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Many of my most highly educated candidates come to my recruiting firm with complaints about a lack of employer commitment to their particular employment field or specialty. It’s a common theme for deciding to make a job change. My response as a recruiter with over 30 years of experience has been that it’s up to you to engender that commitment. But if you have tried to get management to recognize the benefits of a broader view of your profession and failed then it really is time to look around.

If this high level of employer commitment is your primary goal in changing jobs then you should structure your job search to aim at those organizations that meet world class performance metrics in accounting or engineering or whatever your area is. You should look for recent surveys in your professional magazines that offer some ideas on what questions to ask of such an organization and what their basis for claiming world class status is. To get an interview at one of these companies you must tailor your resume content to appeal to them on their own scale of measurement.

Your resume must show examples of certifications, measured results, performance metrics and indicators of training and coaching that most world class programs have in common. Even if your accomplishments and numbers are high, the effort it takes to reduce them should show in your results and achievements. It’s far better to have a poor program going in the right direction as evidenced by increasing frequency of audits, reduced lag time for corrective change, and decreasing numbers of at risk operations than good numbers and no evidence of improvement. Put those indicators in your resume and you will attract interest from resume readers at the world class firms who know what they mean.

Other factors in the resume content matter too. Dollars and profits are part and parcel of world class programs. Many resumes I see are focused on various rules and regulations, legislative act names and categories. This level of commitment doesn’t produce a world class program. So you should cite your efforts to create corporate values, state business benefits and describe the management systems you attempted to institute, successful or not, that support a claim to world class status.

An effort on your part to conduct an attitude survey of your workforce could be the basis of a resume statement. Many world class programs have worker surveys and you could do the same fairly easily. Record the results and then publicize them in your resume. It would show your understanding of the next level of participation regardless of the results or field of employment.

I have often criticized the outside activities section of resumes that are filled with church and kid’s sports leadership roles. I based that on comments from my client companies that such people have no time to work late or on weekends because they are too busy. You can turn this around by making such activities demonstrate your commitment to the off the job happiness, safety and health of your workforce and their families. Financial planning assistance, tax return help, seat belt fairs, child seat inspections, home smoke alarm checks, Christmas pageant fire inspections, sports safety equipment rules and condition surveys, monetary reserve calculations, etc. can all be part of your resume. These are natural extensions of your community involvement and constitute another facet of the world class program you are aiming for that you want to have on your resume.

When you have tailored your resume to illustrate a higher degree of knowledge of a world class program, you might find that you will have the opportunity to put it into action.