Sunday, November 13, 2011

It’s never the season for inside baseball

To Company/Government/Big Organization Lifers Looking to Move On


I’ve seen a great many long time employees of large employers—government, UN-type organizations, corporations.  Often resumes contain mindnumbing detail about work environments which do nothing to  advance their case with new prospective employers.

If you have been with a single large employer for a bunch of years, you have probably had shifting responsibilities, different titles and reporting lines.

In describing a long career with a single employer, candidates often get bogged down in the minutiae of internal politics.  That is, in looking at the resume, the relationships between various committees and departments  is meaningful only if you intended to look for a job elsewhere in the same organization. 

 To the rest of us, it’s inside baseball and not terribly informative.

In addition, for the more senior candidate, getting bogged down can be deadly.  It raises the question of whether the candidate is flexible enough to adapt to a different organization or operational structure.  It’s the question whether you are steeped in nostalgia for the halcyon days of your professional youth or whether you have absorbed lessons and are flexible and nimble enough to move forward.

Step back and extract from these relationships the significance and state that, for example, if you found yourself at different points working with different kinds of players within an organizations, pull out from it that you had the flexibility to deal with different kinds of corporate constituents and parties.  Or that moving from x to y within the organization meant that you were only one hop away from the C-suite instead of three.   Or that the change in committee role meant you got to control more $, people, decisions, etc.

Also, look to last week's entry about helping people to understand what your title(s) within the organization mean.

Another argument against minutiae is that a resume is not meant to be exhaustive.  It is meant to convey enough about your experience to show the interviewer that you can do the job for which you have submitted your resume and that you will do it cheerfully and reliably. It's meant to get you the interview. So, list your most impressive achievements and summarize, as tightly as you can, the less impressive recurring day-to-day responsibilities.  Edit and focus what you write about your past. 

1 comment:

  1. Andrea,

    Good, solid advice.

    "Edit and focus." Or, as we say in the writing game, "First write; then, edit, edit, edit."

    Russell

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