Overcoming Career Liabilities in Your Resume and Job Search

A hiring manager may perceive someone as the perfect fit for a job, but the reality is that no one's perfect. That's okay, simply because everyone is human and everyone has weaknesses. Get around a few common career liabilities that come up in a job search by developing a strategy ahead of time to mitigate the damage your weaknesses may cause.

Career liabilities may come in the form of too little experience, too much experience, the wrong experience, not enough qualifications or too few skills. All these weaknesses can be overcome during a job search, and the key to getting past them comes from identifying positions that most closely fit with your skill level. Jobs should match your strengths that overshadow any weaknesses.

When you apply for jobs, optimize your job search results by outlining the weaknesses you possess that may appear in a resume. That means you need a resume that focuses on your strengths to make the liabilities less noticeable.

1. Experience

Too much or too little experience may skewer the rankings of an applicant tracking system. When your years of employment fall outside of the range of the experience listed in the posting, the ATS may ignore your past experience and rank other people ahead of you. These computer programs, though handy, may exclude plenty of well-qualified candidates simply because applicants failed to tailor the resume to the number of years needed.

Get around this in your job search by including the precise amount of experience called for by the job description. If you have 15 years of experience and the posting calls for 10, shorten your job experience section by excluding some past positions. The most relevant jobs prepared you for the one at hand, so those are the most important. Place some older positions into a career summary section if you learned valuable skills back then.

When you have 19 years of experience and the position needs 20 years, put the number 20 somewhere in your career summary. As an example, list "Nearly 20 years experience in sales across several positions." This mitigates you having less experience by touting your hard skills, results and accomplishments.

2. Job Titles

Job titles may not accurately depict previously earned experience. This could lead an employer to believe you're unqualified for a position when that's not the case. This is where keywords on a resume come into play. A job title of "director" may be the equivalent of "vice president" in another firm, even though the job duties remain essentially the same. Use keywords to illustrate your experience implementing business strategies, enhancing the performance of employees and improving the leadership skills of managers you supervise.

Alleviate both these situations in your job search by leveraging your network. Building relationships within your network obviates much of the process of posting your resume through a job board, searching through a company's HR page and filling out lots of paperwork. You still should have a polished resume ready to go, but at least you don't have to get around an applicant tracker.

No one has a perfect resume or perfect work experience. A successful job search minimizes the impact of any liabilities while focusing on your strengths to find the job right for you.

Photo courtesy of Ian McAllister at Flickr.com