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Soozy G. Miller, CPRW, CDCC, CDP
POWERFUL RESUMES. Career Transition, Career Fuel, Ageism Buster, Conquer Interviews. Executive career direction with job-landing resumes & LinkedIn profiles. Land your next job within 90 days!
I recently heard about a C-Suite leader and her plight to find leadership talent for her company. Let’s call her Linda.
Linda is the Chief Client Officer for a global media conglomerate. Linda is the only woman in the C-Suite there. She is part of a team of about six C-Suite executives, and the rest of them are white men in their 60s and 70s. This will become pertinent later.
Linda is constantly interviewing executives because many new hires fall short of expectations within their first 90 days, and because new executives get fired for all kinds of reasons. So she’s constantly looking at what she describes as boring and uninspired resumes, and she’s constantly having the same boring and uninspired conversations with executive candidates. Again, these are leaders at the top of their field.
Linda only hires about 25% of candidates. These candidates often see themselves as the heirs apparent. Shoe-ins, if you will. They have probably been leading smaller companies, or have risen easily through the ranks of other similar companies, and they are ready for next. But Linda gets very frustrated with the talent pool because recruiters send her unqualified candidates all the time – what she calls ridiculous referrals.
The biggest problem that Linda has with hiring—I see this problem every day as well—is that all the candidates look and sound alike. In this case, for Linda, they are mostly white men in their forties and fifties who all think they are awesome. Linda usually doesn’t agree.
These self-described awesome candidates, the shoe-ins, will walk into her office, or appear in a video interview, with the attitude that they assume that they have gotten the job, or that they deserve the job. And yet time after time Linda is bored with them. All of their resumes show their experience and their leadership skills. There is never anything unique or engaging about any of their experience. And all of them say the same thing: I am passionate … I have an Ivy League MBA … I believe communication is crucial … I love this business … I am a hard worker … I love your company ... blah blah blah.
Linda is bored and frustrated with hiring. And yet she has to do it all the time, because these candidates, these shoe-ins, one after the other, try unsuccessfully to convince her why she should hire them instead of the other shoe-ins. And even if they do get hired, she is still constantly interviewing because the chances are, for a variety of reasons, that they won’t last.
Between the demographics of her C-Suite team and the demographics of her leadership candidates, Linda is surrounded by leaders who believe that they deserve to be where they are. And yet if she were to ask even her fellow C-Suite colleagues why they deserve to be there, chances are they would say: I am passionate … I have an Ivy League MBA … I believe communication is crucial … I love this business … I am a hard worker … I love the company ... blah blah blah.
Don’t do blah blah blah. Do impact.
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Get a better job, sooner.
For a free resume review, please contact me at soozy@controlyourcareer.net
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Experienced Administrative Specialist
4wThank you for this. Ironically, I read this and an hour before an of just offering up the things that we are softened programmed to say during interviews like "I did this....i have this degree, I can do this for you based on X experience." I thought about how much of this is too much because to the interviewer too much of this can seem like filler and regurgitating what they already picked up from my resume. Instead I said things about who I am, how I am as a person, and how what makes me tick can fit the position and the organization because these are the things you may not see just by reading a resume (they she already read my resume, my, skills, and my experience. She doesn't need it repeated.) As the interview progresses I was met with replies like "oh yes, that sounds great, I can see how that comes from your experience in X" in a way I think it allowed for her to make connections that wouldn't normally come out in a dry old school style interview. And for me, it gave me a sense of what she was focused on and interested in from my background.