3 Ways Your Resume Could Seem “Boring”
Posted May 20th, 2015
There are a lot of labels you want to avoid as a job seeker – lazy, incompetent, disruptive, unqualified. But one that often gets overlooked, yet has a surprising impact on your job prospects, is “boring.” At first blush, it would seem irrelevant. After all, they are hiring you to work a job, not serve as entertainment. But with employers increasingly using cultural fit to evaluate applicants, being labeled as boring could cast a shadow over any list of credentials.
Grab a copy of your resume and make sure it doesn’t have these three features:
1. Objective Statement
Remember how much you hated writing this? Well, it turns out that hiring mangers hate reading them too. In almost all cases, these are just statements of the obvious, “I want to work at Company A and accomplish Objective B using Skills C.” It doesn’t say anything you can’t say better elsewhere, and it wastes valuable real estate on your resume. Cut it out entirely and instead use the way you frame your education, skills, and past employment to show hiring managers that you have what they want.
2. Soft Skills
Soft skills are important to hiring managers, but they don’t want to hear about them on your resume. Statements like “clear communicator,” “team player,” and “innovative thinker” are so common and vague that they are basically useless. Worse still, they are unconvincing. If you really are a great communicator, give some examples, and be ready to ready to dazzle in your interview. If you really are a team player, highlight how your role on a team made a difference. A resume is no place to fall back on platitudes.
3. Passivity
This one is hard to point at, but impossible to miss. Resumes that read as passive frame the applicant as a passive person. And rarely, if ever, has that been a quality employers are seeking out. Read through your resume closely and look for phrases like “served as,” and “responsibilities included.” These are passive phrases, and as they begin to pile up, it lulls the reader to sleep and diminishes the impact of your actual accomplishments. Find all those passive phrases and replace them with active phrases like “built,” “managed,” and “pioneered.” And, as much as possible, focus on the actions you took and the positive outcomes that resulted.
Don’t dismiss the impact of a boring resume. At the very least, it buries you in the pack of other applicants when your goal is to accomplish the opposite. Find more resources to help you polish your employment documents by partnering with Bayside Solutions.
