The world is changing really fast. It’s disorienting. Lance Armstrong is a hero! Oh wait, he’s a big liar and a bully. Wheat is good for you - we ate it every day as kids. What’s that? Gluten is bad for you? It makes people sick, and stupid?
Easy come, easy go in the information-and-advice department, and it’s a good thing, because everything we've been taught about personal branding is wrong, also.
The Skills dogma that most of us grew up with is complete B.S. and a total waste of time. You know what I’m talking about – the thing where you talk about your Communication Skills and your Administration Skills in your resume and your LinkedIn profile, not to mention on job interviews.
That Skills dogma is the lamest advice ever dumped on an unsuspecting and job-seeking public. I don’t think there’s a worse way to describe yourself on paper or in a job interview than by listing your Skills -- and for that matter, listing the same half-dozen Skills that nearly every other job-seeker also claims.
"I'm well-qualified for this job because of my Organizational Skills, my Communication Skills and my Negotiation Skills,” says a typical job-seeker on an interview or in a resume.
What does that robot language mean? The Skills dogma gives no clue.
When I say I have Excellent Communication Skills, you can’t gauge the veracity of that statement. Worse, you are skeptical, because people who communicate nimbly don't describe themselves using done-to-death cliches.
When a job-seeker's resume says the guy has Negotiation Skills, a reader has no way to evaluate the claim. I might think my Negotiation Skills are world-class, but a hiring manager could decide after talking with me that I can't negotiate my way out of a paper bag. We have no agreed-upon standards for these Skills we blithely toss around, and in any case a person's skill level is in the eye on the beholder.
Lists are boring. Every list in the world is boring - lists have no emotional weight at all (except this kind) and can’t carry your flame across the chasm to a person who hasn't met you yet no matter what Skills you might credit yourself with.
The Skills racket is a dog not only because anybody could claim any Skills he or she wanted to or because lists are boring.
When you claim Skills on your resume, you've hampered a hiring manager's ability to learn what he or she really wants to know about you: who you are. The central question for a hiring manager is "How does this person's brain work? How does he or she think?" The purpose of a job interview is to give both the applicant and the hiring manager an opportunity to see the other person's brain working.
That happens organically when a manager invites a job-seeker to ask a question, rather than answer one. Scripted interview questions and their tepid, scripted answers give little room for thoughtful interpretation or human spark (unless you try our frame-shifting responses, hereand here). They suck even more humanity out of the interview room than was already lost when the applicant walked in the door and snapped into Performance Mode.
(Why oh why would a hiring manager ever want to interview a person stuck in fake, formal Performance Mode? Doesn't it make more sense to invest energy early in the interview getting to Human Mode, in order to talk the way people talk in a coffee shop or at the grocery store? You'd see so much more of the real person behind the resume if you did that on your job interviews.
You can do it easily if you take off the mask that says "I'm a manager, and I deserve respect." Deference is pleasant in the moment, but it costs you: the more you cling to the persona The Person in Charge, the less of the real job-seeker you’ll see.
If you're going to spend hours a day with a person under sometimes trying circumstances, don't you want Real Guy to come out during the interview, and replace Fake Interview Guy? And if you want to see Real Guy, why would you ever use crappy scripted Mad Men-era interview questions?)
There is a better way to interview candidates, and we'll dig into that in a future column. For now, let's get back to bashing the ready-for-the-dustbin-of-obscurity Skills dogma for job-seekers.
Skills tell us nothing about what you did that mattered, when the chips were down. To say you have Skill X and Skill Y tells us exactly nothing about when, whether and how you’ve had occasion to use those Skills, and that is the Skills dogma’s biggest problem.
Skills carry no context with them. They don't convey your warmth, your core, your flame or your passion. They don't tell us how you think or how you react in the moment. When I was an HR leader in corporate America during the Jurassic period, the Skills dogma was going strong. Every resume read nearly exactly the same.
Rows and battalions of Results-Oriented Professionals and Motivated Self-Starters marched through our doors every day. Why on earth would we ever want to brand ourselves with the zombie brand that screams "I'm Just Like Everyone Else?" Yet that's what we have taught job-seekers to do, going back to the 1980s and beyond.
Forget Skills, and ask yourself instead, "What problem do I solve?" Think about your stories, the dozens or hundreds of stories you've collected during your career. When did you rock it at work, and why did it matter? What were the stakes? What did you do to save the day, and why was that exactly the right move to make in that moment?
We have to re-teach people to tell stories, because people have forgotten how. When we talk about storytelling at our workshops, people say "I have no stories." They worked at a job for twenty years. There were grand-opera-scale dramas playing out around them every day. It's not that there were no stories. It's that we have devalued our stories and storytelling in general after sucking down the dogma that told us only Skills are worth notice.
Imagine you've got two resumes in front of you, candidates for your Admin Assistant job. Both candidates claim Communication Skills and Organizational Skills. You can hardly choose between them - both have four years of office experience and community college diplomas - so you invite them both in.
Annabel is well-spoken and passive. When you ask "What did you mean when you wrote about Communication Skills on your resume, Annabel?" she says "I heard that was a good thing to write, I mean, I read you should," clamps her lips shut and slides back in her chair. Dear Annabel has no more awareness of her communication abilities, bent, experience or orientation than the Man on the Moon. In Annabel's short career, she very likely has never thought about her own communication talents or preferences before.
Nadia comes in to interview next. You ask Nadia about the Communication Skills listed on her resume, and she says
"I think of myself as a communicator because my job involves communication all day long. I'm always coordinating schedules and unruffling feathers and making sure people are heard. I get their important messages through to my boss, the VP of Sales, get his thoughts and play carrier pigeon with the staff."
Nadia is in a wildly different league from sweet Annabel. She could help you at a much higher level. Yet the two administrators' resumes were substantially the same. Why would we teach every job-seeker in the country to write a resume in such a way that the vast difference in altitude between your candidates made evident in their interviews would be almost completely obscured on paper?
The standard resume format is an insult to job-seekers and to all of us with its list-y, robotic, stiff tone and language that's completely lacking in color.
We invented the Human-Voiced Resume(TM) to bridge that gap, to let job-seekers bring more of themselves across on the page. To get there, though, we have to step out of the Good Little Job-Seeker frame. We have to say "I choose not to bound by conventional resume wisdom. After all, whence cometh these rules that people keep spouting, like the rule against using "I" in my resume and the one that tells me to list my Skills? Who ever thought these were good ways to brand ourselves?"
Those ancient, unexamined resume rules either came from Hell or from someone who hated job-seekers and resume screeners. You can only read forty or fifty of those zombietastic resumes at one sitting before you want to kill yourself.
Luckily, the day of Corporatespeak is ending and the day of a human voice in business is arriving. We are human all the time – thank goodness!, because our customers, shareholders, fellow employees and our families need us to be human, even (or maybe especially) at work.
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If you send me a LinkedIn invitation, please include a joke in the invitation! Here is a pretty good one that Kevin Riley sent me today (please pick up an E-Book for that, Kevin):
Pavlov is sitting at a pub enjoying a pint, the phone rings and he jumps up shouting, ‘Oh crap, I forgot to feed the dog!’
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