Episode 14: When you should hire a resume writer

Thank you for listening to The Career Clarity Show. Today we are celebrating the season! No, not pumpkin-spice-everything season…midyear review season!

It’s that time when career development conversations and informal reviews are wrapping up, and bonuses, raises, and promotions are about to be revealed publicly. (Or, may have just been announced, depending on the fiscal year at your organization.)

If you’ve been waiting for that raise to hit (because it puts you in a more competitive pay tier) or, (ugh) you didn’t get the promotion you were expecting, pumpkin spice season might mean you’re gearing up to shoot your resume out into the great wide digital beyond.

However, if you want your next job to be engaging, satisfying, and challenging, STOP! Don’t send out your resume! Don’t call up a resume writer! Do not pass Go! Do not collect $200 (yet). 

If you really want your next role to be fulfilling, there are a few things you’ve gotta incorporate into your job search strategy so you don’t end up in a “same shit, different day” situation in your next gig. Listen here: 

First and foremost: Whether you’re on the prowl because you’re bitter you didn’t get that fancy new job title or you’re just bored at work, your current resume may be working against you. Almost everyone’s resume is a long list of the crap they’ve already done and don’t necessarily want to do again (and, after coaching more than 500 people, I’ve seen A LOT of resumes). Things like…a decade of experience doing project management for a big engineering firm you’re not passionate about. Or putting together shiny strategic consulting proposals that never actually got implemented. Or sitting in your same specialized niche as a lawyer where you’re bored to tears. 

If you dive into the job search with your resume as-is, highlighting those experiences, you’re only going to get momentum on more jobs you’ll get bored of and outgrow too soon.

Nobody wants to endlessly ping-pong from job to job. We’d much rather set ourselves up to move into a role that challenges us and grows with us, one that lets us stay with the organization for years to come.  

That means you need to fundamentally change the way you position yourself on paper to find a job that will stretch, excite, and engage you for the long-term…instead of landing you back on the market in a year.

But don’t get a resume writer on speed dial just yet. Often, resume experts are incredibly talented at polishing and finessing your accolades to make them stand out. But if what you need is a revolution, many resume writers don’t usually specialize in helping you think expansively about what’s possible or what could be next. They’re ah-mazing at constructing a compelling AF resume, but strategizing a big-picture career change isn’t always their zone of genius. And you definitely don’t want to pay them to help you beautifully rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic, when you know in your gut you’re on a sinking career ship. 

Knowing the answer to the question “what do you want to do?” is the key to making the investment in a resume writer really pay off.

But how do you figure out what you want to do if you’ve outgrown your current job?

The first step is to let yourself cultivate a brand new vision for where you want to go (and grow). 

Let yourself get dreamy for a moment: if there were no constraints (or Negative Nancy opinions) to hold you back, what would you love to say you’re doing 5 years into the future from now? Or, if you could look back on the last five years, what would you love to be able to say you accomplished, tried, or became?

Don’t limit yourself! Think about this through the lens of the personal AND the professional, because sometimes they inform one another. Want to have written a book? Learned how to use Photoshop? Lead a team of a certain size? Run a half marathon? Maybe you want to have started your own business? Each of these goals might require some flexibility or in order to fit work into your life to let you accomplish them.  

Let yourself be wildly selfish and write everything – every crazy, seemingly impossible thing –down on paper. There’s no such thing as a bad first draft idea! 

(Want more help with visioning? I use 3 specific exercises to help people get clear on their epic visions.  Come do them with me at this webinar with FairyGodBoss next week!) 

Once you’ve got your draft ideas out of your head and on paper, your mission is to reverse engineer the pathways to get there. Note that you don’t want to limit yourself to just one pathway. As Tony Robbins says, “Success leaves clues,” and, if you do your research, you’re sure to find lots of different avenues to achieve your goal. 

Take a look at your dreams, and think about what you’d need in order to accomplish those big, beautiful goals. Start by evaluating where the biggest gaps are between the “today” version of you and the “future” version of you. (Hint: Usually the kinds of resources you need fall into three buckets: knowledge, skills, and relationships.) Brainstorm everything you could possibly need to get from here to there. 

For example, perhaps you wrote down that you want to be an entrepreneur (like my former client Jason). In Jason’s case, he was great at collaboration, project management, and running effective teams. However, he knew that to be an entrepreneur, he needed experience packaging ideas, pitching them, and closing sales. Using the exercises I teach, Jason realized that if his next role was in new business acquisition, he could essentially get paid to learn a new skill. So that’s exactly what he did – repositioned himself to show off his transferable skills and made a pivot from project management into a lead generation role for the company.  

Only once you’ve identified the gaps – and come up with a short list of the jobs that could help you fill them – you can give that resume writer a ring. It will make your investment way more efficient and effective, and will allow that person to help rebrand you as a killer candidate for these “gap-filling,” high-growth opportunities. 

Helping folks get clear about what’s next is my specialty so if you want to really flesh out a compelling and exciting career vision, click here to get more details about and register for the Crafting Your Career Vision webinar next week on FairyGodBoss! 

SHOW NOTES:

• Get more details about and register for the Crafting Your Career Vision webinar on FairyGodBoss!
• How to Take a Sabbatical (and, how to take a sabbatical without derailing your career) on Medium
• How high performers get results in their job search on the Happen to Your Career podcast
• JobJenny
• Michelle Robin

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