Retaurant Recruiter, my mother taught me as soon as I could talk “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

Regarding your question on how to show accomplishments within the context of a failing business, I can tell you that this absolutely can be done. I recently worked with several marketing and creative professionals who were let go because the product line they worked on was terminated. Even though the product was not successful, these candidates had numerous accomplishments to showcase including statistics on new market share they captured, examples of innovative low-cost marketing techniques, development of more cost effective product display units, and improved project management processs, just to name a few. A job seeker who has worked on a product line that fails can be of enormous benefit to a competing company because the candidate has gained valuable insight from a previous employer’s mistakes.

All job seekers have quantifiable accomplishments. Take some time to think about the problems you solved for your previous employers and how you helped save them time and money and you will be taking a giant leap forward in your job search.

I believe there’s big-time truth in your comment:

“You can ignore the first impressions, but I’ve heard the person looking at your resume will spend less than 10 seconds before they make a decision (save/toss).”

10 seconds might even be pushin’ it! Candidates have to give recruiters a reason to stay longer than 10 seconds. If they stick around for all 5 days of your experiment, they just might figure out how to do that!

Dennis

And if I do put down that the product was worth X million and sales and my former employer comes after me then what? Please don’t say that would never happen, because someone I used to work with had this very problem.

What do you do with metrics that you might be able to quantify, but that are meaningless without context? 1 million in sales at some company beats 100 billion in another. Percents aren’t always computable without other info.

Also, what do you do when you worked at a company that went bankrupt and out of business, and your areas were among the few that were being done well at the company? or what do you do was acquired and everyone was laid off but the acquiring company kept the corporate name and changed everything? How do you quantify or describe these companies?