The "What not to say..." blogs will be dedicated to the random selection of answers to my interview coaching session questions. Can you follow that?!
Question - What steps do you take to reduce personal stress during the working day?
What Not To Say - "I tend to Squeeze my squishy ball"
Luckily for that respondent he went on to receive a good 2 hours of interview counseling!
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The Questionnaire Laid Bare
As part of the information discovery process, I usually ask clients to bring along to our meeting any additional information they feel is useful, relevant or in some other way important. Last month, one of my clients produced an old "questionnaire" they had been asked to fill our by a resume writing firm about 8 years ago.
The first thing that struck me about the document was how impersonal it all was. Stock questions, soliciting the inevitable stock answers, strengths, weaknesses, lists - endless lists of attributes to circle. What i was looking at, was a template to build a template.
The end result, the resume, was as bland and uninspiring as you'd expect from such a process. I was amazed by the blatant listing of attributes throughout the cover letter and resume without any supporting narrative to put the clients skills in context.
Here's a section from the cover letter;
"I am a great communicator, can multi-task, give and take orders, have listening skills, organizational skills, planning skills, speak french and have good computer skills".
The above extract is absolutely meaningless without context. It looks like every other D.I.Y. cover letter project out there and was clearly lifted verbatim from the questionnaire and deposited unceremoniously into the cover letter.
Is that what you really want from a process and service charged with the responsibility of demonstrating your unique qualities to a prospective hiring manager? Templates are for the masses - let everyone else use them.
The first thing that struck me about the document was how impersonal it all was. Stock questions, soliciting the inevitable stock answers, strengths, weaknesses, lists - endless lists of attributes to circle. What i was looking at, was a template to build a template.
The end result, the resume, was as bland and uninspiring as you'd expect from such a process. I was amazed by the blatant listing of attributes throughout the cover letter and resume without any supporting narrative to put the clients skills in context.
Here's a section from the cover letter;
"I am a great communicator, can multi-task, give and take orders, have listening skills, organizational skills, planning skills, speak french and have good computer skills".
The above extract is absolutely meaningless without context. It looks like every other D.I.Y. cover letter project out there and was clearly lifted verbatim from the questionnaire and deposited unceremoniously into the cover letter.
Is that what you really want from a process and service charged with the responsibility of demonstrating your unique qualities to a prospective hiring manager? Templates are for the masses - let everyone else use them.
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