I still remember my shock when a fellow panelist at a conference years ago told audience members that his biggest advice to get a job was to lie on your resume and in the interviews.
Coming off a decade in which there had been notable instances of people getting fired for having fabricated experiences on their resumes, the ethics couldn’t have been clearer from my perspective.
A decade later, in an era where AI tools are helping people fine tune their resumes to match the skills and credentials asked for in job descriptions, if that’s one bright line in the sand that you still shouldn’t cross, how do you navigate the delicate balance between self-promotion and humility as you’re seeking to get a job?
One thing I’ve learned from my colleague Bob Moesta, co-founder of the Jobs to Be Done theory and a serial innovator and entrepreneur, is that when you’re developing a product or company, it’s not enough to know what you want it to do.
You also need to know what it’s going to “suck at doing.”
That’s true with individuals as well.
Although one of the most popular job interview questions is “What is your greatest weakness?”, most people answer it with a nod to their strengths. As in, “My greatest weakness is that I work too hard!”
A better approach is to take a page from product development and not just figure out what your assets are but also what you’re bad at doing and don’t want to do. Don’t be afraid to share those insights rather than wait to be asked.
That not only helps you avoid landing a job that’s going to be a bad fit—where you are bored, disgruntled, disengaged, or doing a poor job—but it also sets you up as someone honest and a straight shooter.
For example, Bob is dyslexic. Landing jobs where he was expected to write in his early career was a recipe for disaster.
And yet, today, he’s authored several books (including two with me—and one about getting your next job called Job Moves).
How? Bob assembles a team where he can lean into what he’s good at doing—conducting research, building and testing processes, generating insights, recognizing patterns that few others can see because he’s dyslexic—and let folks like me take care of the writing.
Recognizing that reality doesn’t force Bob to do something he isn’t good at and that drains his energy, but instead allows the team around him to leverage the things he’s great at doing.
This sort of honesty is something companies should appreciate. As Peter Drucker observed in The Effective Executive, organizations often fixate on finding individuals who lack significant weaknesses. But what they should do is look for people with outstanding strengths—and then build teams around them to accentuate the strengths and offset the weaknesses.
Creating this kind of honesty will solve a problem I see far too frequently in hiring. One person I coached got to the final round of the interview process for a project manager role at a tech startup—only for the company to then discover that she didn’t have the technical chops for the role. That should have been clear up front to all involved.
A second insight from our research in Job Moves is that for established roles, you should go into your interviews already knowing what the day-to-day and week-to-week of the job would be like—and how it maps on to what you do and don’t like doing.
This isn’t about memorizing the job description—largely a meaningless hodgepodge of skills, qualifications, and platitudes about work style and culture cribbed from past job descriptions and competitors’ postings.
This is more about actually understanding what people do in the job. Not what the title is, but what are the actual tasks? How does this person actually work with others? What is the culture?
And the way you can learn about that is by having informational interviews with people who already have the role you want—and literally asking them how their day-to-day and week-to-week maps on to the things you want to be doing and the type of work that drives and drains your energy.
By doing that, when you get into the interview, you can share your story and explain with real substance how your experiences and assets map onto the work that needs to be done. And you can be honest about where there will be tradeoffs—for you or the employer—so you can start to craft the job with more intentionality.
Both of these ideas take some real work up front—of learning about yourself and learning about the work of others. But it’s work worth doing so you can lead authentically as you seek not just to land a job but also find one that will be a great fit for you and your future employer.
This piece was originally published on Forbes here.
