5 deadly mistakes job-seekers make

I’m horrified at the state of corporate and institutional recruiting, which is as broken as it can be. We do not use our heads or our hearts when we design the typical bureaucratic, talent-repelling recruiting system.

That’s why I teach employers how to modernize and humanize their recruiting practices, and teach job-seekers how to crawl through the wreckage of the broken recruiting apparatus to get a good job and help a hiring manager who is starved for talent.

As broken as the standard recruiting system is, job-seekers don’t help themselves when they fail to take the time to put their best foot forward in a well-written, thoughtful outreach for a job they’re interested in.

Here are five catastrophic but sadly common mistakes that job-seekers make on the job search trail. If you have been feeling that employers are unfairly rejecting your advances, check this list!

If you’re making one or more of these mistakes, it’s time to stop blaming employers for their busted recruiting processes and step up your own job-search game.

They Send Out The Same Resume No Matter What

I remember how grown-up I felt when I got my first set of 100 resumes typeset and printed in 1982. It was a big deal. One day I’ll find a copy of my first resume and post it here so that you can chuckle at my description of my 22-year-old business persona.

I’m sure my first resume is stuffed with zombie jargon, but that was the style for resumes back then! In 1982, you also couldn’t change your resume to suit a particular job opening every time you sent your resume out.

Now you can, and you must! You have to customize your resume to showcase your stories and experiences that are most relevant to the specific job you’re applying for.

The copy of your resume that lives on your hard drive is just a template. You’ll tweak it every single time you use it.

If you’re going after a PR job, for instance, you’ll make sure your resume highlights your PR experiences. You’ll change the Summary at the top of your resume every time you apply for a job, to make it clear to your hiring manager that although you’re good at lots of things, at this moment in time you’re conveying your expertise in one area in particular — the one your manager is most likely to care about.

They Sound Like Everyone Else

Job-seekers who brand themselves “just another Battle Drone” in their resumes and their LinkedIn profiles don’t do themselves any favors. That was great twenty years ago. Now, you have to bring some of your unique personality across on the page.

The worst brand in the world is the generic “Results-oriented professional” brand. Everyone says that. You sound like anyone and no one when you brand yourself that way.

Put a human voice in your resume instead, and tell us who you are behind the suit and the business card:

I started out as a Computer Science major in college and switched to Organizational Development midway through. Now I help teams push aside or leap over roadblocks to hit their most ambitious goals.

You may like or hate this job-seeker’s self-description, but you’re not going to confuse him with every other banana in the bunch! Take a chance and put a human voice in your resume. You’re writing to a human now, not a machine!

They Put Their Faith in Broken Systems

By now we can agree that Black Hole recruiting — the kind where you lob resumes into the abyss and hope that a keyword-searching software program likes the words you chose — are a disaster. Corporations and institutions know that recruiting by keyword is a horrible idea.

It’s expensive, slow and time-consuming, and automated Applicant Tracking Systems push talented people away. If a bridge were out on your usual drive to work, you wouldn’t drive straight into the river. You’d find another way.

It’s the same in your job search. It’s time to find another way to get a job, and leave the automated application sites behind! There is another way. You can reach your hiring manager directly with a Pain Letter and your Human-Voiced Resume. You can write directly to your manager at his or her desk. You can find your individual hiring manager by doing this.

They Focus on the Wrong Things

For years we’ve been taught to list our Skills in our resumes and on our LinkedIn profiles, but who cares about Skills? Anybody can say they have Negotiation Skills or Communication Skills.

So what? If you really have Excellent Communication Skills, you’d never use that lame and trite expression to show it. You’d communicate brilliantly, right in your resume!

Forget about your Skills and tell stories on your job search instead — in your Human-Voiced Resume and your LinkedIn profile, in your Pain Letter and on job interviews. Tell us what kind of Business Pain you solve for employers. Tell a hiring manager what you’ve learned or intuited about his or her problems. Take a chance, and share an opinion! That’s how you’ll get a hiring manager’s attention, and get a job you deserve.

They Forget About Pain

Business Pain is the key to a 2015 job search. Every manager has pain — you can’t be in business without it!

Your job is to ask yourself “What kind of pain does this manager suffer from?” and then in your outreach, offer a Pain Hypothesis that says to your possible next boss, “I think I have an idea of what you’re up against.”

Consultants have used this approach for years. When a consultant goes to meet with a new prospective client, they don’t talk about their skills and experiences. They talk about their Dragon-Slaying Stories, the times when they slew (or tamed) a dragon very much like the one that’s plaguing whichever prospective client they’re talking with about a consulting project.

They have a ready list of Dragon-Slaying Stories on all the topics they care about. You need to develop your Dragon-Slaying Story list, too, and to focus on Pain rather than the bullet points in a job ad or your own done-to-death list of Skills!

The job market has changed dramatically and your job-search approach has to change with it. Don’t get bitten by one of these five deadly job-search mistakes. Put a human voice in your job search, remember that you’re amazing and above all, tell yourself every day: Only the people who get me, deserve me!

This article is published in collaboration with LinkedIn. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

To keep up with the Agenda subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Author: Liz Ryan is the CEO and Founder of the Human Workplace.

Image: Motorized mannequins hold signs that read “Hire Me” in Toronto May 23, 2014. REUTERS/Mark Blinch.