Writing Powerful Action-Benefit Statements

Action – Benefit Statements use your accomplishments and experience to demonstrate the positive impact you can have on a company’s bottom line. An Action-Benefit Statement consists of:

Action:

A Job responsibility or specific situation that you took when faced with a situation, problem, or opportunity that enabled you to achieve a positive result.

Benefit:

The positive result or benefit to the organisation, such as an increase in revenue, a reduction in costs, streamlined processes or systems, or improved morale.

An Action – Benefit Statement might read “Analysing declining sales and developed campaigns that increased orders by 30% in less than one month.” This statement describes the situation or challenge you faced (declining sales), the Action you took (developed a campaign), and the Benefit of your actions (a 30% increase in orders).

Always quantify or qualify the accomplishments and achievements described in your Action-Benefit statement. When you are quantifying results, consider the impact of your work in measurable terms and include the numbers, percents, dollars, and other values that represent your experience in the best possible light.

Before:

Supervised a large staff of retail employees covering multiple territories. Effectively managed business unit P&L and consistently grew profits.

After:

Ten years experience managing 15 employees across multiple territories. Effectively managed P&L of $10 million business unit. Consistently generated 30-35% gross profit.

Alternatively, when you are qualifying accomplishments, consider describing the process, depicting the environment, and including the personal characteristics that a future employer would consider valuable.

Before:

Increased sales through cold-calling, follow-up, and account management.

After:

Consistently grew revenue and profits in a rapidly changing environment through aggressive cold-calling, persistent followup, and relationship-focused account management.

When writing an Action-Benefit statement, it is unnecessary to provide details on how you solved the problem. You can provide this information at the interview. Focus on the results as opposed to the process. If your Action – benefit statements are powerful enough, employers will invite you in for an interview just to see how you achieved the results.