Building Your Skills Arsenaland exactly how they can make a positive impact on whatever
organization you’re applying to. Unlike Marie you won’tdo the
following:
- Think your résumé will speak foryou.
- Speak in generalities and expect the interviewer to “con-
nect the dots” for you.
No wonder. Marie kept getting turned down for jobs in spite
of her friendly and businesslike demeanor. Employers want proof
of your abilities! The reality is that, before an employer pays
Marie over $100,000 per year to act as his or her sales director,
the employer will want to have some specific examples of where
and how Marie had used those skills to produce positive results
for another company. Marie cannot expect her résumé to “do the
talking” for her. Instead, she has to learn to clearly and succinct-
ly verbalize those results.
In the next two chapters you will learn how you
can easily avoid the pitfall of sounding too vague
simply by knowing your skills and knowing how
to communicate them with confidence.
Let’s move on to the good stuff!Assessing Your Skills
Taking an inventory of your skills is the beginning of being suc-
cessful in any job interview. Ninety percent of employers say that
the primary reason they do not hire a candidate is because the
interviewee could not clearly state his or her skills.Read that last sen-
tence again. That doesn’t mean they didn’t havethe skills neces-
sary to do the job. It means that they could not verbally statethose
skills in a convincing way.
When you’ve finished the exercises in the next two chapters,
you’ll have built the foundation for an enormous constellation of
personal skills and accomplishments that I call your “skills arse-
nal.” In this chapter, we’ll take an inventory of your skills. What