4 Tips for Fine-Tuning Your Accounting or Finance Resume

By:
September 11, 2024

A thoughtfully crafted accounting or finance resume can help you stand out in a competitive job market. To convey the message that you have the skills to excel in a position and will add substantial value to a company, your resume should showcase your skills, experience, and, most importantly, measurable accomplishments. The following tips will help you fine-tune your resume, elevating it from good to great.

1. Follow Basic Resume Rules

First, check out this general resume advice.

An accounting or financial resume should include these typical resume elements:

  • Contact section: Provide your name, location, phone number, and email address. If you have a LinkedIn profile or a professional website, include the URL.
  • Headline: This brief phrase encapsulates who you are and what you can offer the employer. For example, a headline for a finance resume could read: “Successful Risk Manager with Regulatory Compliance Expertise.”
  • Summary: Use this section as your elevator pitch. Your summary should be an engaging short paragraph that showcases your strengths, your competencies, and your most significant achievements.
  • Education: Provide the type of degree you earned, your field of study or major, and the name of the educational institution you attended, as well as academic awards and other relevant details.
  • Work history: Provide concise descriptions of your current and past jobs, with a focus on your specific duties.
  • Skills: Provide a bullet list of your most relevant professional, technical, and soft skills.
  • Certifications: If you hold certifications — such as CPA, CMA, CFA, CIC, or FRM — add a section to list them.

In the past, resumes commonly included an Objectives section that stated career goals, but, in general, it’s best to include this section only if you’re seeking an entry-level position.

2. Ensure your resume matches your career level

If you’re a mid-career accounting or finance professional, your resume should not merely be a longer version of your early-career resume. Likewise, a senior professional’s resume should take a different approach than the resume of a mid-career professional. Make sure that your resume matches your career level:

  • Entry level: Because you may have little or no professional work experience, your resume should emphasize your education, coursework, internships, and other factors that will demonstrate you have the knowledge and skills to succeed in the specific position you’re seeking. When describing your past unrelated jobs and other activities, stress experiences and personality traits that display your teamwork, leadership, and other abilities that relate to the job.
  • Mid-level: If you’re a mid-level professional, your resume should highlight the skills that you’ve developed, accentuate specific job achievements and successes, and demonstrate your career progression. For example, if you’re a finance professional, use quantitative language to describe how you solved specific problems, such as “shortened closing time by 3 days.”
  • Senior level: As a highly experienced professional, your resume should give employers confidence that you can provide effective leadership and drive value. For example, if you’re a senior public accountant, your resume should emphasize your experience and successes in conducting audits, identifying expense reduction opportunities, and providing actionable, profitable recommendations to management. For most senior-level resumes, it’s often best to summarize early-career work history much more briefly than recent work history.

3. Include the Right Skills and Keywords

Your resume should make it easy for a recruiter to find the distinct factors that align with the specific skills needed for the position and make you stand out from other applicants.

For an accounting resume, common hard and soft skills include:

  • GAAP
  • Financial statement preparation
  • Tax planning
  • Budgeting
  • ‌Compliance
  • QuickBooks (and other accounting software)
  • Data analysis
  • Written and verbal communication
  • Time management
  • Organizational skills
  • Critical-thinking skills

Other relevant skills and keywords to add to your resume will depend on your areas of expertise, such as cost accounting, payroll, ledger, or audit.

For a finance resume, common hard and soft skills include:

  • Financial analysis and reporting
  • Statistical analysis
  • Financial modeling
  • Cash flow optimization
  • P&L analysis
  • SAP (and other finance software)
  • Data analysis
  • Written and verbal communication
  • Leadership
  • Organizational skills
  • Critical-thinking skills

Other relevant skills and keywords to add to your resume will depend on your areas of expertise, such as financial analysis, risk management, investment advisory, and compliance.

4. Customize Your Resume

Job applicants can no longer submit the same resume over and over. Each time you apply for an accounting or finance job, revise the relevant parts of your resume to demonstrate to recruiters that you have all of the needed skills for that particular position.

This approach requires tailoring sections of your resume to repeat the exact same keywords that appear in the job posting. Many companies use an applicant tracking system (ATS) to screen resumes. If your resume doesn’t echo the keywords the recruiter has input into the ATS for the position, your resume likely won’t survive the first cut. Even if you’re an ideal candidate, the recruiter won’t even see your resume.

Career Moves Can Make Your Resume Stand Out

Paul Wigglesworth, CPA and founder of Career Moves, can help you build the perfect resume and get it into the hands of the right people at many of the top companies in Connecticut. With more than two decades of experience helping accounting and finance professionals land their ideal positions, he knows what hiring managers look for in your resume. Contact Paul for assistance.