Lasker speaking: Every CV claim needs a 'reason why'

In my first years at Lord & Thomas in Chicago, half of the agency treated advertising as ornament. Give the client the most beautiful words; the client will be happy; happiness equals orders. Foolish.

One day an Englishman named John E. Kennedy walked into my office and spoke three words to me. "Advertising is salesmanship in print."Those three words changed the industry. Advertising is a salesman, printed. Not poetry. Not decoration. Written for the order.

Imagine I send a salesman to your door. He says: "I am a good salesman, dynamic, solution-oriented." You shut the door. He comes back and says: "This vacuum does this job at this price. Three of your neighbors already bought one — one of them is right there."Now you stop and listen. The difference is reason. Every claim has a "why" behind it. I called this reason-why copy. My entire agency was built on it.

Most CVs are full of reasonless claims

A friend sent me his son's CV last month. Fresh out of university. The first line read: "Strong leadership skills, problem-solving oriented, communication-focused young professional."

How many claims in that sentence? Three. How many reasons? Zero. Which is to say: knocking on my door and saying "I am a good salesman, dynamic, solution-oriented." Same sentence. Same emptiness. Same door slamming.

I told the young man: keep the same three traits, but put the reason behind each. An hour later the sentence became: "Led a 14-person project team in his senior year, fielded investor questions during the defense himself, lined up 9 conversations from a customer panel in two weeks."

Same person. Same potential. The only difference: each claim has a reason. What is being sold to the recruiter is no longer feeling — it is concrete performance. The young man had a job within three weeks.

Claim + Reason — five examples

At Lord & Thomas I would teach the rule simply: if a claim does not include a number, a date, a name or a result, the claim is half done. Move it to CVs:

• WEAK: "Experienced in data analysis."
  STRONG: "Built weekly retention reports for three products in SQL + Tableau, brought churn from 18% to 11% in 2024."
• WEAK: "Successful in customer relations."
  STRONG: "Carried a 60-customer book and scaled NPS from 32 to 58, renewal rate 12 points above the team average."
• WEAK: "Strong management skills."
  STRONG: "Held an 11-person team across product and engineering stable for 14 months — attrition under 4% as technical lead."
• WEAK: "Strong communicator."
  STRONG: "Headlined keynote at three 200-person conferences in Turkish and English, hosted 14 podcast episodes."
• WEAK: "Solution-oriented."
  STRONG: "Completed root-cause analysis of an 8-hour production outage in 90 minutes, wrote the postmortem alone, single-handedly owned a 6-week cross-team incident."

Why does a reasonless claim burn money?

Ten years into Lord & Thomas I ran a budget where one client's campaign ran in the same newspaper for four straight weeks. The headline was "Quality Soap." No reason. Adjective. Result: three weeks of no change in sales; the agency's face went red.

We came back with the same product and the same budget. New headline:"Soap that leaves no scum because it's milled six times."The reason behind the claim: milled six times. Same product. Sales rose 46% by the sixth week. The only change was that the claim had a "why" beside it.

CVs are no different. When a candidate writes "leadership skills" next to a candidate who writes "managed an 11-person team for 14 months," the latter is called in 2.5 times more often. I held that data for years. A claim without a reason is an unsold product sitting on a shelf.

After writing the reason-why: measuring

I learned many things over the years; my favorite is this: "The only scientific difference between two campaigns is the difference I measure." Without measuring the reasons you wrote, you cannot know which one worked.

In advertising, we printed coupons for this. The customer would clip and bring it, we'd count which newspaper and which headline pulled sales. The modern equivalent for CVs is much more elegant: send the CV as a tracked link. Was it opened, how long did the recipient stay, which page got the most time, which headline was read longer? Three reason-why variants to three different recruiters takes one week and serves you for a lifetime.

Candidates who use Lurienfor this write back to me: in the first week they see that "team player" was read by no recruiter, while "incident response time of 90 minutes" was the longest-read line on the page. They rewrite the CV accordingly. Three weeks later the calls start.

Practical exercise: convert your CV to reason-why in 10 minutes

Open your CV. Apply these four steps:

• Write "so what?" next to each line. If you can't answer with a number or concrete result, the line is empty.
• Delete or rewrite the empty lines. Drop the adjective, keep the verb, add the reason.
• Send the CV as a tracked link to two different recruiters. Two versions — one with the old "team player" line, the other with "stabilized an 11-person team for 14 months." Measure which is read longer.
• Repeat the test every three weeks. Continually refine the reason-why. A CV is never a finished ad — it is a continually improved campaign.

Last word

The day I started in advertising there was a headline in a newspaper: "Dead-end Street." An ad for a street. The street was still a dead end — but no reason was given. No reason, no headline; no headline, no ad; no ad, no sale.A CV is not exempt from that chain.

If a CV line cannot answer "why," that line is empty. If, after sending your CV, you do not know whether it was read, you are not measuring the campaign. An unmeasured campaign is a probability. Probability is not the professional's luxury.