Majoring in minors

There are many creative ways I've seen people work against themselves in a job search, including stalling at that critical step of "getting out there" - declaring their candidacy, so to speak; making contacts and applying to postings with the goal of getting a new position.

I can think of half a dozen common self-defeating tactics. I'll cover them all, but the one on my mind today is "Majoring in Minors" - putting lots of time and energy into doing low value, low return tasks - rather than the scarier higher payoff ones.

A favorite is resume tweaking. My resume is not perfect yet is a fabulous excuse to not apply to any positions or companies yet. I used to teach a class in Resume Writing, but tweaking is such a popular resistance-to-move-ahead tactic that we took the class off the schedule, and instead only offer to write resumes for clients, do updates, edits, give feedback and collaborate with clients on them. They get a better product far faster for both of us.

There are those that believe that everyone should write their own resume. That is a subject for another day other than for me to say I wouldn't dream of cutting my own hair - I leave it to a professional who cuts hair all the time and can see my head from angles I can't.

Back to resume tweaking. Another popular stalling tactic is to send your "draft" out to everyone you know for feedback. Maybe it's a safe way to sort of announce your candidacy as a planned information leak. "If nominated, I will not run, but if I were to run, would you vote for this platform?"

Getting feedback from many sources is where the Resume Class participants frequently started augering into majoring in minors. Fact is, everyone is going to have a different opinion - some valid, some not so much. Once you get all those dissenting opinons, there goes your confidence in your resume, and you've got to tweak and tweak before you can send your resume out "for real", right?

So here's the deal: people who want to help you in your job search but don't know of any cool positions for you, or have any contacts to give you, give you what they can - some advice on your resume. We've all seen resumes, so we can all spot a little something that could be done differently.

There are more ways to format and structure resumes than there are people. Will it be effective based on your goals for where you want to be next? We still don't know until you take the plunge and get it out there. Should you apply all the resume advice you get? One question: would you let the person giving you the advice cut your hair?