Executives: Are You Worth the Investment?

Every executive must always be concerned with making a return on investment, or ROI. In business, returns need to be all but guaranteed to make an investment worth while.

Job seekers must realize that companies feel the same way when they start interviewing potential employees. Their investment in you needs to be validated by significant returns. If they don't know this for sure, you won't get the job. Given that, how can an executive prove to a prospective hiring company that he's worth the money? Here are a few ideas to consider …

Look at Your Revenue

If there were quantifiable parts to your previous job, you want to make sure to put them into numbers on your executive resume that will help illustrate your success. Revenue is one crucial area--show prospects that you turned into sales, major business deals, and other revenue you'd earned for your previous employers.

For instance, you might note that you not only were able to slash hiring expenses by cutting advertising costs (advertised on free websites), but you were able to create a stellar staff that increased revenue by X amount of dollars over a year’s time. Showing numbers that correlate with the success you brought a company clearly shows your value to said company and makes you a safer hire.

How Productive Was Your Staff?

Businesses are often very concerned with productivity, as you probably are as an executive, and they look for ways to ensure that their employees are earning them as much as possible. An executive who shows how he was able to affect productivity in simple terms stands a good chance of getting a job.

For example, you can look at the amount of time it took to complete a major project that resulted in a revenue increase of 3 percent for the year. Let’s say in simple terms that you were allotted 12 weeks of 40-hour per week shifts at $10/hr for 20 workers to complete a special project. The cost of this was $96,000. Let's say that you also invested in training resources of $500 per employee, and software updates that cost $10K but cut the project down to six weeks. Your final cost for the project is $68,000, which means you saved the company $28,000, still increased the revenue by 3 percent, and was able to increase process efficiency so that the workers could be used to enhance other projects.

Other Numbers to Think About

If your segment of the company didn’t work in terms of revenue, you can still note numbers that represent progress. For instance, if your ran the customer service department of your company, you can look at the number of customers your department was responsible for, as well as increases in customer satisfaction. Phone contact with customers can be a troublesome issue, so show how you decreased the time span of each call or helped your department handle more customers per day on the phones.

Remember, just like on your previous jobs, prospective employers want to know their potential ROI when looking at candidates. You're used to dealing with investments and returns, so use your experience to explain clearly why you should be hired.