Your CV should trumpet your many unique strengths. Experienced CV reviewers know that most strengths also reveal a weakness, so they routinely look at the other side of the precious coin you are presenting to them.
What you say and they hear are quite different things. This is what they find when they look at your CV or at a reference you have provided:
- Analytical and insightful: Doesn’t get people and achieves nothing.
- Very goal focused: Ambitious, tramples over people.
- Entrepreneurial: Not a team player; largely uncontrollable,
won’t fit in. - Great team player: Yes man; little drive or initiative; blindly follows insane orders.
- Good networker: Politically devious and untrustworthy.
- Honest and reliable: I can find no meaningful strengths in this person.
- High achiever: Puts self ahead of anything or anyone else.
- Empathetic: Likes hugging people and trees, expect neither action nor insight
- Mature: Past it, low energy levels.
- Expert: Anorak who will bore you to tears, cannot manage and lives in a silo.
- Strong values: Opinionated, fully signed up member of the awkward squad.
- Outstanding leader: “My way or no way” person who doesn’t like working for others.
- Diligent: Boring plodder who stays in the box.
- Action oriented: Shoots first, thinks second, dangerous liability.
- Strong track record of success: Good at telling fairy stories, likes to steal the credit.
All of this confirms what most job seekers fear: you can’t win.Whatever you say or do will be taken down as evidence and will be used against you.
But at least if you know how your cynical interviewer will twist everything against you, you will be better prepared for the ritual humiliation of the interview process.
(Photo:kthypryn, CC2.0)
