ESTIMATED READING TIME: 6 minutes

I see a lot of resumes, both from individuals I coach and as an I/O psychologist working on hiring and selection systems.

What’s the single biggest mistake I see?

Thinking that resumes are about the past, when they’re actually about the future.

I'll explain.

Somewhere along the line, most of us adopted the idea that a resume is a comprehensive chronology of where we’ve worked and what we’ve done, so we put all that history together and send it to prospective employers, hoping that they’ll sift through our past experience and have an "aha!” moment when they realize that our unique and wonderful history makes us the perfect person on whom they should make a huge gamble by hiring.

The first problem with this approach is that, for the most part, employers care about our past only as much as it ensures that we can perform the job for them in the future.

The second problem is that employers generally don’t like to sift through hundreds of peoples’ past experience to try to experience that “aha!” moment. Employers prefer to be convinced – quickly – that one or possibly a very small handful of applicants are likely to perform the job best and then eliminate the rest of the applicants.

In sales, I learned that the best salespeople were masters at helping customers to nurture a vision of how they'll experience a product in their futures. They didn't focus on the development or history of the product; instead, they spent time assessing the customer’s vision of the future and then demonstrated the aspects of the product that precisely fit that future vision, and very little else. The very best would then create an emotional experience the customer was going to have in the future...but only if they purchased the product, of course!

Real estate agents do this particularly well: they stage a home for sale by removing almost all of the current owner’s personal effects, they point out only those features they know clients need or want in the future, and they don’t mention the drawbacks of the house, like the fact that it might be a little too close to the train tracks. They certainly never spend time telling you the history of the house or the experiences prior owners enjoyed in the house, since it doesn't really create the positive emotional connection for you to imagine how much someone else enjoyed the house in the past.

When coaching, my first question is, “What kind of job are you looking for?” because I want to learn how much work the client has already done, and because I need to understand the client’s specific goals in order to be the best coach possible.

Too often the reply I get is, “You know, I’d really like to create a general resume that I can use for applying to any job.”

They don’t like to hear what I say next: there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all resume...it just doesn't work.



Back to the real estate analogy: whether someone is looking to buy or to sell a house, no one tells a real estate agent, “Oh, just a general type of house...”

Real estate agents push to get very specific details on needs and features, so that they can show prospective buyers only those houses that fit the criteria. It would make very little sense to do things any differently, because there’s very little chance of a sale if the house doesn’t fit into the buyer’s vision of the future!

Resumes and interview responses need to do exactly the same thing.

The job seeker is the person who is offering to sell their time and effort, and the employer is the person looking to buy the time and effort of the person who they can visualize fitting into the company's specific future plans.

Here are three specific tips for putting this into practice:

Do your research on the company’s future: extensively research the company you think you want to work for, including the department, and even the specific team and manager, if you can. The best way to do this is by using your network to talk with people at the company who are likely to know the company's future plans. Knowing a company’s history helps, but if you have the choice of reading the founder’s biography or the company’s five-year strategic plan, I suggest reading the strategic plan every time. Tailor your resume to the company’s future: use what you learn in #1 and from job descriptions to tailor your resume – yes, I wrote "resume" and not just cover letter – to demonstrate how you are offering the perfect set of skills, knowledge, and abilities that fit precisely into the future the company envisions. Do the same in your cover letter, but be aware that though cover letters are a must, they are sometimes ignored in the hiring process. This is why it’s so important that your resume demonstrates your fit in the company’s future. Use the interview to talk about the company’s future – with you in it: use interview questions as an opportunity to demonstrate how you will fit into the future. Resist the temptation to talk too much about your past, since too much history can sometimes invite speculation that your successes might have been situational or due to some aspect of your prior employer(s) which might not be true at the new employer. Don’t share irrelevant details from prior positions, no matter how interesting they might seem.

Letting go of past positions and accomplishments like this can be hard – after all, we spent a lot of time and worked hard at them. When I’ve instructed resume writers to remove jobs or leave off certain duties or accomplishments, sometimes the look of horror on their face makes me wonder if I accidentally misspoke asked them to give up a favorite pet!

Loss aversion probably explains why we feel this way: research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (article PDF) has demonstrated that humans are extremely loss averse. We tend to overvalue what we already have in comparison with what we stand to gain. This likely extends to what we include on our resume, so while we tell ourselves that we really want to gain a new job, we’re just not willing to let go of that job experience on our resume as a summer camp counselor, despite the fact that we’re applying for a job that’s entirely unrelated to summer, camp, and counseling!

We have to consciously remind ourselves that we are selling a product (ourselves as employees) and that anything that doesn't fit the employer's vision of the future can derail our candidacy.

To summarize, the very best job seekers adopt the strategies of great salespeople and real estate agents by focusing on the employer’s future and selectively highlighting their own past: they find out exactly what the employer needs in the future; they tailor their resume, cover letter, and other materials to clearly demonstrate how they fit in the employer’s vision of the future; and they use interviews as an opportunity to insert themselves in the employer’s vision of positive experiences in that future.