Tim Madden is an Executive Coach and former Headhunter. Founder of Executive Career Upgrades, he's on a mission to help accelerate careers.
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Whether you’re attending a workshop or reading an article, a common piece of advice when it comes to securing the job of your dreams is that the best way to land a role is to scout out job postings and send out the perfect cover letter and résumé. This sounds logical enough, but it’s not how the world really works—especially with high-level positions like directors and executives. In many cases, the issue isn’t the résumé, but the process you’re following to find a job.
Debunking The Résumé Myth
It’s true that a résumé has some level of bearing on whether you can land a job. Likewise, it’s not wrong to say that looking for grammatical errors on your résumé and checking that you’re using the right formatting is a good idea. But at the end of the day, no matter how good your résumé is, it’s never going to do anything more than get your foot through the door. You could have a résumé so fantastic that the CEO of every Fortune 500 wants to invite you to interview, but if you can’t walk the walk when that interview comes round, you’re not going to land the job.
Hopefully, if you’ve climbed the career ladder to the point where you’ve reached a high level in your career, you have the skills needed to shine in an interview anyway but that’s no excuse to hone in on your résumé at the expense of everything else.
Don’t underestimate your competition.
When you see a job posting, it’s a given that the vacancy will have also been posted on dozens of other sites like Indeed, Monster and LinkedIn. It’s therefore also a given that each posting is going to attract hundreds or even thousands of applications.
This is sometimes stated as a reason to work on your résumé—with so much competition, shouldn’t you go above and beyond to stand out? Not exactly and here's why: It’s not a realistic assumption to think that recruiters are going to look through thousands of résumés and give them all a fair chance. The company might go through the résumés one by one and decide who they’re inviting to interview before they even lay their eyes on your résumé. There must be a better way to do things (and there is).
Remember, you’re more than your résumé.
Some people get so hyper-focused on how important they perceive their résumé to be that they end up self-sabotaging the interview when it comes around. They feel their skills don’t match the requirements, leading them to feel overly nervous in the interview rather than showing off what they can really offer. Yet why would a company have invited you to interview in the first place if they didn't think you stood a good chance of doing the job? By all means, use your résumé as a confidence booster if you match the criteria perfectly. But focus on your skills rather than a stale list of criteria.
Go into the interview with the mindset of a consultant, looking for the problems the company is facing and how you could solve them. Your ability to do this comes down to tons of factors that most likely aren’t listed on your résumé. Regardless of how well you seem to match a posting on paper, it’s not going to make someone hire you if you’re presenting yourself in the wrong way.
Focus on networking.
We’re not just here to talk about problems. If résumés are so ineffective at landing you that top job, where should you be diverting your attention? Above all, your network. This is something that people going for higher-level positions tend to have built up already, so neglecting this area can put you behind. But it’s never too late to create a new network for the first time. Get in contact with the people who are part of the companies you’re targeting directly—and if that’s a foreign concept to you right now, it’s time to learn how. A good coach can help you achieve this.
The point of this article isn’t that your résumé is worthless and you can simply load it with filler. To some degree, your résumé matters, and it should certainly reflect a level of quality and professionalism. But given the competitiveness of online job postings, nobody should be focusing all their energy on résumé-based applications. Instead, remind yourself what you can offer companies and how you can solve their problems. Then go after those jobs more directly, either by using your network or making new contacts within the organization.
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