“Should I admit a weakness?” one of my coaching clients asked me. “Something tells me I shouldn’t.””Something” was telling her right. Your best tool in writing a good resume, is your intuition, or common sense aka Emotional Intelligence.
WEAKNESSES
Don’t talk about your “weaknesses” unless you’re asked. In my years as a Career Counselor for college students, I received fledgling resumes that read “I don’t like people” or “I hate talking on
phone.” On one hand, such statements of extremes are rarely true, and on other hand they are open to gross misinterpretation.
How do I know this? First-hand, of course, way hard lessons are learned.
When I took my first job, I announced “I’m horrible at math.” To MY horror, all work demanding “math” was removed from my desk, grossly limiting my chances for advancement, and also leaving me to puzzle how to address this situation without appearing to “protest too much”. [Shakespeare] “Wait, wait, I didn’t mean I was BAD at math.” And there goes my credibility. Save yourself some grief.
Later I made it through graduate statistics just fine. I had MEANT “in relation to my other skills, my math is lower, and also that I don’t wake up in morning hoping to balance someone’s books.” However, I’ve done it.
A resume is in writing and you don’t get to “explain,” so be conservative.
Focus on what you’re good at. Extremes are rarely true. I’m thinking of young woman who wrote on her resume, “I don’t like people.”
Upon query, it turned out she liked ME, and I like to consider myself a person, doncha know. She didn’t like a CERTAIN KIND OF PERSON, which could be said of us all, and her gross generalization didn’t hold up under scrutiny.
However, scrutiny is not what you’ll get from recruiter who looks at your resume. What you’ll get is roundfile.
Avoid listing things that could possibly elicit a negative reaction from hirer. If you can put “president of a political organization” instead of “president of young republicans,” this is better. Better yet put “president of an organization with 500 members”. (They will ask you about this, but talking allows more latitude.) You can also leave it off. If you put that you volunteer for young republics, you stand chance of alienating a percentage of your reviewers, depending upon their political beliefs, and how “open” they are to people in opposing camps.
What you want to do is talk to your broadest audience. For hobbies, put “working out” rather than “Chi Gong,” and “music” rather than “rap music”. People have prejudices even though they may be trying to be professional, and may think "Someone who does X for exercise could never be an accountant."
If you’re asked to reveal your weaknesses, use your head. Here are some suggestions:
