Your resume is highly optimized. It is skills focused and accomplishment driven. Take another look. How many of those skills are the ones you actually enjoy doing? Are you emphasizing what you might be GOOD at doing, but don’t care to do at work?
Richard L. Knowdell spoke at the Career Management Alliance conference, and I was intrigued by his suggestion that coaches advise clients to OMIT skills from their resumes if they are skills the job seekers do not enjoy.
In a tight job market, this advice seems extreme, or even foolish, on first glance. Shouldn’t we all be marketing everything we have to offer? It’s a recession, after all! So, I posed the question on Twitter: Should job seekers leave off (or de-emphasize) skills on their resume that they do well but don’t enjoy?
Veronica replied, “As job seeker, I don’t think should leave off any skills that could help get a job. Each circumstance individual.” @vmodarelli
Sam Blum, Co-Founder and CEO at Razume said, “Resumes are marketing documents, not statements of personal interest. I say list any skill that can give you an advantage.” @samblum
Reasonable replies, certainly.
However, my goal (and that of my colleagues in the career coaching world) isn’t only to help people find and land jobs, but to secure positions doing what they enjoy. My friends who are experts in personal branding have a different take!
Deb Dib, a CEO coach and personal brand expert explained: “I leave them off/give subsidiary placement. Don’t want burnout skills attracting interest; fit won’t be right.” @ceocoach
Walter Akana, a life strategist and personal branding expert said, “Yes, deemphasize skills that you don’t enjoy. Emphasize ones you do – provided, of course, what you offer creates value!” @walterakana
This makes a lot of sense to me. Why attract opportunities that may be a bad fit?
Two social media/marketing professionals had some practical advice:
Avi Kaplan suggested: “Leave everything on applicable to each job & don’t apply for roles needing skills you don’t want to use,” which Neal Wiser echoed, “If a job seeker doesn’t like doing something, they shouldn’t apply for that job.”
Think about it…Are you over-emphasizing skills you are not motivated to use on your resume? How much time do you spend thinking about applying for and targeting positions that you would enjoy doing? Are you applying for just “any old job?”
I hope this is food for thought…I’m open to your “take” on the subject, but I hope you’ll seriously consider focusing your job search in areas that appeal to your motivated skills. I’m happy to help. Follow THIS LINK to learn more about me and how we can work together to optimize your resume to help you land the job you love!
photo by BPM
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I’d like to firmly place my pup tent in the “promote your marketable skills” camp. Intentionally omitting skills, especially in the current job market, is from my perspective a foolish choice. I would go so far as to suggest that those advocating that their clients do so are walking a dangerous line. I hope they are set up so that if their advice is challenged in a court of law that they will not have their personal assets at risk. The advice borders on negligence.
Let us remember, the primary purpose of a resume is to get the applicant in the door for a personal interview. In a nutshell, that is what applicants should be tailoring their resume to achieve. (Later it serves as a reference point on which an employer can base targeted interview questions.) Properly written it will help the applicant land an interview, not a job. The interview is where the job is earned.
While I completely understand the argument pertaining to fit and happiness, the person/environment match should be assessed by both the employer and the applicant IN THE INTERVIEW. This is the appropriate place where skills and job responsibilities are illuminated and discussed.
Let’s hypothesize that Ahmad leaves his accounting skills off his resume because he dearly wants to focus on marketing and stay far away from accounting due to burnout. Let’s us also hypothesize that Company A is seeking a marketing manager. When reviewing resumes for the marketing manager position the search chairperson finds several applicants with similar marketing experiences to Ahmad. However, there are two applicants who also have accounting skills on the resume and one who does not. It just so happens that the marketing manager is part of team of 8. Also on the team are 2 project accountants. One of these accountants is about to go to active duty for a 10 month assignment. The other is recently pregnant. The applicants with accounting experience on their resume are given an interview opportunity while the applicant who left accounting off is not. It seems that having skills that allow cross germination of ideas and language as well as being able to pinch hit for short periods of time in other areas is valued. The applicant who was advised to intentionally leave the accounting skills of the resume is passed up and is not given the opportunity to interview for a position that he may have found a great fit, even with a bit of accounting tossed at him now and again.
The point is you never know what ancillary skills the hiring organization may find valuable. No need to emphasize skills that you want to move away from, but to omit them could be an unwise move. A savvy job hunter will have all guns blazing on the resume to be as targeted and well-rounded as possible. Once landing an interview it can be determined if the hiring organization is going to want to put these skills to use in a way that the job seeker does not desire. It is at this point that a career coach must help a client weigh the issues of values, happiness etcetera.
Also keep in mind that a job search is all about networking. Let’s say an interview is landed because a desirable skill is included on the resume. The interview process shows that the skill the company latched on to is not the applicants area of interest and passion. Fair enough. But who is to say that in the interview process an unexpected outcome of a group interview is someone from another department noticed the applicant, became impressed and knows of a position opening soon and wants the applicant to apply. Stranger things have happened.
Career Development theorist Anne Rowe developed a formula for occupational choice and one of the coefficients is chance. Chance is also a coefficient in the career search. Being in opportunistic places, discovering unknown opportunities (the hidden job market) is all part of the process.
Intentionally leaving marketable skills off the resume has the potential to stifle these opportunities. In a tight job market I fail to see the wisdom in the advice to leave them off.
I do agree with the point that it is not a good idea to apply for positions which you know from the description or your networking are not a good fit because they primarily require skills you possess, but do not wish to utilize. Happiness and personal satisfaction is extremely important and should indeed be weighed heavily into career decisions. At the same time, you do not want to sell yourself short by self-selecting skills to omit when you have no idea if leaving them off may put you at a disadvantage.
Miriam, keep up the great work! Cool topic. I believe Richard may need to re-think his recommendation to omit items. Good luck to everyone in their search.
Hi,
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