Spring is in the air: it’s the perfect time to give your home a thorough cleansing – and your resumé an updating so that you can explore new job opportunities. We recently spoke to two recruitment professionals who have agreed to share their tips on how best to present expertise, achievements and goals if you’re an IRO on the move.
Smooch Repovich Reynolds, managing partner of US executive search company DHR International, explains that CVs are all about building and promoting your own personal brand. ‘I see resumés as a key part of your career brand,’ she says. ‘So when people think about how to structure them and what type of content to include, they should be thinking in terms of their overall brand.’
Candidates should first take into consideration who will be the recipient of their document. ‘You have to hand people a resumé that answers their questions extremely well, and there are different levels of sophistication [depending on]whether you’re dealing with an external recruiter, a C-suite executive or a mid-level HR staffing person,’ Reynolds continues. ‘In that last category, those people aren’t going to know the nature of the business of the companies you’ve worked for. One of the biggest mistakes executives make is not to include a one-line description of their former employers.’
A CV should be structured to highlight your skills and responsibilities, with a few achievements that speak to the role you are applying for, adds Jennifer Bargrove, a London-based principal consultant at recruitment firm VMA Executive. ‘It is therefore very difficult to have one master CV to serve all opportunities,’ she notes.
Candidates should focus on the achievements they can take ownership of. ‘If you were less than 50 percent responsible for a project, you may want to think of other examples to present instead,’ Bargrove advises. Although the IR role requires a mix of communications, stakeholder relations and budget-management skills combined with analytical capabilities, Bargrove regularly sees CVs that ignore whole areas of expertise. ‘I recall a candidate replying, Well, of course my current role requires me to write copy for the website/annual report/board announcements,’ she says.
Degrees of importance
Finance degrees and qualifications – such as CFA, CPA or an MBA in finance – should be underlined, as should strategic duties, ‘without misrepresenting one’s experience and credentials,’ Reynolds stresses. ‘Finance and an understanding of the global capital markets have become critical to being viewed as a top-notch investor relations practitioner.’
IROs sitting on the corporate finance council of a company or with the corporate strategy team, for example, should emphasize those responsibilities. ‘Any time you can demonstrate you have breadth of experience beyond just traditional finance and IR, I believe that’s a competitive advantage,’ Reynolds adds.
She also notes a trend where candidates omit the date they graduated from college, often to conceal their age. ‘Especially for an IR professional, transparency in one’s own career brand and the facts of what you’ve done are equally as important as corporate transparency,’ she stresses. ‘The reality is that if you become a top contender for a job [the employer is] going to carry out verification, so it’s best to just put the facts there on paper.’
Another tip from Reynolds is to ‘be straightforward and not gimmicky. A person’s voice in his/her resumé should be as close as possible to his/her C-suite voice, because that resumé is going to be read by the CEO, CFO and board of directors,’ she advises. ‘They will all be thinking, Is this person the right one to involve in those critical inner sanctum meetings and conversations?’
Size matters
While CVs in Europe are usually required to be two pages maximum, US-based candidates, especially very experienced ones, can present two to four pages – ‘as long as they’re well written,’ says Reynolds. ‘When you get to the four-page mark, even if you’ve got 30 years of experience, you probably need to go back and think about reframing. And if you have 25 years of experience, your first couple of jobs out of college should be one-liners anyway.’
What about the online version of your resumé? ‘In the past two to three years, individuals have become aware that their LinkedIn profile actively supports their CV document – the two must correlate,’ Bargrove says. ‘The expectation for your CV is that it’s a more detailed document and all the information can be referenced and verified.’ If a LinkedIn profile can be ‘a little more creative’, it should still stay ‘within the realm of the truthful,’ Bargrove adds. ‘Often candidates will see that their LinkedIn profile has been viewed prior to being invited for interview and, when they arrive at the interview, can find both documents in front of the interviewer.’
Moving from the sell side
Reynolds offers some specific advice to former sell-side analysts wanting to move into IR. ‘One way analysts can frame their potential IR ability is to put a summary paragraph at the head of their resumé to draw correlations about their past experience,’ she says, reminding candidates that very few companies will hire a sell-sider directly into the top IR job.
To illustrate her point, Reynolds routinely asks candidates whether they have ever had to counsel a chief executive or CFO on how to perform such investor-facing tasks as earnings calls or one-on-one meetings. ‘Most admit that they have never done that,’ Reynolds comments. ‘They have gaps in their experience and they need to learn.’
‘You need to understand the day-to-day role of an IRO before pitching yourself for an IR role,’ Bargrove agrees. ‘Sell-side experience makes you eminently qualified for the marketing and roadshow elements of the IR role, but up to three days a week you are likely to be more focused on the accounting and internal stakeholder management challenges.’
Nevertheless, ex-bankers who consider IR as a bridge into the corporate world – or to a senior financial role – should not hide their ambitions. ‘If you see IR as a stepping stone, it’s best to be upfront about this,’ Bargrove highlights. ‘There may be opportunities to take on corporate strategy or special projects as well.’
What candidates should avoid, however, is any reference to IR as some sort of Plan B for their career. ‘Don’t insult an existing IRO by suggesting your sell-side role was much tougher than this IR job, as if you are ready for a rest,’ Bargrove concludes. ‘Investor relations is equally challenging, just in a different way.’
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To cover or not to cover? Covering letters are still a must if you’re aiming for a job in the US. ‘Believe it or not, the ability to write is one of the most important elements CEOs and CFOs ask me to qualify in candidates,’ says Smooch Repovich Reynolds, managing partner of DHR International. ‘There are a lot of people, unfortunately, who don’t write well and don’t go back over their resumé to ensure it’s written well.’ Moreover, a covering letter is somewhere candidates can ‘design some creative statements’ about how they can add value to different operating environments, be it an IR consultancy or a corporation. ‘You need some way of demonstrating to the recipient that you have whatever unique qualities are required, and the only way to really do that is through a covering letter or email,’ Reynolds concludes. |
This article appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of IR Magazine
