Burnison - Lose the resume: land the job

I'm confident in the power of this bookand the unique resources provided hereto help you find the best possible career for who you are. Your success is our most important endorsement. Gary Burnison

Book design by RossMadrid Group
Illustrations by Brett Ryder

Copyright 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Burnison, Gary, 1961- author.

Title: Lose the resume : land the job / by Gary Burnison.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2018] |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017051510 (print) | LCCN 2017054519 (ebook) | ISBN

9781119475255 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119475231 (epub) | ISBN 9781119475200 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Job hunting. | Vocational guidance.

Classification: LCC HF5382.7 (ebook) | LCC HF5382.7 .B88 2018 (print) | DDC

650.14--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051510

To everyone who hates his or her boss.

Early one morning, as I drove to work along the Pacific Coast Highwaythe sun glistening off the ocean to my righttraffic suddenly slowed to a crawl. Several cars stopped in the median of a six-lane highway where cars normally move at a steady fifty-five miles per hour. One man stepped out of his truck and stared at the ground. As I rolled slowly past, I couldn't believe what I was seeing: A skunk had a plastic soda cup stuck on its head. It had obviously jammed its snout to the bottom of the cup to get the last drops of sweet liquid, and now it was stuck. Scampering frantically left and right, the skunk shook its head violently back and forth in a fruitless attempt to dislodge the cup.

Timidly, the man circled the animalclearly at the crossroads of whether to be the hero of the helpless or a victim of the clueless. Eventually, an animal-control officer arrived and safely removed the soda cup from the poor animal's head. But the image of the man and the skunk was burned into my memory.

Far too many people today feel helpless and clueless when it comes to getting their next job. And too often they act just like the skunk. They focus on what they believe is a sweet opportunity without considering the fit. And just like the skunk, they find themselves stuck. They're in the wrong environment; the culture is not a fit. They're working for the wrong boss, who is never going to champion them to gain the learning experiences that will expand their skill set. And all they can do is shake their head back and forth, wondering how they can get out of this mess.

How can I get a new job? What's it going to take? What should my resume say? How do I go about this process? People at the earliest stages of their career are not the only ones asking these questions. I hear them from people at all levels, even those who have two or three decades of professional experience.

Their stories of frustration and confusion are similar. I can't help but have empathy. But honestly, in the back of my mind I'm thinking something is terribly wrong hereunfortunately, with them. Their entire approach is just plain wrong.

In my thirty-five years of professional life, including the last decade as CEO of a public company, I have been continuously shocked by the naivet of people when it comes to their career. From the supposed most sophisticated to the least experienced, from Fortune 500 board members and seasoned executives to college seniors, people are confounded by how to find their next gig. Not knowing what to do, they resort to the old standby: Let me send you my resume, which has become as meaningless a clich as Let's do lunch. When you say it, you know you're never going to have lunch. The same goes for your offer to email your resume. Unless someone genuinely wants to hear from you, your resume isn't going anywhere.

That's why you need to lose the resume to land the right job. Yes, you still need to have a resume, but don't expect it to be more than a calling card, a conversation opener. Unfortunately, people think their resume accounts for 90 percent of getting a new job, when actually it's only 10 percent. No wonder sending out resumes isn't getting people where they want or need to go!

Let me send you my resume has become as meaningless a clich as Let's do lunch.

While it's true that almost anyone with a decent education and some experience can get a job, finding the right job is not easy. In fact, it has never been harder. Forget unemployment rates that might not seem so bad these days; most unemployment figures mask the fact that the combination of technology and a merciless global economy has made it almost impossible to find work that offers the compensation we want or purpose we need. In survey after survey, it's the same complaints: Wage growth isn't happening, motivation is down, and job stability is vanishing. Here's a ridiculous stat: Half of U.S. workers have a pay rate that fluctuates sharply every monthby almost 30 percent.

Yet the only way out of this trap is to engage in a job-search process that people never expect to be so arduous or so long. If you are like most people, you will start out by making the critical mistake of waiting for opportunities to come to you. Given that an average of 250 resumes are received for every corporate-job openingthe first 200 typically land just seconds after the job is postedthis approach is patently passive and illogical. And when you fail to gain any traction, you tend to send out more resumes. You feel stucklike a victim.