Three Ways To Add Personality To Your Resume (And Three Ways Not To)
Create
a resume that grabs hiring managers’ attention in seconds (for the right
reasons).
It takes a hiring manager just a few seconds to look at your
resume and decide whether or not they like you enough to want to meet you. That’s
precious little time to stand out and convey not just your professional skills
but who you are.
Nailing that challenge means striking a careful balance: You want
to show you’ve got what it takes to actually do the job but also that you have
the soft skills–and personality–to make you someone the hiring manager and the
rest of the team will enjoy working with. Here are a few dos and don’ts.
You already know you need to load
up your resume with keywords to
describe your experience, education, and technical skills–to show you’re a
match for the ins and outs of the role’s daily duties. But there’s much less
advice out there on how to share your passions with hiring managers: Which ones
reflect positively on you as a person? Which seem irrelevant? What comes off as
unprofessional?
While experience, skills, and education will help you complete
your assigned tasks, this trio isn’t enough to keep you motivated day in and
day out.
While experience, skills, and education will help you complete
your assigned tasks, this trio isn’t enough to keep you motivated day in and
day out. And even if only in the back of their mind, the hiring manager knows
that.
So it’s up to you to offer a glimpse of the deeper factors driving
your career: What are your professional passions: What motivates and inspires
you to go into work each day? Is it the thrill of the unknown that accompanies
startup life? A love for seeing children learn and grow? Giving back to your
community?
Weave this into the bullets underneath each role on your resume,
connecting a few of your key accomplishments with a sense of why those wins
matter to you in the first place.
We all want to work with people we get along with. It’s a plus if
they have similar (or at least interesting) hobbies as well; sports, travel,
and board games are all safe bets and easily relatable for most folks, but you
may think they’re totally irrelevant on your resume. They aren’t.
Even if it’s in one line at the bottom, mentioning a few of these
hobbies shows you’re a well-rounded person who has interests outside of work.
Personally, I love seeing applicants who are involved in extracurricular
activities that promote community building, self-care, and well-being.
And Deloitte researchers even found that
volunteer work is among the most underrated job skills that candidates leave
off of their resumes to their own detriment.
Full confession: I drink three (okay fine, sometimes four) cups of
coffees a day. That may sound like overkill to some, but the simple truth is
that I’m a coffee lover! So I share this on my resume because, well, many people
like coffee, even if they don’t drink as much of it as I do. At a very minimum,
they can relate to those who are well-caffeinated, and it’s a simple way to
touch on my personality without getting too personal.
So those are a few things you should consider
using to liven up your resume. Here’s how to what to avoid:
While adding personality to your resume shows hiring managers that
you’re a person and not just an employee, there’s a whole category of
information that can open you up to discrimination. Known as “protected class”
information, these are the aspects of your identity that have no bearing on
your fit for a given position and should be avoided–like signs of your age,
gender, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, and disability status.
Obviously, there’s still plenty of information that can hint at
these things anyhow, like your name or if your alma mater is a women’s college,
for instance. So unless an employer or recruiter is using a system to cloak
bias-prone data in order to create a fairer hiring process, there’s not much
you can do about that. On the other hand, any personality-revealing tidbits you
do want to add can still show off who you are and what you care about.
Unless you work in select entertainment industries, like as acting
or modeling, where your physical appearance is tied to the job, headshots or
any other images of yourself are a no-go. Similar to protected class
information, this needlessly opens you up to discrimination.
And while it may sound like an obvious “don’t,” the temptation to
share images might be greater than it was a generation ago, before LinkedIn,
Twitter, and Instagram existed. But even if those profiles are all public, it’s
still best to leave headshots out of your application materials. Wait until the
interview for them to see what you look like.
Hot-button issues are also to be avoided, unless you’re applying
for a position in political advocacy or some other cause-related work. You can
still show off your personality without mentioning politics, religion, sex, or
anything else that’s typically taboo. You may feel it’s important that a
prospective employer shares your core values (and you’d be right!), but the
better place to suss that out is in a job interview.
BY KYLE ELLIOTT
https://www.fastcompany.com/3069245/three-ways-to-add-personality-to-your-resume-and-three-ways-not-to?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fcdaily-top&position=4&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=03302017
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