Being responsible, creative and motivated means you aren’t
Your LinkedIn profile is not a beautiful or unique snowflake
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery
If you try to stand out from the crowd by describing yourself as “creative”, “motivated” or “responsible”, you’re actually making yourself look like you lack creativity and aren’t motivated enough to take responsibility for your career by penning a cliché-free LinkedIn Profile.
We make that assertion on the basis that LinkedIn’s annual list of buzzwords in its members’ profiles includes those three terms among the top eight words that members use to describe themselves.
First conducted two years ago, this year’s effort saw the seriously-social network comb through profiles penned by over 187 million members to find the most-used words. Entries in languages other than English were translated and the whole lot poured into a big data melting pot that spat out the following eight terms as the most-used:
- Creative
- Motivated
- Multinational
- Responsible
- Experimental
- Effective
- Specialized
- Analytical
LinkedIn argues that using those words in your profile makes you stand out from the crowd in the worst possible way – as someone who can’t articulate your values in anything other than words devalued by overuse, or lacking qualities that can be accurately described without resorting to blandishments.
There’s at least one piece of evidence out there to suggest employers already see through these words, as those of you who recall our story from early this year about a job ad for ‘mediocre developers’ may recall. ®
COMMENTS
Re: Still capable but lazy :)
The three great virtues of a programmer
Laziness
The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.
Impatience
The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer.
Hubris
Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. The reason why you would write a program that someone else has already written for no other reason than you know you can do it better. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer.
Re: Dear Sirs
At which the applicant will respond "But Mum, I'm on a raid. Can't it wait?"
The solution.
The way to solve this is for everyone to have two resumes: the bullshit cliche one for the HR drones that makes a point of including all of these words even if they don't really fit, and the real one for everyone else.
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