The 7 deadly sins of job hunting

4. Skipping an inventory of your skills
Having a full inventory of your marketable skills can make or break a job opportunity. Here’s an example: Mary, a nurse from Tufts Medical Center in Boston, wants to follow her husband to another part of the country. They don’t want to move before she finds a job there. Mary was an OR nurse, but she also helps with collecting and organizing data for a daily business dashboard. When she tells me that she has had a few interviews but hasn’t been able to secure a job yet, I ask her for the inventory of her marketable skills. Mary hadn’t done this list. When she goes through the exercise of listing an inventory of her marketable skills, she lists the work from the daily business dashboard project—collecting and organizing the data in a nice database. The next day, Mary flies out to interview for a nursing position, and her interview goes just like all the others—until the end. The interviewer asks if Mary has anything else to add. Mary remembers the list and mentions the daily business dashboard project. The interviewer almost jumps from his seat. Because of that “minor” expertise, Mary was offered the job in a few short days. Her success came only days after we did her Inventory of Marketable Skills.

5. Neglecting to investigate