Your Unique Expertise

Occasionally, I'll meet with an experienced professional who is hesitant about including some of their prior experience on their resume or talking about it in an interview. This could be experience from a prior career in a different industry, maybe something they did 5 to 10 years ago, or a small business that they run outside of their full-time career. I can appreciate the concern of including things that on the surface may not seem relevant to an employer. However, I firmly believe that your unique professional experience is what makes you stand out from the crowd.

Let's think for a moment on how we can view many of the different lenses of diversity or intersectionality. On the surface, people tend to focus on things like race, ethnicity, geographic location. However, bringing in a diverse set of backgrounds and perspectives also happens when you include people with different educational backgrounds, different certifications and licensure, different industry experience, and skill sets. All of these things factor together when assessing you as a potential candidate. Even if there are other candidates that may have the same educational experience or certification that you do, they haven't had the same roles that you've had or the same accomplishments within those roles. 

With each job that you've had in the past there are three separate ways of looking at the role that you perform. There's the job description that was posted (which is often not complete). There's the actual job description which is a realistic view of the stated responsibilities against where the time is actually spent. And finally, there is you doing that specific job. Each of those things is very different. The job description is just one component of the professional experience and I cringe anytime I see a client using a verbatim job description as their work experience. 

As a hiring manager or a recruiter, I want to know not only what the job was, but what you did that was unique to that job. Candidates being able to articulate their unique expertise is the most important part of the interview experience. Let’s say you have held the title of coordinator or manager, what was different about you as a manager and how did you make it unique? Your prior experience, your skills, your background, and all those things that you might have been hesitant about including, make you a different candidate than someone else who may have the same title even in the same organization.

So the next time you consider dismissing some of that unrelated work history, I would challenge you to ask the question, is that experience so unrelated that it doesn’t inform how you act as a professional? Are some of the skills or knowledge that you learned in those ‘irrelevant roles’ being used in your current role. Chances are, the way you show up for your teams, customers, leadership has been shaved and influenced from some of those prior experiences. Perhaps you’ll find that your prior experience isn’t so irrelevant after all.