Top Resume Mistake: Using Skills Bar Charts

 

If you have been looking recently to update your resume, you have probably come across numerous resume templates, all looking more modern, vibrant, beautiful and colorful than the next. These highly trendy visual, sometimes even infographic looking, resume templates became mainstream when graphic designers started creating these templates, seeing some people taking interest in giving their resumes a visual spin and making them look as good as a magazine ad.

These templates are for sure more and more popular, but are they worth all the hype? Are they worth spending a few bucks on? Are they even worth using? The short answer is that in most situations and for the vast majority of people, you should just stay away from these trendy design inspired templates.

Trend Alert: Skills Bar Charts

One thing these advertising worthy resume templates usually have in common is that they often use skills bar charts, sometimes called skills progression or progress charts or graphs. The following examples of resume templates, taken from Microsoft Office Word’s online resume templates, showcase these skills charts.

Often, you will see these skills charts displayed with a scale of small colored circles or sometimes they will take the shape of pie charts. It looks good. But is it any good? No.

It is important to communicate in your resume which skills you possess that are related to the job position that interests you, both soft skills and hard skills. And it is also highly important to communicate your strengths in regard to these skills so that a future employer can have an understanding of how you will perform down the road if they hire you. They need to have a clear picture of your skills and their levels… but colored dots in a row does not paint that clear picture, it only brings confusion, meaninglessness and superficiality.

These self-rating scales on your resume showcase not your skills, but instead can highlight inaccuracies and biases. Not exactly what you want to communicate to an employer.

Poor Self-Assessment

For most people, self-evaluating their own performance, competences and skills is flawed and inaccurate, because it is simply a highly difficult thing to do in an objective manner. How objective can one really be about themselves? More often than not, someone's perception of their abilities and performance is far removed from reality. Most people simply don't have an accurate vision of themselves.

And in the event where someone would have the ability to objectively and accurately rate themselves, how could an employer know this or in any case trust this self-rating information on their resume to be precise and reliable? A lot, if not most people would tend to increase their self-evaluation in order to make themselves look good, to stand out and to not miss out on the chance of securing a great job. Employers and their HR recruitment staff are no fools. They see right through this.

Rating Scales and Criteria

As shown in the examples above, these skills bar charts usually use percentages in lieu of a scale; so you essentially end up rating yourself on 100 percent or on 10. For instance, one could write that they rate themselves an 8 out of 10 for their leadership skills, or 80 percent.

Even if the rating was accurate, part of the issue with using scales is that they do not measure behaviors nor the impact that your mastery (or lack of mastery) of these skills may have on business. And an employer looking at your skills bar chart will not know your rating criteria.

HR employees usually have a better than average understanding of self-rating scales and their implications. Performance evaluations, an HR activity, are not based on 100 percent or on 10 rating scales; rather they are usually based on a scale of 4 or 5 elements which tend to look like the following.

Each of the point in the rating scale usually comes with a very precise definition with tangible examples of what the rating looks like in terms of how an employee performs for a specific skill. These rating scales allow an employee to self-evaluate or for a manager to evaluate an employee by comparing the employee's behaviors and actions to detailed definitions and examples. These evaluations are not random and they can be measured against a highly detailed scale. Unlike a skills bar chart in a resume, there are criteria to measure and evaluate against.

A skills bar chart will only offer to an HR talent acquisition employee a skewed rating that does not bring valuable or accurate information about a person. Essentially, it does not communicate any reliable information about a candidate that they can use to evaluate your candidacy. 

How to Showcase Your Skills the Right Way

The very first thing you need to do, after you have analyzed the job posting you are interested in and therefore now have a good understanding of, is to identify the most important skills required for the position according to the employer. Notice here that I mentioned according to the employer, and not according to you. The skills showcased in your resume must answer to the needs and wishes of the employer. However, if you have a certain skill that you master and know it would be beneficial to the employer, then by all means, include it as well.

Once you know which skills you will need to focus on, then you will need to show the employer, with specific examples of your accomplishments, how you have successfully applied and used these skills to the benefit of your current or any past employer. Let`s try an example.

A popular desired employee skill amongst employers is communications. Communications can be a lot of things. It can encompass written and verbal communications, it can be external and internal communications, it can also mean listening skills and oral presentation skills. The communications bucket can be quite large, and the same might apply to other skills, whether a soft or a hard skill. So you will need to identify the areas that are important to the employer according to the job description and any other information you have been able to gather about the position.

Let's imagine the following bullet point was part of the job description:

• Craft, copy-edit and proof internal communications as needed.

So here, we understand that you might want to show your experience with various types of internal communications in addition to showing your writing abilities, your great knowledge of the written English language as well as your detailed-oriented and methodical approach.

Using numbers to present your accomplishments is usually a good idea, as people tend to not question numbers and are often times even impressed by these same numbers. Under a specific job of your work history, you could include, depending on the importance of this specific element in the job, one or more bullets showing your accomplishments. Here are some examples of what it might look like:

• Wrote, edited and proofread an average of X internal communications per week, including intranet contents, newsletters and new hire announcements, while consistently respecting deadlines, adapting tone and style to the type of communication.
• Sought-after communications advisor renowned for solid project management abilities and for keeping revisions under strict control and time and effort involvement of contributors to a minimum.
• Actively contributed to the overhaul of the internal communications plan with innovative and creative strategies and tactics which resulted in an increase of employee satisfaction by XX% over a year.

These bullets show an employer, with specific tangible examples, what the candidate has accomplished using these skills, the value the applicant brings to the table and how the business would benefit from having this person on board. If a candidate has done X, Y and Z in the past, they are bound to be able to repeat it for a new employer.

Just remember, the employer and the HR hiring staff are not mind readers. They are just readers of your resume, so you need to be specific and use words, not colored dots to tell the employer about your skills.

Summary

These skills bar charts are pretty. But that's it. Nothing more. And employers don't want pretty. They want employees with solid skills who will be able to get the job done. These graphs are superficial with no real meaning and make anyone using them look just as superficial. It makes the ones who use them look like people who don't use their brain much, who do not stop and think before they do something, like followers who don't question anything. An employer might actually want and like that, but is that how you want to be perceived? Is that what you want for yourself and your career? Will being perceived that way take you where you want to be? Will it bring you the respect, salary and position you want and deserve?

Appearances are very important in work and in job hunting. But pretty graphs won't make you look good, they'll end up making you look bad.