SoFi Blog

As a career counselor and career coach, one of the most common questions I hear from clients is how to improve a resume.  While there are plenty of tips and best practices out there, I find that a lot of job seekers get tripped up from hearing too much advice about what to include, how to format things, etc.  Clients often say to me, “Someone told me to do this, but someone else told me to do that – which one should I do?”

It’s a fair question, but it’s one that always raises a red flag for me.  Why?  Because I don’t think job candidates should spend excessive time and effort on their resumes.  And that’s exactly what all this well-meaning advice causes them to do.

Want to know the secret to an effective job search?  Here it is: There is no secret – at least not one that works for everybody.

Are there best practices?  Absolutely, and you probably already know most of them.  Are there wrong ways to go about it?  Yes, and they’re pretty obvious, too.  But if anyone tells you that the secret to getting a job is “doing X to your resume” or “doing Y with your LinkedIn account,” they’re missing a critical point – which is that every candidate is different and therefore needs to take a different approach.

To get ahead in your career, technical expertise is a must-have.  But many experts agree that it’s a mastery of the less tangible qualities – things like leadership, communication and interpersonal skills – that differentiates the great from the good.  You can have advanced degrees, experience and IQ in spades, but if you don’t develop your EQ and other non-technical competencies, your career prospects will likely be limited.

Holiday downtime is a great opportunity to start planning your career strategy for the new year.  In a recent guest post I wrote for The Daily Muse, I shared one of my favorite tips for people who want to be on an executive career path: build a “career advisory board.”  To learn more about it and how to create your own board, read on . . .

Every year around this time, I notice a slowdown in the number of phone calls I get from job candidates.  Some of it has to do with people taking time to relax and enjoy the holidays, but I think it’s also due to the myth that December is a bad month to find a new job.  Many candidates simply take a whole month off from their search because they assume that employers are doing the same on their end.