Whether during an interview or on your resume, describing your current job responsibilities can be challenging for candidates during the job search. Understanding the right approach for illustrating your career accomplishments and professional experience gives you an edge over the competition and helps you make a positive impression on the hiring manager. Our guide will provide you with valuable expert tips for describing your current duties on your resume and during the interview process.
Brand Your Job Responsibilities as Accomplishments
Simply detailing your day-to-day responsibilities won’t help you stand out from the crowded pool of applicants during the job hunt. Instead, you want to rebrand your job duties as accomplishments by drawing attention to your ability to create value for the companies you work for. Sometimes this can be challenging, as job seekers don’t always take the time to evaluate how their daily responsibilities contribute to the success of their organization. For example, if you’re supporting day-to-day sales operations, your actions play a critical role in the company achieving its revenue goals, and you’ll want to highlight how your actions have positively impacted your team.
How to Describe Your Current Duties on Your Resume
It’s generally recommended to use bullet points to describe your current duties on your resume. This will improve the readability of your document for the hiring manager and allow them to evaluate your professional experience more easily. Be sure to keep your bullet points to only two or three lines. Otherwise, you run the risk of creating a wall of text that will make your accomplishments difficult to read. You also want to ensure that your bullet points begin by showcasing your daily job responsibilities and projects and end by highlighting the results of your contributions. This will paint a clearer picture of your story, as simply stating that you generated $200K in revenue won’t be as impactful if you don’t explain how you achieved these numbers.
Should you use past or present tense to describe your current duties on your resume?
Many ask whether current duties should be described in the past or present tense. This is a common topic amongst resume writers, and there isn’t a clear consensus amongst subject matter experts. The present tense is the obvious choice at first glance, as you’re still actively performing these duties on a daily basis. However, one of the benefits of using the past tense is that bullet points are sometimes read more proactively and support the end goal of crafting an accomplishment-driven document. This approach also prevents a tense shift, which can sometimes be hard to read. Ultimately, this comes down to personal preference, and if the content is well written, your career achievements will grab the hiring manager’s attention.
How to Describe Your Current Duties During the Interview
Describing your current duties during the interview can be stressful and nerve wracking for many candidates. To give yourself confidence and make you more comfortable during the interview, you may want to consider preparing some statements in advance to common interview questions. It’s important to understand that you don’t want to rehearse these statements as though you’re reading from a teleprompter. You want this to be a fluid conversation where you and the hiring manager leave the interview with positive takeaways. Keep these statements in the back of your mind so that you have ideas to strengthen your responses and make the right impression on potential employers. Below, you’ll find some examples of how to describe your current job responsibilities during the interview.
Example 1
Question
Tell me about a recent problem that you solved at your most recent job? What steps did you take to overcome these challenges?
Response
During my current role as a Project Manager at Enterprise Software Corp, I played a key role in helping our PMO resolve project delays that negatively impacted long-term relationships with our clients. As our client base grew, we attempted to maintain our commitment to an Agile approach despite the challenges of constantly pivoting our priorities with a large number of customer projects. I drove a strategic initiative to grow our project management organization and integrate a hybrid Agile-Waterfall approach, which saved three at-risk accounts valued at over $2M and helped us to expand our delivery of services to secure five new enterprise clients.
Analysis
This works in this context because it explains the candidate’s responsibility for daily project management functions and draws attention to their ability to improve how the organization delivers services to high-value customers. This shows that the job seeker has experience solving complex problems and finding creative solutions to ensure that operations run smoothly and clients are satisfied with their services.
Example 2
Question
Tell me about your day-to-day job responsibilities. How do you optimize daily operations? How do you drive efficiency for your current company?
Response
As a customer service manager, I manage a large team of over 30 customer representatives at a high-volume call center. In addition to managing escalated tickets, I am responsible for achieving customer satisfaction goals each month. When I notice that my team members struggle to resolve a particular issue, I make a point to document the appropriate solution and deliver remedial training sessions to my team members. By standardizing our responses and alerting management to common trends amongst customer calls, we’ve reduced average call times by over 35 seconds.
Analysis
This response provides the hiring manager with a clear understanding of the candidate’s daily workflows. It also draws attention to how they can collaborate with their direct reports to enhance the efficiency of daily operations. Remember, simply listing your daily job responsibilities isn’t enough to generate an interesting conversation. You want to provide specifics and results that showcase how you can overcome challenges and help organizations improve.
Craft your perfect resume in minutes
Get 2x more interviews with Resume Builder. Access Pro Plan features for a limited time!
