Whatever the job advertisement says, I find that what managers really need and (if they’re good at their job) will hire for comes down to three things:
- Technical Competence: In other words, can the candidate execute on the position’s main task and produce results? The results can be anything from balanced budgets to a million social media followers to five academic papers a year. Incompetence at producing necessary results rarely ends well.
- Communication: Results might as well not exist if they aren’t successfully communicated. In these days of high complexity and teamwork, positive results are also hard to create without effective communication.
- Playing Well With Others: A capacity for effective teamwork is vital. Even if you can communicate well and produce results, going around constantly irritating and angering your co-workers is a problem. Churning up organizational strife can easily degrade the performance of the overall team, thereby negating the value of a cantankerous star employee. This is a situation I sometimes describe as “going negative.”
I have seen people fired or laid off for failings in all three areas, though violations of number three seem most frequent. It’s always a challenge to probe for these qualities in the recruiting and interview process. The resume is primary when it comes to establishing technical competence. Of course, people can write whatever they want, so don’t be offended if a prospective employer presents you with some sort of test or problem to work through during the recruitment process so that she can gauge your technical ability. Communication also starts with the resume and becomes more heavily evaluated during the interviews. Finally, teamwork skills are very challenging to evaluate. Really-on-the-ball employers might arrange a test teamwork scenario to probe your abilities, though most will rely on what you tell them and their gut feeling. So, calling out teamwork accomplishments on your resume and going into an interview with a few anecdotes about how you get along with others and build bridges will help your cause.
The above is an excerpt from The Effective Resume: A Concise Guide to Compelling STEM Resume Construction and CV Conversion, an ebook dedicated to helping you communicate your abilities successfully.