Focusing On Responsibilities And Experience Ruins Your Unemployment Job Search

I'll bet you're ruining your unemployment job search by focusing on responsibilities and experience in your resume and interviews. On qualifications and skills also.

Just about all job seekers do this, so you're also probably focusing your communication on ineffective statements. It's what career coaches, outplacement firms have taught you and what resume writers have used to create your resume. The career professionals you've worked with, focus on responsibilities, experience, qualifications and skills because it's what they were taught in their professional certification training.

The problem with responsibilities and experience is they are used to achieve a goal that's far too low, when you're an unemployed job seeker - the goal of appearing qualified. But you're facing too many other competitors who are also qualified in 2024, so being qualified doesn't make you special. Instead, it makes you appear average.

Employers naturally perceive greater risk from unemployed candidates, because they don't know why you're no longer working ... no matter what you say in your resume/interview. Hiring managers have been burned before by hiring candidates who said it wasn't their fault, and it turned out they hired someone else's problem.

And since most of your qualified competitors are currently employed, it should be clear that trying to compete as an average job seeker that also presents more risk to an employer is a strategy that ruins your job search.

Worse still, responsibilities/experience/qualifications/skills forces your readers to guess if you were a success or failure. When you describe responsibilities and experience, you may have been a failure (and if you really were a big success, wouldn't you make that clear to employers?). So this expands the risk you present to employers as an unemployed candidate, because you're not proving success.

But you have a better choice ...

Rather than describing yourself like everyone else (based on responsibilities, experience, qualifications and skills), why wouldn't you instead focus on presenting yourself at your best?

Why not instead focus on the impact you made for your past employers? Why not focus on your success, rather than making employers guess if you were awesome or if you were terrible at your job?

This is an especially effective way to overcome employer risk of hiring an unemployed job seeker (risk that you were average/below average, when they have many choices). You can learn how to change the story in your head to instead focus on impact, overwhelm employers with your success, so you appear head-and-shoulders above your currently employed competitors - Because your competitors continue to focus on responsibilities and experience, with a goal of appearing qualified (= average), forcing employers to guess at success or failure.

You're proving success, while others make employers guess ...

You'd already be doing this and your unemployment job search would be much quicker, if you knew how. Why not let me show you?

During my next free Resume Webinar - Beating Unemployment, I'll teach you how to change your resume/interview/job search strategy to accelerate your unemployment job search. While we're at it, I'll show you how to change your resume, interview and job search strategy to one that proves success and can win jobs in 2024-2025.

Join me for my next free Resume Webinar (enroll at https://x.resumewebinar.com/Registration for no charge) and learn how to accelerate your job search, so you can find your next job faster in 2024.

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