Corporate Restructuring: How to Reflect It in Your Resume

Have you ever been a victim of corporate restructuring, in your work career? There may be various scenarios of corporate restructuring, such as lay off's, mergers, acquisitions, and closures. You may or may not be lucky enough to always survive a corporate restructuring. However, the reason for this article is, what if you don't survive a corporate restructuring, how do you represent it in the resume effectively and let it shine.

Writing a resume after suffering a structural change in the organisation is different than writing a law school student resume. Referring to any student resumes such as business student resume examples is not what you should do, read the following tips instead to let your resume shine even after incorporating the details related to structural changes.

Since the last decade, the corporate world has seen a lot of restructuring, for various reasons, such as shedding staff, saving money etc.. Being a victim of corporate restructuring may affect your career. You may fear that it’s the writing on the wall and you may have to suffer lay-offs in the future organisations also. However, this article discusses a few tips about what to do in particular restructuring scenarios to let your resume appear attractive to a prospective hiring manager.

Mergers and Acquisitions:

Many job seekers make this mistake of listing different employers and job titles, even though their company underwent mergers and acquisitions. Such representation can give impression that you are a job hopper. Hence, consolidate all the job titles and mention only one company’s name with all restructuring details under one section of employment history.

E.g. Company X (merged with Company Y/ Acquired by Company Y in Date)
Sales Specialist (xx date to xx date)
Sales Manager (xx date to xx date)
Sales Assistant (xx date to xx date)

Demotion:

In case, your organisation has various sub-ordinate level jobs, and you are pursuing a lower-level job similar to those sub-ordinates, after demotion. How to handle this impact of restructuring? Well you can represent this with a positive note that 'you were retained from no. of employees during the corporate downsizing, based on exemplary performance'.

Lay-off:

If you lose your job as a result of lay-offs during the process of corporate restructure, then highlight your job position and the accomplishments at the organisation. However, use the cover letter to inform the hiring manager that you were laid off due to staff downsizing.

Survival

Surviving a corporate restructure is an achievement in itself. Thus, you can express that you are a valued employee of the organisation. State your qualities such as flexibility, conviction, dedication, and efforts that helped you to be retained by the corporate.

Closure

If your organisation closed down during the corporate restructure, you still need to list the experience along with the previous ones. Give your job position and accomplishments with the organisation. You may explain about the closure through your cover letter.

Corporate restructures are not uncommon these years, and you may have been victim to the structural changes of an organisation. Whatever, the outcome may be, you may find it difficult to represent on your resume. The above given tips can be helpful to you, to build a resume that overcomes the setbacks of you suffering a corporate restructure.