developed and implemented a collaborative goal setting process for teacher teams, resulting in greater engagement and higher evaluation ratings compared to individual goal setting.

Well, that is really going to make you stand out.

So four quick ways that you can turn your duties into accomplishments.

I've used the acronym SNAP.

You can turn them into stories.

You can use specific numbers.

You can list the actions that you took.

and describe the processes that you put in place.

Those four things, stories, numbers, actions, and processes will really make your accomplishments pop out of your resume and cover letter.

And if you want a little bit more on how to turn your duties into accomplishments, you can get the Ed Leadership Job Application Template Bundle at principalcenter.com slash template.