Several
résumés arrived via email last week; two of them caused me to think of William
Jennings Bryan. Not prone to giving old William much thought, but the bombastic
tenor of those two presentations may have triggered a subliminal relapse.
Old William’s claim to fame was that he ran three-times
for the presidency and was a self-professed biblical scholar who represented the
prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial. William did not cotton much to science
or evolution. (Hmm? Who said history
doesn’t repeat itself.) William was also a renowned orator, given his
proclivity for making long-winded, boastful speeches.
Most résumés fall somewhere between mind-numbingly blasé,
or proceed in the puffery direction. If old William were alive today, his
résumé would gravitate toward closed-minded extremism. Résumés outside these
two extremes appear sorely needed these days.
To escape being labeled bland, many jobseekers opt to
jump the shark. By that, I mean they infuse charged rhetoric into their material
that would cause all but an egomaniac or politician to blush. (That may blur the lines of separation.)
To novice résumé readers, the following might sound
appealing. For those required to suffer through mounds of bombastic rhetoric
however, the task can be daunting. The opening paragraphs are often designed to
appeal to anything and everything imaginable.
Highly
motivated leader with more than (fill-in
the blank) years of strong experience and a passionate desire to achieve
phenomenal results seeks a creatively challenging opportunity to demonstrate a
track record of accomplishments, management responsibilities and (fill-in the blank) expertise. Extensive
experience in strategic and organizational planning, superior written and oral
communication skills, and extremely dedicated and driven to delivering the
highest quality of (fill-in the blank).
Wow! No flies on this jobseeker. Not a signal-overused buzzword
was overlooked! If you were to receive several hundred résumés with similar hyperbolic
jargon,[1] how bowled over would you
be then? At what point would your brain cells numb and your eyeballs roll
before you mumbled, “What a bunch of unfiltered
malarkey.”
Many jobseekers thirst to “stand out” from the crowd.
They are oblivious to the reality their competition entertains identical aspirations.
The cogent strategy is to avoid the extremes and strive to come across as authentic, genuine and real—sans the b.s.
The bygone era of William Jennings Bryan may have past,
but not his flair for unabashed efforts to self-promotion. Nothing speaks
louder about a jobseeker than his or her résumé. More often than not, the hyped
message sent is not the same as the one employers received. When this occurs,
your résumé has probably jumped the shark.
Copyrighted ©
2015 by Robert James
[1] Buzzwords
should not be confused with keywords.
Keywords tend to be associated with specific occupations, and vary according to
the position being sought. Hence, keywords for one type of employment may not relevant
to another occupation.