The One Mistake Everyone Makes With Resumes
The One Mistake Everyone Makes With Resumes
If you Google “best resume”, the top 20 search results that you get will be about formatting resumes. There are so many design template options and all of them are definitely very beautiful to look at, in terms of design. They show you where to put your name, your address, your work experience etc but why are people still being told that their resumes are ineffective?
The problem is obviously, the content of the resumes.
But what could be the problem? Isn’t name, address and work experience the same whatever the resume format?
Name and address definitely is the same regardless of format, but the one thing that the vast majority of job applicants get wrong is to recount their work experience as things that they did and not as a presentation of what they actually achieved.
Potential employers want to know what you can do, and the only way they can gauge that at a glance (unfortunately) is to base that conclusion on what you have achieved previously.
There is a big difference between what you did and what you achieved, though it may seem to be more or less the same thing. To use a sports analogy, it is very different to say that you played in a tennis competition (that is what you “did”) compared to winning the competition (that is what you “achieved”). Of course not everyone gets to win all the time and that is where your knowledge of your actual personal experience and history makes the difference. In that competition we were talking about, you may not have won but you indicate for instance, that you reached the quarter finals, that you beat 20 other players to reach that level, and you earned x thousands of Dollars in prize money getting to that point. That is a list of achievements.
Is it all a matter of perception? It’s all a matter of what you are claiming you can do for the potential employer.
“Recruiters want to be wow’ed.”
Applicants tend to think that recruiting managers are looking for ways to fail them or reject them and throw them out of the hiring process, but nothing could be further from the truth. Recruiters actually want to hire you because that allows them to complete their work, and go home.
Applicants fail because they don’t give recruiters enough reason to hire them. This applies to the resume, the interview and everything that happens in between as well.
The only person, though, who knows what was truly achieved is you. That is why someone else cannot write your resume for you, not truthfully anyway.
What is required is that you realistically self-reflect and understand yourself and what you can do for that specific potential employer, and from that point, re-cast your resume to get ahead of everyone else. How? Because everyone else is still talking about what they did, and you are talking about what you achieved.
Simply put, your personal brand is the way you are perceived by those who “experience” you. That could be a face-to-face, personal experience, or via your social media posts or through your emails or WhatsApp messages. Looking at it that way, a personal brand is unavoidable. We all have them. For certain people, however, you really want them to perceive you in a very specific way. Those people in the work arena are going to be prospective employers, clients or even colleagues. Critically, you want them to perceive you in a way that is of your own choosing.
It’s a horror situation. No doubt about it. But every person who has ever had a job, has been in this position at one time or other, so it is not an insurmountable challenge. Nevertheless, it’s a tough situation, so here are some ideas to help you. You should: