Put a Human Voice in Your Resume

I posted this cartoon the other day and inadvertently launched a conversation about business jargon, what I call Zombietastic Corporatespeak. We drown in that stuff these days: paradigm, synergy, leverage, key performance indicators, cross-functional teams. Where did this robot language come from? That’s a mystery, like the associated mystery “Why do we all start speaking Zombietastic Corporatespeak fluently, once we go to work in the business world?”

In the typical corporate or institutional workplace, we hear and read business jargon continually. A torrent of clichés assaults our senses throughout the working day. It’s a dead language, like ancient Sumerian, but it's everywhere you look in the workplace, from the recruiting brochure to instructions for borrowing the company breastpump.

We don’t talk about paradigm shifts at the grocery store. When we stop at the tavern to play darts with the guys, we don’t talk about critical success factors and performance metrics. Nobody likes to talk that way, yet we find ourselves doing it against our wills. The zombie tendrils of corporatespeak spiral into our brains until every time we sit down to write a memo or email message, the dreaded jargon spills out through our fingers onto the keyboard.

We don't hand in projects these days; they're deliverables now. Corporate language encircles and chokes the life out of conversations, verbal and electronic. It's like kudzu. Everywhere we look, there's more of it - in the company handbook, in the signs posted on the walls, on our paystubs and in memos, messages and Powerpoint presentations. It makes work less human and more cold.

Nobody teaches Zombietastic Corporatespeak, but everybody learns it. You could look the world over for a better tool to inhibit human spark, warmth, randomness and awesomeness at work and fail to find one. Language sets the tone and makes an organization’s culture manifest. Corporatespeak is ugly, boring and dehumanizing, but we all know how to read, speak and write it like natives, so more often than not, that’s what we do.

We don't have to sound like zombies at work. Our work will be more lively, more authentic, more fun and more human when we talk, write and behave like humans all the time, at work and at home. If you're scoffing at the notion that one could bring himself or herself to work all the way, I am sorry that you haven't experienced that yet. Once you work in a place where the language and the culture are human, you will see instantly why people who have come to work as themselves do not go willingly back into robot mode.

We know it's not a language meant to convey human brilliance or creativity. So why would we use Zombietastic Corporatespeak to describe ourselves on a resume?

If you've ever had a job from Hell among people who didn't get or deserve your talents, you know that avoiding that fate is a Highly Strategic Imperative in your own career. The language in your resume is one way and to let people who encounter you in writing (on your resume or your LinkedIn profile) know there are no zombies in your family tree.

If you've ever gone on a job interview and stayed there in pain until the closing credits, all the while thinking "Am I here? Am I conscious?" while your gut screams "Run away!" then you know that if a given employer is not going to like your brand of jazz, it's good to know that up front. Life is too short to spend it being interviewed by weenie people with long lists of insulting interview questions and the attitude "You are lucky we're interviewing you at all."

If you decide to try the STOP! Don’t Send That Resume™approach and send a hiring manager a Pain Letter™ and a Human-Voiced Resume™ directly, you're going to need to put a human voice in your resume. You can't very well send your possible next boss a conversational, down-to-earth Pain Letter™ and a typically wan and robotic resume together in one envelope.

Luckily, it's not difficult to put a human voice in your resume. You just need to recast the resume to bring more of you (not your skills, but you the person) onto the page.

You start by understanding your own story. You are not a bundle of disembodied Skills (don't get me started) and years of experience with Tools A, B and C. You are not your degrees. You are not your past employer brands or your job titles. You are not your resume, at all! The more human energy you can push through the ether to the living, breathing hiring manager at the other end of the connection, the better.

A resume is a marketing tool, and a job search is a marketing campaign. As with any product or service, everyone is not your customer. At Human Workplace we say "Only the people who get you deserve you."

Will every hiring manager love your Human-Voiced Resume™, pick up the phone and invite you for coffee? Highly unlikely. There are hiring managers who will be horrified at the idea that you'd step outside the velvet ropes to reach out with a message about mutually advantageous collaboration.

What does a Human-Voiced Resume™ do that a traditional resume doesn't? Here's a short list:

It speaks in a human voice, using the first person and the word "I."

It tells a story -- your story -- in your own voice, as though you were standing in the room talking with the reader.

It's written for one reader at a time. It uses full sentences rather than sentence fragments.

It doesn't use Praising Adjectives like Savvy, Seasoned, Strategic. Powerful people don't stoop to praise themselves.

It doesn't use jargon like Results-Oriented Professional.

It shares your experience in very short stories we call Dragon-Slaying Stories(TM).

It makes clear why you left each job you've had. It makes obvious what problem you came to each place to solve -- your mission -- and how you came, saw and conquered in each role.

It attracts smart, self-aware hiring managers and pushes away bureaucratic, fearful ones. (That may be the best reason to try a human voice in your resume, right there.)

People who convert their resumes out of Zombietastic Corporatespeak into human language write to me and say “I finally sound like myself, on paper!” That is a great reason to go through the exercise of putting a human voice in your resume. You have a powerful human story to tell. Let’s not let a crusty, dusty resume format handed down to us from who-knows-where stifle the vibrant, funny, real person that plenty of hiring managers (especially the human ones) are dying to know.

KEEP READING TO SEE HUMAN-VOICED RESUME™ EXAMPLES & LISTEN TO A PODCAST ON WRITING ONE.

==================================================================

If you send me a LinkedIn invitation at liz@humanworkplace.com, please include a joke or a palindrome in the invitation. Please JOIN Human Workplace when you have time! JOIN our LinkedIn group, too! and LIKE us on Facebook. Twitter: @humanworkplace

HERE is an E-Book with a Human-Voiced Resume(TM) Example (Before & After) and

here's one full of stories about Human-Voiced Resumes™

Here's an E-Book about how to get your own Human-Voiced Resume(TM)

Here is a webinar from the Northwestern University series "Your Journey, Your Career with Liz Ryan" focusing on business pain and Dragon-Slaying Stories™, two fundamental Human-Voiced Resume™ ideas