I was scrolling through my LinkedIn feed earlier and came across a post that stated something along the lines of “your resume clearly states what you offer.” This statement made my brain skip because it’s just completely wrong. No resume in the world can state who a person is, what they’ve done or conveyed what they can do. No resume clearly states anything other than name and highly editorialized experience list.
What a resume should do is get a person through Phase 1 of a decision-making process. It should answer the question: Is this person worth finding out more about? If yes, the person would pass to Phase 2 of the decision-making process.
Decision-making starts and ends with understanding how to filter variables and assign importance to which actually matter to success. Filtering is critical whether choosing a vendor, hiring a new employee, picking an operational path, approving a project for go/no go, or planning a governance process. You cannot build a final decision model while factoring in all unique and independent variables. The list must be winnowed in steps without going back and questioning each time.
Indecision has led to as many bad outcomes as simply picking the wrong answer. At least when you have one selected direction, even if it turned out to be suboptimal, the team can march forward and do their best to improve as they go. Making no decision or changing midstream leaves no opportunity for incremental improvement as more information comes in.
Filtering from a long list of variables and options to start means balancing not removing good options too early while also not keeping bad options throughout. It’s important to understand what really matters because more than a few decision making processes failed because they ruled the best option out in the first filter.