The Importance of Being Both Generic, and Specific
Being generic is something that many people fear in life. And choosing a career path also fits into that category of fear, so combining the two is not a fun aspect for some. When choosing a career path, it’s important to choose something you are passionate about and will enjoy doing, but also important to choose a path that has some specificity. But of course, you cannot be TOO specific either, as that is going to limit your job options down the road.
Using myself as an example, throughout my internship, I have learned that I want to be working in the athletic communications field, which can mean a lot of different things, which are mostly behind the scenes aspects of a sports broadcast or how a sports team is run on the public relations/journalism side of things. It’s a field that has a lot of things that interest me, while it also does not tie me down to one specific field. I initially wanted to go into sports journalism, and to mainly go into writing about baseball, but obviously that narrows down my job options tremendously.
But often times there are areas where as a job applicant, you need to be somewhat generic. Illana Gershon in her book Down and Out in the New Economy, writes about this, saying, “In general, to be hired, job applicants have to be reasonably competent at a range of genres. They have to fill out online job applications correctly, have a presentable resume, create a LinkedIn profile that recruiters will find by searching keywords, and so on,” (Gershon 67). This shows that being generic in your active job search is not necessarily bad. You have to be generic in some ways to pass through the initial filter of an employer searching for a new hire. The key is to stick out from the crowd after.
Gershon continues to discuss the issue of being too generic with the use of a LinkedIn page and a resume, saying, “While resumes can be tailored, it is hard to use the same strategies for a LinkedIn profile,” Gershon continues, “LinkedIn profiles, because of how general they are, must be written to be as general as possible — to allow you to connect with as many jobs as possible,” (Gershon 71). She mentions this, I believe, to show how important it is to have both of these documents. A resume, as she says on page 70, is only supposed to put down jobs that are related to the job that is being applied for, simply because people today have had too many jobs to put down. This is something that I agree with. If I’m applying to work for a company like ESPN, why would they want to know I worked at Panera Bread for six months? So, the point here is that resumes are your chance to be a little more specific, and possibly to stand out more from the generic crowd.
The issue, as Gershon alludes to, is that hiring managers may often compare your resume with your LinkedIn profile and not like the discontinuity between the two (Gershon 71–72). In my opinion, the LinkedIn profile should be more generic, as it is supposed to help you make connections with as many professionals possible. The resume is where you can pick and choose what aspects about you make you a good fit for the specific job.
I think traits that are often mentioned on a LinkedIn profile or on a resume are ones like “a good team player” or “efficient in Microsoft Word.” And while these are skills that are good to have, they are skills that are assumed you have already, and putting them on a resume is just a waste of space it would seem at this point.
In order to accentuate one’s strengths, the key is to get your foot in the door with a company that is hiring. Gershon says, “I always found the people I was talking to much more interesting and unpredictable than any of their LinkedIn profiles or resumes might suggest,” (Gershon 75). While this sounds like she is playing down the importance of these tools, I think she is more highlighting how important it is to make a strong impression in an interview for example. The tools that get you the interview are going to be generic by nature, but the interview is where you have to show your real strengths.
As far as improving weaknesses, the first step to doing that is being open on what you are not good at, much like we did in class a couple of weeks ago. Being open about what you need to improve on will allow you to work on improving those skills and becoming a better job applicant.
There is definitely a fine line between being too generic and being too specific. As students preparing to enter the job field, we have to fine the area where we are being general enough, while also being specific, whether that is with our LinkedIn profiles, resumes, or the career path we intend on going down. All of these helps make a strong applicant, and will hopefully lead to the job we want in the future.
