How can I effectively highlight my transferable skills on my resume when I’m transitioning into a new career?
What are some common resume mistakes that could hurt my job search?
In this episode of The Career Rx we’ll discuss:
- The most common resume red flags and why
- How to highlight relevant skills and experiences
- Effective ways to avoid making resume mistakes
Listen and you will learn the common downfalls that can negatively impact your job search, even with a strong professional background. I address the importance of avoiding overused industry jargon and clichés to make your resume stand out. By understanding these common mistakes and implementing effective strategies, you can craft a compelling resume that highlights your unique qualifications and ensures you’re putting your best qualities forward.
In this Episode:
[2:20] Addressing the AI in the room
[8:12] Less than a year? Two years?
[13:00] Keep it relevant and keep it moving
[20:24] Unfinished work doesn’t make the cut!
Links and Resources:
Industry Insider – 12 hours of CME, learn exactly how to land a rewarding nonclinical career without a new degree, special connections, prior experience, or a pay cut
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TRANSCRIPT: Episode 130 – Red Flags on Your Resume – What to Avoid
Hey there. Welcome back today on the podcast, we’re going to be talking about red flags on your resume. And I know many of my students in my course ask about their resumes.
They asked me to review their resumes and help them to figure out what should stay, what should go, and how they should communicate certain elements of their career journeys and other experiences that they’ve had, especially while they’re trying to figure out how to really paint a great picture of their transferable skills in an area where they don’t have the direct experience for the role that they’re trying to get.
So it’s a delicate balance, especially in this sort of recent and modern day and age, many physicians are doing more than just their day job, and they have lots of interests. They have a lot of passions, and many have a lot of other activities that earn them income on the side, I’ll just call them side gigs here for ease and convenience.
And many people who are interested in a career shift have also experienced a fair amount of burnout, which has led them to explore different things. And by that, I mean, you know, sometimes people have explored part time, sometimes they have explored locums.
Sometimes they’ve explored, you know, a telemedicine type of work or even a different type of certification, some of the certifications that would allow them to do something like lifestyle medicine or obesity medicine, things that are they are, of course, bona fide specialties that stand on their own, but they’re also have lent themselves in recent years to people kind of switching out of their current specialty.
So many students will come that have all kinds of different activities. They want to know how to put them on their resume, and they want to know if this is going to provide, you know, a favorable impression or an unfavorable impression. And it’s such an important question, so I’m going to do my best to answer it.
Okay, on the topic of red flags on the resume, I also want to say, sort of overarchingly, a little bit of a disclaimer, right, that when I say that something might be a red flag on your resume, I don’t mean that this is because I don’t think it’s a good activity, or that I don’t think it’s worthwhile or that I view it in any low level of esteem whatsoever. It is not about that.
Please, please remember, and this is the most important thing of anything I’m going to say, forget the specifics of the red flags the person who is looking at your resume, first and foremost, if you’re listening to my podcast, you already know a lot of times it’s not even a person. So we have a computer screener even more.
So these days, with AI, you’re not even going to be in front of a person for the most part. So you have this huge hurdle where your resume has to pass a computer screening, and then it has to pass the sort of visual two to five second scan of an uninformed person. And by that, I mean they are, they are not the hiring manager, right? They are human resources person.
They are screening candidates based upon the criteria that they have been told to look for. Okay, so, and I bring all this up again, not to even to disparage that person, but to say the computer is not making its own thoughtful independent decisions, right?
And really, nor is the human resources person, not because they’re not capable of it, but because they don’t have to. They get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applicants.
They only want to interview three to six, perhaps they only want to hire one, and so they don’t have to think for more than five seconds about whether or not they should be viewing what they’re reading in a different way.
Does this say something about the candidate that I hadn’t thought about? Does this, you know, like, should I give the benefit of the doubt here, there, or the other place? They don’t have to think that way, because they have way too many candidates to need to do that, and therefore I don’t want you to put yourself forward in a way that would require anybody to have to think about that at all right.
You want your resume to be a very, clearly, very effective marketing document that accurately and in a compelling way describes your professional experience and makes you a strong candidate for the role, right?
And so it should line up very, very well to the job description for the role for which you are applying. This is why I’m always talking about how important it is to tailor your resume for the job for which you are applying. And of course, you’re changing it. You’re tailoring it.
That doesn’t mean any of it is untrue or embellished, obviously just I’m saying you only want to include the things that are helpful in communicating the most compelling version of your candidacy, and you do not want to include anything else because it’s either distracting or, in worst case, could be viewed as a red flag.
And again, I’m not making a judgment call on the actual activities themselves, and I don’t even necessarily think that other people would right that. I don’t. I’m not saying that an HR person or a hiring manager necessarily would view these as a red flag or would judge them negatively. But what I am saying is it’s not accomplishing the mission of your resume, right?
If it’s anything other than absolutely aligned and making you a strong, compelling candidate, then it’s a distraction at best. And because they have hundreds and hundreds of applications, anything that’s even remotely causing them to think, I wonder if this person is right, it’s going in the discard pile immediately.
You don’t want to be in that pile, and so I want for you to, sort of like, compartmentalize, you know, when you’re thinking about what goes on your resume, and I’m advising that certain things maybe should not go on there.
It’s not because I don’t think they were a good use of your time, and it’s nothing to be offended about, right? And I’m sure it’s great, but it’s is the question that I am answering this from, is the point of view of, is this going to get you the job?
All right?
Red flag number one, short term employment, right? Right? And this is a pattern, a pattern of short-term employment. People are always talking about, you know, have you/are you job hopping? Are you moving from one job to the next to the next? In clinical medicine, we do this very infrequently. People often stay for a really long period of time in industry.
Most people will stay in a given role for, you know, two to maybe four or five years, and then they will usually move up or over enroll. So it’s when I say an industry job hopping would be like six months here, eight months there, you know, things that are less than a year, or even, you know, one year, two years. If everything is very short like that, that might be a red flag.
Why? Because the employer is going to wonder like, is it that they couldn’t keep the job, right? Was there a performance issue whereby they were essentially being let go or encouraged to move on, or which is, you know, of course, not good, but it’s also not good if the person is just their own career cadence is to move on, because then the company knows that if they hire you, they’re not likely to get a whole lot out of their investment, because you’ll no sooner have onboarded and just sort of barely starting to function well on your own when you’ll have moved on.
So they want to know that they’ll be able to retain you for a reasonable period of time. And so when they look at these kinds of quick job hopping type of roles that can be a red flag if you have some of those. I mean, you just need to explain them.
And actually, in industry, sometimes people do have them for reasons that are not their fault, right? The company has a reorg and you’re laid off. Your medicine does not make it through whatever phase of study is going on, right? You have a failed study of a failed drug, and now your job does not exist anymore.
None of that’s a reflection on you as an employee. So that is understood. I do just have to explain it, but a high number of frequent roles can be viewed as a red flag.
Another red flag, of course, is unexplained gaps in your employment. I think actually, academics is way more strict on this, right? I mean, in academics, if you’re out of work for more than like five days, they want to know what happened there.
In industry, I think people are really talking about gaps that are on the order of months or years, and they really don’t need a whole lot of detail explaining those it’s perfectly acceptable to have been on a personal leave of absence, to be a caretaker for your family, or to have been on a medical leave, or to have been on a personal sabbatical, or what have you, but just so long as it’s explained in some way, just don’t leave it blank, which is confusing.
On the other hand, if you’re in between jobs and you took, you know, a month off to go on vacation like that, doesn’t, I don’t think need an explanation, because the dates essentially line up that you, you know, worked somewhere until February and you started your next job, you know, in April. I mean, that’s not really a gap, I don’t think so.
But you don’t want to have a long gap. That would be a red flag. So much, much better to have a brief explanation than to have anybody wonder about it, right? That’s what we don’t want, is for people to be wondering about stuff. So, so don’t do that.
The third red flag is irrelevant experience, and I think this is, you know, where a lot of my clients question are coming up, right? Because they’ve done a lot of things for fun, right? Many people have done things in investing, or they’ve done things in, you know, to kind of scratch their entrepreneurial itch with like a like a direct marketing or an MLM type of company or something like that.
And you get great skills and great experience from doing things like that, and it’s fun, and you’re making money and all this, it is probably a red flag, though, on a industry resume, and the reason for that is because it’s just not painting a picture, necessarily, of a corporate type of employee, right? It can be useful to say you have some business acumen, and you have gotten that from some entrepreneurial activities.
You want to be really careful to frame it that way. Otherwise, it will just potentially seem like you don’t have a really clear professional narrative, because, you know they’re presumably hiring you because you’re a physician and they have a physician role.
So if you’re going to include things like that, please be really, really careful to phrase it in a way that highlights the experience that is relevant. I mean, presumably you have a reason for leaving it on there that is relevant to the role.
And by that, I mean, directly linked, in actual words, to the job description. If they have said they’re looking for someone who has business savvy and entrepreneurial spirit, or something like that, and you feel like this reflects that, then you can include it, but link it directly to that job requirement.
And, you know, try to describe your role in a way that does not lend itself to any of the preconceived biases that many people have about some of these kinds of jobs, right?
You just don’t want to do that because, again, not because, I mean, the person who’s having a bias about it, maybe that person is in the wrong. They almost certainly are in the wrong. That’s how bias works. But nonetheless, that’s if that’s an impression you don’t want, that it doesn’t help you. It doesn’t help you get over the hurdle, and it doesn’t help you be the very small, small percentage of applicants that they’re going to bother to interview.
So keep it really tightly relevant. Do not list things that are unrelated to the industry, all it does when you include irrelevant experience is it just it just undermines and sort of dilutes the experience that you do have.
So you may have a lot of really strong, really favorable experience, but if the net impression someone has when they’re looking at your resume is that you don’t know who you are because you’ve tried all of these different things, then that does not make you a strong candidate.
And again, I want to remind you guys of where I’m coming from here. I am not saying that that means you don’t know who you are, and I’m not saying that you’re trying all kinds of things out of desperation or because you know you can’t commit, or because you get really bored easily.
But you can imagine how someone who doesn’t know you can look at, you know, clusters of experiences that seem irrelevant and that don’t seem to jive with their view of a physician, a clinical physician, or even an industry physician, and how that just becomes confusing and it dilutes you.
So the flip side of that coin, right, which is what I would say to you, if you’re my friend, is like that really makes you multifaceted. And as a person who likes to try new things and that you’re brave and that you like to grow and all that, but it doesn’t look that way on your resume.
You have to be really mindful about how it comes across to people who do not know you, and again, in a sea of other resumes that are coming across extremely, extremely tightly aligned to the job description of people who are industry professionals and have been before.
That’s who you’re competing against, right? So again, not disparaging any of the things that you have done to say they’re irrelevant. I’m just saying make sure they paint that picture really, really strongly.
Okay, similarly themed, I suppose, is another red flag is multiple career changes. This is maybe a combination of short term employment and irrelevant experience. But if you have a whole bunch of things that seem like you are doing a different thing every year, that is going to be a red flag.
And you know, it’s going to cause people to wonder if they can retain you when they hire you. It’s going to cause people to wonder whether or not you were not performing well in the various things, but whether they think that it was on you, your performance, or on just your own level of interest, knowing that you’ve moved on, you know, on your own, it just makes you seem indecisive or unfocused, and that’s not a good investment for the company.
Now, if you had had a handful things you know, as we’ve talked about, if just, you just need to describe them in a factual way, and if they are thematically related, sometimes you need to really highlight that, because it could be that a handful of experiences that seem irrelevant and kind of all over the place actually are not right, that there is a common theme, and that what drew you to them, or the kind of experience you’ve got in them, is much more coherent than maybe it looks on paper, in which case, just make sure that you are presenting it that way.
Another red flag, this one is more rarely encountered, but it’s worth mentioning. As you know, you know, on a resume, you write not only what you did like what your role was, but also a little bit about what you accomplished or what the role was like. And from time to time, I will see people describing some of what they did in terms of problems rather than solutions, and so just kind of give your resume, uh once over for tone.
Are you describing things in a way that show and demonstrate achievement and action and solutions and forward movement, you know, like you did stuff, or is it described in a way where there were a lot of problems, a lot of challenges.
Because even if you, even if what you did was work to fix those things, you just want to be sure that the tone is really positive. It’s hard for me to, I think, communicate that on this podcast without concrete examples. And I’m not, I don’t have permission to share concrete examples, so I’ll just put that in your mind.
Just please think about, you know, how does your resume read, and when you’re describing you know what you did there? Make sure that it is, well, just that is positive and upbeat in in its light, or at the at the at best, in a neutral light, right?
Nothing that is negative, because you don’t want anything to reflect poorly on the prior employer, or you know the like the place, or your colleagues in that place, or the people that you served, or you know, your patients, your clients, your customers. There’s, there’s a whole lot of ways that things can be read into in a way that’s unintended. And so just be sure that your descriptions sound positive.
Okay, another red flag is over emphasis on non-professional experience. Some people do still like to include volunteer work or hobbies. And I think this is fine, you know, but it should be like a single, one or two sentence sort of at the bottom. Why not?
Because people don’t care about you as a human being, but because you know it, if you’re taking up a lot of real estate on your resume to talk about hobbies, then a person might reasonably wonder like, do you have a good sense for the kinds of qualifications one needs for this job? And why aren’t you telling me about that, right?
Or why are we taking up a bunch of real estate talking about your hobbies? I would limit it and I would relate it to the role. Certainly, a lot of volunteer experience can be relevant, especially if it is healthcare related, especially if it is travel related, right?
There’s a lot that can be linked and, and I think there are a lot of things about your hobbies that might reveal really important character traits, right? If you love to do distance running, right? That shows a certain amount of discipline and perseverance and so forth. But you know, if you don’t have these on your resume, please don’t add this section.
I don’t think it’s necessary. And if you are, you know if you like to share it, because you feel like this communicates something about yourself, and perhaps because it’s important to you that you and your employer are a match in that regard, right, and that they also care that you have hobbies in a life.
I mean, I think that’s a fair rationale, which I’ve heard before, but again, I take us back to the beginning, which is like, you could always decide at the end of an interview process that you don’t like the company that much and that even if they offer you a job, you don’t want to take it, but you can’t do that if you don’t get the job offer.
And the point of the resume is to get you in the door so that they interview you, and the point of the interview is to get the job offer and also to determine whether or not you would want to accept that job offer.
So don’t do I don’t recommend you do anything at the resume stage that is going to get you eliminated, or, you know, even runs that risk, because it confuses people.
Okay, sort of related red flag is education or certificates, like professional development, types of activity that are either very, very low level or are also incomplete or unfinished. If you have an actual degree, perhaps you’re in the middle of, you know, a serious graduate degree at an MPH or MBA or something like that. I think that actually does belong on there. And to say that you’re a candidate for the class of whatever, whatever. But if it is anything that is smaller than that,
I don’t think I would list it, it would need, of course, to be very, very relevant to the role, and if it is just sort of, you know, your personal level professional development, like I have seen people list LinkedIn courses and things like that that they’ve taken, it would need to be extremely robust, and probably in in collaboration with the university, to warrant putting that on there.
The reason for this, I mean, it’s sort of twofold. One is, if you’re doing, if you’re doing your own education to try to further your experience that’s related to the job that you want, then I think there is a way to put that on your resume that that says exactly that, right? I’m committed to a career change. I want to learn as much as I can about it. Here’s what I’m doing.
But you also want to be careful not to dilute things by putting things that are sort of small and unimportant on there, because then you run the risk of giving the impression that you think there are big things, right? And so you don’t want to do that. So just be thoughtful about education or certifications or anything else that is learning that is not complete or that is relatively low level.
So, okay, that was six or seven. I think red flags again. I want to just really, really emphasize this is not, it’s not a personal judgment, right? People who have done a lot of different things for a lot of different reasons, whether it is because you are multi passionate and maybe you do get bored at work, and you want, you like, to always be busy learning and doing new things. That may be true. And I personally think that’s great.
Actually, I’m a little bit like that myself, but that’s not how I want to come across on my resume, right? Is that I get bored easily and I’m constantly ready to move to new things, because someone who doesn’t know me may not view that as an asset.
And similarly, for those of you who have dabbled in a lot of little things, right, and you’re kind of like bouncing all around. And maybe because you can, right, maybe because some of you have, you know, the financial stability that you can choose to do whatever kind of work you want.
And so you’re trying a little bit of everything. And I say, you know, more power to you. That’s fantastic. But again, just be mindful of how it shows up on the resume. Because, you know, these are not my judgments, that any of these things are inherently bad.
It’s just that, you know, thinking about it from the goal of, Am I putting together a document that is going to market my strengths and my most relevant skills in a way that is really tightly aligned with the job description for the sole purpose of getting me an interview.
That is what it is for anything that doesn’t meet that test should not be on your resume. That is my advice to you, because, again, you have to compete against hundreds and hundreds of applicants, and you have to do it in various stages.
And the first few stages are people who are not at all going to stop to think, either because they’re a computer and they don’t think, or they’re just they’re not going to stop to think like I wonder what this says about this person. And maybe this is an asset. And maybe, taken in totality, this person is amazing, and I can tell because they are so multi-dimensional on the page, that is not how people look at resumes. It’s just not.
And so I’ve had almost heated conversations with people about this, because they’re people feel very close to the things they’ve done, right, and they feel somewhat defensive of you know, yeah, here’s how I spend my time, like I know it’s a good use of my time, so I don’t want to be misunderstood. I would hate for this episode to blow up in the wrong way.
I am not saying any of these things are not good. I’m just saying don’t craft your resume in a way that makes anybody have to ask any of these questions.
If any of it needs an explanation it is already hurting you, and the point of the resume is to get you that interview. The there’s too many hurdles, there’s too much competition, to leave it open and say,
Well, you know what? If somebody they could ask me about this, they could, but they won’t, because you’re not going to get the interview You because they have 500 people, and they’re going to interview four people, right?
So you won’t get the opportunity to explain it. If it’s something that could be a red flag, it’s just going to get you eliminated. The things that they will ask you about are the things that are extremely tightly linked to the job description, where you didn’t provide every single detail because it’s a resume and it’s short and they can’t wait to get you in there for the interview so that they can ask you more about it.
That’s different. It’s a totally different sort of use of the they’re going to ask me about this piece. But if it’s any one of these things that falls into the potential red flag category, you can be guaranteed they are not going to be asking you about it, because they’re not going to be interviewing you. So I mean this with all the love and support possible that I’ve poured into this 25 minutes. So please take it for how it is intended.
This is not what Marjorie Stiegler but think very, very carefully if you have any of this on your resume about how you should modify that resume, either to remove it or to frame it in a way that does present your strengths and your relevant experience as as it is explicitly related to the job description.
That’s what you need on your resume. All right, at this point, I think I’m just repeating myself, so I’m going to bring this episode to a close. Good luck. I know it is hard to take your whole life experience and a long CV and turn it into a short and compelling resume. It’s not easy work.
But, you know, it’s a marketing document. It doesn’t need to have everything on it, and indeed, it probably shouldn’t have everything on it. So if you look at it through that lens and just give it the job that it has assigned, the job is, get me an interview. Get me an interview amid really stiff competition. If you look at it that way, it may help you to craft a really great resume that has all the right things and none of the red flags.
That’s it for today. Bye, for now. Bye.
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