Plenty of Advice…
It’s tough to avoid the influx of career advice these days – it seems to have infiltrated all my LinkedIn groups and there is no limit of people offering free webinars, paid events, etc. Through my coaching, I have had to re-work many resumes that people paid (top dollar!) to have created for them. And I am happy to report that at this point, I can sniff out a ‘professionally’ done resume which more often than not, is not a good thing since those resumes are often filled with phrases like:
- Self-Starter
- Top Performer
- High-Level Strategist
- Critical Thinker
- Strategic Visionary
- and the list goes on and on…
Ugh, Those Catch Phrases
Usually, my job involves parsing out which of these are truly and authentically, the main points that the individual is really ‘selling’ themselves on and then, figuring out how to weave those ideas into the content of the resume where these attributes can be tied to actual experiences rather than rattled off as list of attributes we would all love to have. Vindication arrived this week for me in the form of an article titled, “Catch Phrases That May Bust Your Resume,” arguing the same exact thing and I thought…Finally!!
How does this apply to you?
As is often the case, this issue is ubiquitous whether you are applying to jobs focused on sustainability, social impact or other. So I encourage you to take a look at your resume and consider:
- Are there words or phrases in there that don’t mean much?
- What do you REALLY want to convey to the reader and are you doing that by embedding those ideas where the work or experience happened?
If you put in the time to make your resume do all this, I can assure you, it will be much more powerful making the time invested well worth it!