Your Resume Doesn’t Get a Vote (Competence)
I was working with Apple many years ago when one of its lawyers told me that the best attorneys graduated in the top five percent of their class at Harvard.
He had gone to Harvard himself.
Harvard graduates will occasionally mention this, usually when discussing something completely unrelated, like soup or trigonometry.
His standard was ridiculous.
There are brilliant lawyers who didn’t attend Harvard. There are brilliant lawyers who didn’t finish in the top five percent of anywhere. And presumably there is someone who graduated first in their class at Harvard who shouldn’t operate a toaster.
None of that mattered.
Because if you wanted this particular man to believe you were a great lawyer, and you didn't go to law school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you had a problem.
We don’t think about competency this way.
We think competency belongs to us.
"I have twenty years of experience." "I have this degree." "I’ve worked with these companies." "I’ve won these awards." "I know this industry." "I’ve done this a hundred times."
Organizations do the same thing.
Visit a professional services firm’s website and you’ll find pages devoted to credentials, experience, rankings, awards, case studies, and impressive lists of things they’ve accomplished.
All evidence of competency. Unless the person reading it doesn’t care.
And that’s the uncomfortable part.
Because you don’t get to decide what makes you competent.
The person taking the risk does.
When someone hires you, promotes you, buys from you, follows your advice, or puts something important in your hands, they’re making a bet that you can do what they need you to do.
And people look for very different evidence before making that bet.
One person wants thirty years of experience. Another worries that thirty years means you haven’t learned anything new in twenty.
One wants the largest firm in the market. Another assumes the largest firm will hand their work to the least experienced person in the building.
One wants the gray-haired salesperson who has seen everything. Another wants the twenty-six-year-old who understands what is happening now.
None of them has to be right..or fair...or logical.
That’s what makes competency so difficult.
We spend years accumulating evidence that we believe proves we’re good at something.
Then we walk into a relationship and present that evidence as though everyone agreed on what good looks like.
They don’t.
This happens inside organizations, too.
The employee who believes excellent work should earn a promotion discovers that leadership values cooperation more.
The brilliant technical expert discovers that the next position requires skills that have nothing to do with being brilliant technically.
The person who has spent their career becoming indispensable at one thing discovers that the organization is looking for someone capable of something else.
And everyone has felt this in a personal relationship. We want to be loved for the things we are most proud of giving. But sometimes the other person loves us for something else entirely. And we can become so busy being disappointed that they don’t appreciate the person we think we are that we overlook the person they’re grateful to have.
So before you tell someone how good you are, find out what good means to them.
What would they need to see? What would make them nervous? What would make choosing you feel like a risk? And which of the things you proudly tell people about yourself actually matter to them?
If the relationship is important enough, this may mean presenting a different case for your competency to different people.
Which is why you shouldn’t send the same résumé for every job. Or the same credentials for every proposal. Or give the same pitch to every prospective client.
We tend to think those things are descriptions of us.
They’re not.
They’re arguments for why we are right for them. And different people require different evidence.
That’s not pretending to be something you’re not. It’s understanding that competency isn’t a list of everything you can do.
It’s the evidence that you can do what this person needs you to do in the way they need you to do it.
The Harvard lawyer was wrong.
That didn’t make his standard irrelevant.
It made it his. And if you want him to hire you, his standard matters more than yours.
