What Do You know about Rugby and Lessons Learned About Assuming What People Know
This morning, as I was daydreaming between cups of coffee, I stumbled across a wikipedia entry on rugby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_football). Wow! Did you know that there are two different kinds of rugby – with different numbers of players and different rules – who knew? As I have a wont to do, I started reading and it turns out that rugby is as confusing to understand as cricket (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket).
It was right about coffee number 3, or was it 4, that I had an epiphany – I do that quite frequently. Things with which we are unfamiliar are confusing. I realize that to some of you this may seem like common sense, but I began to think about that fact that while I am considered by some to be an expert in my field I often make assumptions that others should find the things I tell them to do to be obvious, but maybe they are only obvious to me because of my background – but may not be so obvious to my clients. So I have compiled a short list of some common areas of misunderstanding within the job search industry.
- A plain text resume – is a resume with the formatting stripped out so when it is loaded into a resume tracking system such as those run by job boards it doesn’t get all jumbled and garbled.
- Taleo is a human capital management system that is used by larger companies to manage their open positions and applicants.
- Personality profiling is used to help match candidate “archetypes” to common characteristics perceived to be necessary for certain job types, in other words – sales people tend to have certain traits and engineers tend to have other traits and never the twain shall meet.
- 360-degree feedback is a type of review where individuals are rated by their peers and subordinates in addition to their management in an effort to help balance performance measurement.
- The difference between a resume and CV – CV or curriculum vitae, tends to be more common in the EU – they tend to be longer and contain more personal details which would be out of the norm in the US. They also tend to be more common within roles such as medicine, law or academia.
These are just some common things I know about just as part of doing my day-to-day job that may not be quite as well known to those of you in other fields. Any others? Feel free to ping me and I will explain them in a future entry.
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This blog's author, Debra Wheatman of Careers Done Write, provides executive career services including resume and cover letter preparation, job search / interviewing strategies and professional branding including how to effectively use LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media in your career.
Visit CareersDoneWrite.com to learn more about how we can put your career in gear with interview catching resumes and professionally written career documents.