A man came to see me, and he told me his story. He’d just sold a business that he’d launched with a partner nearly twenty years ago. When his partner retired, my client had stuck around to grow the business, and he’d done a great job of it – so much so that the proceeds from the sale of the business made it possible for him to retire on the spot. “But I don’t want to retire,” he said. “I want to work for at least one more company, and I don’t want to have to start it from the ground up. Too much work.”
The gentleman wanted to job-hunt, and he wanted some advice. “Do you have a resume?” I asked. “I have one,” he said, “but I’m not crazy about it. A resume-writer put it together for me, according to what I hear is the latest resume-writing fad.”
“A new resume fad?” I asked. “I can’t wait to hear about that.”
“Skills!” said the CEO. “Transferable skills. My resume is loaded up with ‘em.”
“Oh dear,” I said. Resume fads take ages to die, and the skill-based-resume fad is going strong. The poor gentleman’s resume was crammed with skills from one end to the other, from Leadership Communication Skills to Accounting Skills to Strategic Skills and a dozen more that I can’t think of right now.
I read his resume from start to finish. I sighed.
“This resume will not help you,” I said. “This resume has taken your power and your genius and broken it down into tiny, discrete parts that add up to nothing weighty or compelling. You bring your next employer much more than a laundry list of disembodied skills. We need to tell the reader what you’ve done! He or she will be able to deduce your skills from your story.”
Can you imagine trying to characterize the CEO of a $40M business via a list of functional skills? The idea is ridiculous. We want to talk about the CEO’s accomplishments, as well as the arc of his career, at a much higher level. It would be ludicrous to talk about his financial skills and his communication skills. If we’re going to get that granular, why not add “He has stapling skills and paper clipping skills?” We may as well say “That Bono, he has musical skills, as well as diplomatic, organizational, showmanship and activist skills, don’t you agree?”
We do not say of Sir Winston Churchill, “He had leadership skills, executive skills, and excellent interpersonal skills.” We say “He led England through one of the darkest periods in its history.”
There are technical certifications, levels of proficiency with function- and industry-specific protocols, and other ‘hard skills’ that need to be called out and identified in a resume. We cannot expect a hiring manager or resume screener to guess which programming languages a job-seeker can code in. There’s a place for these hard skills on a resume. Once we’ve listed those technical and functional checklist items, we should be using our valuable resume real estate to talk about the problems we’ve surmounted. Context-free skill listings are a waste of space, and that’s not even the worst thing about them.
Our work histories are full of powerful, concrete stories about what we’ve made happen so far in our careers (“Our division was under the gun to launch the Nail Biter edible nail-polish line for prom season. As Product Manager, I got the product out the door early to grab us $12M in incremental revenue”). When we trade our pithy, relevant stories for dry-as-dust, abstract lists of skills (like “excellent problem-solving skills,” gag me) we do three very regrettable things:
- We reduce the power and interest level of our resume dramatically;
- We sound exactly like every other job-seeker in the pile; and
- We take away resume reader’s ability to decide for him- or herself whether our real-life experience shows a command of the skills we claim for ourselves.
“Transferable skills” has been a job-search mantra for at least a decade now. There’s a big problem with the transferable-skills concept, however. If we don’t share the story — the situation in which we cultivated and/or deployed the skills we’re trumpeting — no one is likely to believe that we possess those skills, nor should they. We haven’t given them any evidence, and let’s face it: everybody defines “superior interpersonal skills” differently. When it comes to skills, we’re better off sharing a story or two about what we’ve done with those skills than to list the skills themselves.
Of all the skills I’d hate for you to list on your resume, the very worst of all is Excellent Communication Skills. If you truly had excellent communication skills, you’d zip over to www.thesaurus.com and use some of the million-plus words in our bountiful language to come up with something more original than the worn-out phrase “excellent communication skills” to describe them.
When it comes to skills, hiring managers don’t want you to yak about them. Don’t tell us what you bring — show us!
