19,99 €
"'Lose the Résumé' breaks down every aspect of job hunting, explaining what matters and what doesn't."
—The New York Times Book Review
Lose the resume and land that coveted job
Gone are the days of polishing up your resume and sending it out at random. At every level today, you need to "lose the resume" in order to land the right job. In other words, you have to learn to tell a story about yourself that speaks to your competencies, purpose, passion, and values. Lose the Resume, Land the Job shares the new rules of engagement: How you must think, act, and present yourself so you can win.
Based on inner exploration drawn from the IP of the world's largest executive recruiting firm, the book gleans insights and stories (the good, the bad, and sometimes the ugly) from Korn Ferry recruiters across the globe who work with thousands of candidates each day. It helps you gain a deeper perspective on who you are, what you're passionate about, the cultures in which you fit, the kind of bosses you should work for, and where you can bring the most value to organizations.
Getting a job and, more importantly, building a career has never been more complex. Lose the Resume, Land the Job helps you score the positions that align with your passion and match your attributes — and that will put you on a trajectory toward bigger and better things.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 292
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
I'm confident in the power of this book—and the unique resources provided here—to help you find the best possible career for who you are. Your success is our most important endorsement. —Gary Burnison
Cover
“Your Endorsement”
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One: Your Wake-Up Call
The Blunt Truth
Getting a Clue
When Passion and Purpose Go Missing
The Boss Problem
The Tale of Startup Zach
The Wrong Reasons to Look for Work
The Right Reasons to Look
Chapter Two: Know Yourself
Look in the Mirror
The Moment of Self-Truth
Traits: Your DNA
Drivers: What Motivates You?
Competencies: Essential Ingredients for Success
Experiences
From Self-Knowledge to Success
Chapter Three: Be a Learn-It-All
What Do Learners Look Like?
The S Curve: Skills, Scale, and Scope
Your Career-Development Plan
Your Career-Builder Assignments
The Four Career Knockout Punches
From Learner to Leader: Your Career Aspirations
What Great Looks Like
Best In Class: The Brain Balance
How Learning Agile Are You?
Where Are You Headed with What You've Learned?
Chapter Four: Targeting Your Next Opportunity
It's All About Your Effort
To Get a Job You Need a Plan
Geography: Where You Want to Live and Work
Your Company Wish List
Getting Feedback on Where You Belong
Targeting Industries and Sectors
The Job-Search Spiral: Roles and Responsibilities
The Pivot Point
Chapter Five: Networking Is a Contact Sport
Why Networking Mystifies
The Point of Contact
Networking 101: Check the Boxes
The Golden Rule: It's Not About You
The Value of Validation
Networking Your References
Looking for Winners
Be Prepared for the Long Haul
Networking Doesn't End with a New Job
Chapter Six: Your Resume: The Story You Tell
The Resume— in Perspective
The “Calling Card”
First Steps: Marketing Yourself
Constructing Your Resume
Professional Summary
No Objectives, Please!
Professional Experience and Accomplishments
From a Military to a Civilian Career
The Creative Resume
Your Education
How to Sharpen Your Resume
Final Notes for Your Resume
A Living Document
Chapter Seven: Managing Your Online Presence
Raising Red Flags
LinkedIn: A Must-Have Profile
Your Photo
Your Introductory Title
Your Summary
Your Experience
Links and Logos
Recommendations and Endorsements
Gauging Your Activity
Chapter Eight: Working with a Recruiter
Networking the Networkers
Getting to Know Recruiters
Recruiting 101
The Dos and Don'ts of Working with a Recruiter
Chapter Nine: Your Interview Prep: Don't Psych Yourself Out!
Nobody Gets Out of Sixth Grade
Making the Most of the First Seven Seconds
The Twelve Deadly Sins of Interviewing
The Great Unknown: Interview Questions
Your Mental Game
Chapter Ten: Your Act In Action
The Five Interviewers
Going with the Flow
How Can You Stand Out?
Answering the Unexpected
The Interview Close
Next Steps
Meeting with Senior Leaders
The Offer
Chapter Eleven: Your Next Job
The Top 10 Tips for Your New Job
Become Indispensable—Especially to Your Boss
Learn all You Can
Network, Network, Network!
Be an Outlier in an Uncertain World
Appendix
Korn Ferry Advance
Acknowledgments
Back Cover
End User License Agreement
Figure 1
Figure 2
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Chapter 1
1
4
5
6
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
Gary Burnison
Book design by RossMadrid GroupIllustrations by Brett Ryder
Copyright © 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New JerseyPublished simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom.
For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.
Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Burnison, Gary, 1961- author.
Title: Lose the resume : land the job / by Gary Burnison.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2018] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017051510 (print) | LCCN 2017054519 (ebook) | ISBN
9781119475255 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119475231 (epub) | ISBN 9781119475200 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Job hunting. | Vocational guidance.
Classification: LCC HF5382.7 (ebook) | LCC HF5382.7 .B88 2018 (print) | DDC
650.14--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051510
To everyone who hates his or her boss.
Early one morning, as I drove to work along the Pacific Coast Highway—the sun glistening off the ocean to my right—traffic suddenly slowed to a crawl. Several cars stopped in the median of a six-lane highway where cars normally move at a steady fifty-five miles per hour. One man stepped out of his truck and stared at the ground. As I rolled slowly past, I couldn't believe what I was seeing: A skunk had a plastic soda cup stuck on its head. It had obviously jammed its snout to the bottom of the cup to get the last drops of sweet liquid, and now it was stuck. Scampering frantically left and right, the skunk shook its head violently back and forth in a fruitless attempt to dislodge the cup.
Timidly, the man circled the animal—clearly at the crossroads of whether to be the hero of the helpless or a victim of the clueless. Eventually, an animal-control officer arrived and safely removed the soda cup from the poor animal's head. But the image of the man and the skunk was burned into my memory.
Far too many people today feel helpless and clueless when it comes to getting their next job. And too often they act just like the skunk. They focus on what they believe is a “sweet” opportunity without considering the fit. And just like the skunk, they find themselves stuck. They're in the wrong environment; the culture is not a fit. They're working for the wrong boss, who is never going to champion them to gain the learning experiences that will expand their skill set. And all they can do is shake their head back and forth, wondering how they can get out of this mess.
How can I get a new job? What's it going to take? What should my resume say? How do I go about this process? People at the earliest stages of their career are not the only ones asking these questions. I hear them from people at all levels, even those who have two or three decades of professional experience.
Their stories of frustration and confusion are similar. I can't help but have empathy. But honestly, in the back of my mind I'm thinking something is terribly wrong here—unfortunately, with them. Their entire approach is just plain wrong.
In my thirty-five years of professional life, including the last decade as CEO of a public company, I have been continuously shocked by the naiveté of people when it comes to their career. From the supposed most sophisticated to the least experienced, from Fortune 500 board members and seasoned executives to college seniors, people are confounded by how to find their next “gig.” Not knowing what to do, they resort to the old standby: “Let me send you my resume,” which has become as meaningless a cliché as “Let's do lunch.” When you say it, you know you're never going to have lunch. The same goes for your offer to email your resume. Unless someone genuinely wants to hear from you, your resume isn't going anywhere.
That's why you need to lose the resume to land the right job. Yes, you still need to have a resume, but don't expect it to be more than a calling card, a conversation opener. Unfortunately, people think their resume accounts for 90 percent of getting a new job, when actually it's only 10 percent. No wonder sending out resumes isn't getting people where they want or need to go!
“Let me send you my resume” has become as meaningless a cliché as “Let's do lunch.”
While it's true that almost anyone with a decent education and some experience can get a job, finding the right job is not easy. In fact, it has never been harder. Forget unemployment rates that might not seem so bad these days; most unemployment figures mask the fact that the combination of technology and a merciless global economy has made it almost impossible to find work that offers the compensation we want or purpose we need. In survey after survey, it's the same complaints: Wage growth isn't happening, motivation is down, and job stability is vanishing. Here's a ridiculous stat: Half of U.S. workers have a pay rate that fluctuates sharply every month—by almost 30 percent.
Yet the only way out of this trap is to engage in a job-search process that people never expect to be so arduous or so long. If you are like most people, you will start out by making the critical mistake of waiting for opportunities to come to you. Given that an average of 250 resumes are received for every corporate-job opening—the first 200 typically land just seconds after the job is posted—this approach is patently passive and illogical. And when you fail to gain any traction, you tend to send out more resumes. You feel stuck—like a victim.
As time goes on, you begin to doubt yourself. If you lose heart, desperation sets in. Soon you'll lose all perspective about yourself and where you want to work. You take any job rather than languish in a position you don't like anymore. Or you quit before getting another job—and that's the number-one mistake to avoid, because you need to have a job to get a job. When you're “marketing yourself,” you must eliminate every red flag that could sink your career.
People think their resume accounts for 90 percent of getting a new job, when actually it's only 10 percent.
This is the kind of straight talk you're going to get in this book, so that you're no longer at the mercy of the odds that obviously are not in your favor. To break this cycle, you need to change your strategy, to shift to a more active and calculated approach.
The analogy I use is surfing, which exemplifies my life philosophy. Everyone, I believe, gets a number of “waves” in life—some enormous, some much smaller. The trick is to know when and how hard to paddle when your wave appears, how to position yourself for success—when to bail before the wave crashes on you, and when to ride all the way to shore. One thing is certain: You never look down. Look up, look forward, take flight. This book is about creating more waves for yourself, creating the opportunities that will expand your learning, connect with your purpose, and bring more meaning to what you do.
This approach requires action and hard work. You have to understand who you are, your strengths and weaknesses, your purpose, and what motivates you. You need to know the kind of environment you thrive in, even the type of boss you work best with. You must have a plan that targets where you want to work, and you have to network to make the strategic connections that will help you get to those employers. Most important, the effort and details must be at a level that makes all your past job searches seem like sixth-grade homework. For example, “investigating” a company's culture doesn't mean just checking out a company review site. It may require finding and listening to recordings of the earnings calls that public companies make every quarter. Indeed, the detail that's needed is almost always what people skip over.
Fortunately, you have help. At Korn Ferry, we have shown 8 million executives how to achieve their career goals. As the world's largest executive recruiter, we place one professional in a job every three minutes. While we've been known for executive search for more than fifty years, our company today is much broader: We are the leader in talent development and organizational development. More than half of our business involves developing executives and professionals and advising the world's leading companies on their organizational strategy. (Full disclosure: Korn Ferry also offers individuals looking for work a new tool called KFAdvance.com to guide the process. But even our coaches will tell you that you still have to do the hard work.)
The research behind recruiting, hiring, and retention is fascinating. Our company houses its own “Institute,” with PhDs from the world's top universities. The assessment tests they've developed boggle the mind with their ability to accurately forecast anyone's future management behavior. This expertise—along with that from myself and nearly 8,000 Korn Ferry colleagues around the globe—is brought to bear in these pages and distilled into simplified exercises and assessments that can help you.
You'll have access to insights and tools that until now were available only to senior executives. And we'll clue you in to exactly what recruiters are thinking when someone becomes a job opening's 100th candidate to talk about being a “team player,” instead of demonstrating an understanding of how to collaborate.
With this encyclopedic knowledge and your newly efficient approach, you'll see the odds moving in your favor. It's like Moneyball, the best-selling book and Brad Pitt movie, which describes the radical approach the Oakland A's took to build a winning baseball team. Instead of fielding high-priced superstar talent, they made strategic choices that radically increased their chances of winning. Consider this your Moneyball playbook. Step by step, you'll learn what can meaningfully improve the chance that you'll win.
Lose the Resume, Land the Job is organized into three parts. The first is about knowing yourself—your strengths and weaknesses, motivation, behavior, and personality traits. We'll get you there with a series of personality tests developed from our world-class IP (intellectual property) that, trust me, you can't outsmart. The tests may reveal traits you didn't know you had—and recruiters definitely will discover.
Then we'll show you how to match those skills with the specific companies that need them, instead of wasting time with those that don't. For this, you'll be doing detective work into companies and their HR teams that you never thought possible. Finally, you'll learn how to present your story through, yes, your now expertly crafted resume, your carefully manicured online and social-media presence, and the all-important face-to-face (or Skype) interview. When the job offer comes, we'll give you insight into what companies are thinking about in terms of both money and nonmonetary issues.
Ultimately, you'll need to face the fact that job hunting in the twenty-first century requires a focus and dedication you didn't know you had.
Job hunting in the twenty-first century requires a focus and dedication you didn't know you had.
Does any of this sound like something you're willing to do? If so, then by the end of this book, you will have far more in your job-search arsenal than just your resume. You'll have a holistic approach grounded in who you are, where you can be most successful, and the story you tell to forge a connection with a prospective employer. And that's so much more empowering than merely getting your next job. It's the key to your future success.
The Blunt Truth
Getting a Clue
When Passion and Purpose Go Missing
The Boss Problem
The Tale of Startup Zach
The Wrong Reasons to Look for Work
The Right Reasons to Look
“I'm getting a new job.” You've been telling your family and friends this so many times they're ready to run away when you say it again. Reminders are on hand-scrawled notes on the refrigerator and clutter your iPhone calendar. What drove you to make this move has ranged over the years, but pick one: Your boss is a nightmare; your company is posting losses; you don't feel appreciated. Or on a more positive note, you know you've done amazing work and deserve a fantastic opportunity—the kind that Jane, your cheery neighbor, just got with seemingly half your effort. The thoughts won't leave your head: I'm going to get a new job. Today! I'm not kidding.
That means it's time to look in the bathroom mirror, splash some cold water on your face, and ask yourself:
Now what?
There is an entire industry that will give you a simple, pat answer: Polish that resume and start searching online. You've no doubt seen these firms. Out of virtually nowhere has sprung a resume-writing sector that numbers 4,000 to 6,000 companies in the United States alone. While most are one-person operations, the biggest names have become corporate giants with their own apps and email reminders. These firms will tell you they employ the best artificial intelligence known to human-kind to make sure no job opening escapes your notice, and that every line in your resume is just what the HR department wants. The message through these rose-colored glasses is universal: A few clicks (and perhaps a small fee) and it's off to the job interviews!
If you're only sending out your resume, you're not going to get hired.
All of this, of course, ignores the realities of how difficult job hunting has become. The change has nothing to do with macroeconomic factors such as artificial intelligence or advanced robotics. Rather, the job-search process has changed radically. Going back thirty or forty years, it was simple. You looked in the help-wanted ads of your local newspaper and searched for an opening that matched your skill set. The job market was largely restricted to a certain city or region, and the candidates you competed against were local to that region. The world wasn't as specialized as it is today. You wrote a letter or made a phone call, and if the employer liked you, the job was yours. It wasn't unheard of back then to get a job in a day, especially in a small city.
The process today, of course, is far broader and a lot more democratic. Thanks to the Internet and career sites such as the omnipresent LinkedIn, job postings are easy to find. As a matter of routine, nearly every global organization also posts its job opportunities on its own career pages to cast as wide a net as possible. What sounds like good news, though, is actually the problem. The floodgates are so open now that anyone can apply for a job anywhere, even if that person is not remotely qualified. And many people do apply blindly, burying the hopes of the truly qualified.
Sure, you can improve your odds by including keywords on your resume or in your LinkedIn profile that search engines will pick up, but it's still absurdly hard for even great candidates to stand out in this sea of eager beavers. The whole process has become sad. People put enormous care into writing their resumes—right down to using the preferred Times New Roman font—only to have them go nowhere when they're submitted online or emailed.
Over the past several years I've received thousands of resumes, unsolicited and from people I don't know. And guess what: They rarely go anywhere. Most of the time, I don't even open the document. That might strike you as harsh or even unfair, but here's what I know about many other CEOs and senior executives: They're not opening your resume either.
This brings me back to our core advice to “lose the resume”—figuratively speaking. Of course, you need to have a resume. But you should keep your resume in perspective. Your resume alone won't land the next job for you, and it certainly won't advance your career along the trajectory that will get you where you truly want to go.
Simply sending out resumes blindly means you've already lost!
In fact, if you just send out resumes, you have already lost! Consider these statistics: Of the 250 resumes going out for every corporate job, the initial screening typically eliminates 98 percent of job seekers, and only 2 percent will even get an interview. These numbers don't make it into most resume-writing guides. Then again, this isn't meant to be another one of those books. This book serves a different purpose: to enlighten you about the rules of engagement—how to think, act, present yourself, and tell your unique story—so that you can win.
Make no mistake: Getting a job is the ultimate contest between you and every other candidate. Your mindset needs to be that of a true competitor. Ex-NBA star Allen Iverson said in his Hall of Fame induction speech that, as he learned in sports, “If it's me or you, it's me.” If your mindset is anything less, you're not going to achieve your goals. To win, you need a sense of urgency. Once you commit to making a career move, you must put yourself on a deadline. Act as if your job is going to be eliminated in six months! Suddenly, your whole mindset changes. You vow to take control of your professional destiny before it's too late. You have to act quickly, because another unspoken truth is this: It's better to have a job when you're looking for a new one. You become single-minded in your pursuit of the next opportunity. This includes, as you'll soon see, doing the hard work of looking within to assess your strengths and weaknesses, what motivates you, where you fit in, and the contributions you can make to your next employer.
I have to tell you that as a CEO, I always find that the candidates who show a great willpower and drive to land a job—and who avoid the inertia of searching lamely—are the ones who make great employees. Frankly, I would never want to hire someone who views work as just a job. I'm looking for people who equate work with meaning, with purpose—their life goals and destination. These are the 20 percent of people who account for 80 percent of what the organization accomplishes. They aren't going through the motions of what's required. They are invariably “all in,” because they equate their job with purpose.
What you've done is not what counts. Who you are and what you will do for them matter most.
So before you even think of your resume, you must first be introspective. That starts with knowing what you want and why you want it—what inspires and motivates you—and knowing which type of environment and culture will enable you to thrive.
Most people, however, have no idea what they really want or where they'd be best suited. On top of that, they lie—all the time and especially to themselves. Needless to say, this is not a winning combination.
Can you fool companies into thinking you have passion when you don't? Sure, you can try, but some of the greatest research minds have dedicated their lives to perfecting tests that sniff out liars and force candid self-assessments. In one of the bigger breakthroughs in this field, a 2010 University of Barcelona study found that asking people to rank statements instead of grade them brought out the truth. At Korn Ferry, we believe in the “forced-choice” theory of testing. But the bottom line is you will find it easier and a lot more rewarding to reclaim your own passion instead of trying to game the system.
Without a handle on your strengths and accomplishments, as well as an understanding of your blind spots, your weaknesses, and where you need to develop, you will lack clarity in the job search. The heart of the process is finding meaning—your passion and purpose. Far more than the proverbial “following your bliss,” passion and purpose ignite performance! This is an unbeatable combination—the motivation and inspiration that drives you to achieve.
I say all this because if you haven't been in the job market lately, you are in for a shock at how rigorously companies try to find truly motivated candidates—and sniff out the punch-the-clockers. I hear comments all the time about the hours upon hours of interviews and assessments companies now put people through. And then all the “I Spy” background checks, reference calls, and social-media snooping.
But these candidates don't realize just how much pressure companies are under to perform in today's business climate—and how critical good hiring has become. Slow-performing companies can be crushed by competitors that are able to use technology to scale up quickly, or eaten alive by activist investors whose aggressiveness and clout would have been unheard of just a decade ago. In this kind of world, there is no room to miss out on star hires and be stuck with the dregs because of a lousy hiring system.
You need to get in touch with what gets you up and excited at four o'clock in the morning without the alarm.
Our research finds that the cost of replacing a manager six to twelve months after he or she is hired is equal to 2.3 times the person's annual salary. For a senior executive, the replacement cost can well exceed $1 million. More important, companies know that the profits Wall Street wants to see each quarter are largely the product of what we like to call “discretionary energy,” basically the extra work and innovation only the most eager employees bring. You hear top executives say it all the time: If they can consistently stiff-arm the drifters and draft the dream team, the company is golden.
So trust me, any organization worth its name has a pretty good chance of finding out if you're a passionless dud—if that's who you are. And it won't matter if you have an amazing pedigree. The good news, however, is that there is passion in all of us, even if your last job squashed it.
My passion is being part of an organization that is transforming an industry. We are creating the new and the different as a people- and organizational-advisory firm. I get out of bed in the morning (before my alarm clock goes off) thinking about what we can do next to achieve our purpose.
In the same way, you need to get in touch with what gets you up and excited at four o'clock in the morning without the alarm. And don't think Millennials are the only ones motivated by purpose. As I've found in my interactions with people at all levels of organizations (including the one I lead), most desire meaning in what they do. Our research backs this up. In a recent survey of professionals by Korn Ferry, nearly three-quarters (73 percent) cited “work that has purpose and meaning” as their primary driver. When purpose is your motivator, it becomes authentic and tangible in the story you tell about your career thus far, and where you're headed.
Smart companies that have purpose aren't afraid to pound their chest about it and seek only truly purpose-driven employees. (And by the way, be suspicious of those companies that say they have purpose but don't seem to be following through.) The CEO of a large industrial company made this same point as we discussed talent. In on-campus recruiting, on the company's career website, and in every interview for positions at every level, the core message is purpose. This company does not see itself as only manufacturing complex industrial equipment. It sees itself as literally and authentically changing the world by tackling some of the most pressing problems on the planet, from access to electricity to global climate change. If a job applicant doesn't have a genuine passion for the company's overarching purpose, then that person isn't a fit for the culture—no matter how good the person's technical skills are.
Purpose. Passion. These are two pretty big P words, and realizing how critical they are in today's “lose the resume” job-hunting era means doing a gut check on your own level of passion. Without strong doses of passion and purpose, it is nearly impossible to be a positive outlier. Performance is mediocre, at best. People without passion and purpose are the inverse of the top performers. They are the 80 percent who accomplish 20 percent. They don't take enough time to figure out what really satisfies them. When they do manage to get a new job, it usually is one they don't like much better than the one they had before. It's a paycheck, they tell themselves. They're bored and apathetic.
Do you have any of the symptoms of a passionless career (page 29)? There are, of course, other symptoms. Perhaps one of the more serious ones is bad health. It's true that people devoted to work may eat more junk food, sleep less, and miss the post-work trip to the gym. But aren't they typically the ones who find the time to recoup? Maybe they're up before the crack of dawn—no snooze alarms here!—to get in those five miles and prepare organic chicken salad for lunch. Putting it bluntly, they have the will to live well, and that passion follows them throughout their day.
You must have a genuine passion for your employer's overarching purpose. If not, you'll be only a worker.
Whatever the symptoms, a passionless career can lead you into the temptation of quitting. If it does, don't! Job gaps and career interruptions are major red flags for employers. Stay where you are and don't jump at the first thing to come along. If you do, you'll be mired in those same ten symptoms within six months!
If you want to jump ship because of a bad boss, don't do it. Let's face it, about 50 percent of people have trouble with their bosses. It's so common that in my business we say people don't leave companies; they leave bosses. The frequent complaints include: The boss doesn't give feedback, doesn't recognize people for what they do, bases promotions more on personality than performance, and so on. All these may be well founded, but here's some advice I like to give: Having a bad boss can actually be a valuable learning experience. In fact, it is the best way to learn what not to do and how not to act