The Most Important Piece of Your Job Hunt

Don’t Send a Resume says everything that any jobhunter is used to hearing:

• You gotta sell
• Treat yourself like a product
• Market yourself
• Etc.

I can’t say that I disagree with anything Fox says in this short tome, but he leaves out the most important thing for me:

You can’t be someone that you aren’t.

In the end, I need to find my next job by doing something that I want to do. I’ve spent the last 14 years pursuing careers that I hate, to work with people I don’t relate well with, and produce product I don’t care much about. It’s pretty bad when the work I’m most proud of is volunteer work that I didn’t know how to do.

But I did just be myself, pettiness and all.

One of the things that Jim Collins’s Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t and Gallup’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently both seem to emphasize in different ways is that you cannot be someone that you’re not, that greatness does not stem from over-aggression or self-aggrandizing. Instead, it stems from an unflinching look at your situation, from seeing what you are really capable of and shoring up the areas where you lack by bringing in other people.

In the end, I think Fox makes some interesting points but attempts to get everyone else to look like him. We don’t. Still, his first line is excellent advice:

Don’t send a resume.

Image credit: Men of Fort Story operate an azimuth instrument, to measure the angle of splash in sea-target practice. 1942. Via Library of Congress. (reversed)