Are You Living Up to Your Résumé?

Many today are taking a fresh look at their career paths and considering a change of venue. Personal satisfaction and fulfillment are strongly competing with salary and benefits for top priority. But how do you begin to make a move? Still one of the best ways to open new doors is with a great résumé.

So what does yours say about you? Who does it say you are? Is the person portrayed “on paper” the same as the one whose reflection you see in the mirror?

Of course, you don’t want a résumé that makes you look average and you certainly don’t want to write one that makes you look bad. Neither do you want a résumé that is so overblown with self-aggrandizing statements that it just sounds too good to be real.

Whatever you do write in your résumé should be the truth. Seems obvious but in the heat of a competitive field, you may find it tempting to … embellish. It’s easy to fall into the trap of making things sound a little more involved, advanced, important, consequential, relevant, successful than they actually were.

Think of your résumé as a promise you will make to your employer, a pact regarding the skill set you will employ for the organization’s benefit. Your résumé is a story you tell about yourself that should be fact, not fable.

So many people are uncomfortable at work – wizards behind the curtain – because they haven’t been exactly honest about their capabilities and are living in dread of the day they’ll be found out!

Living behind an inflated résumé makes your leadership role in your organization both an internal and external struggle. Internal because of self-doubt and insecurity and external because there’s that curtain between you and the people who are looking to you for guidance.

We know there are some of you who really aren’t sure how to write an effective résumé or how to perform in an interview if you’re called. We offer training in both these areas but we’ll deal with interviewing skills – for both you the interviewer and you the interviewee – in a future post.

For now, we’re preparing a self-help course for you on résumé writing that will help you find capabilities and experiences you may have taken for granted. We’ll show you how to harvest your experience to write résumés that are responsive to the job you’re seeking. Join our mailing list and you’ll be among the first to receive the news when this course goes live.

In the meantime, what can you do about insecurity if you don’t match your résumé? Take time to learn. Whatever it is you don’t know, seek to educate yourself. Find a mentor or other subject matter expert willing to talk with you. Read everything you can find on the subjects where your knowledge is thin. In time your confidence will build and you can live up to your résumé. You can become the person you are on paper – and more!