Your average job seeker is passionate, motivated, driven, responsible and creative- maybe also a team-player, or perhaps innovative and dynamic. While all of these things are good attributes for searching out jobs, they have become too common. Every other resume ‘contains at least a couple of these, and hiring managers are well aware of this, perhaps even a little bit bored. The meaning and flavor of words change over time, and these ones all have an extra connotation- laziness.
When you put “motivated” on a resume’, or say it to an interviewer, you are saying “motivated- but not motivated enough to find a better way to say or prove it.” Whoever you are speaking to has spoken to a lot of people that were “motivated”- and some of them turned out to be telling the truth, some of them were not. Point is, the word no longer has any meaning to them. It is kind of like walking in there and saying “I am human!”- you might need to be to get the job, but you don’t really need to tell the hiring manager. If you want to impress a hiring manager you have to tell them something that they don’t already know.
So, how do we do that?
There is an old writer’s adage “show, don’t tell.” This is your compass for dealing with character traits like passion and motivation. But how do you show motivation and passion before you have the job?
There are a number of different ways to do this. First off, references. References are the bread and butter of proving your value as an employee. Think of bosses and managers that you worked really well for, and put their numbers down. It does not matter how disparate the job fields were, you could be applying for an executive position and put down someone who managed you at a coffee shop. What matters is what they have to say about you as an employee- let an old manager say things like motivated and passionate, instead of saying it yourself. This shows that someone thinks those things based on your behavior, instead of the hiring manger just taking you at your word.
If you are in an interview, tell a story. Don’t tell them what qualities you have, tell them a story that shows how motivated or passionate you can be. Having a concrete story that exemplifies the qualities you want to show your hiring manager is a lot more useful and memorable than just making statements. Tell stories about projects that you had to go the extra mile to get done, tell stories about projects you were really passionate about, and let the story do the work.
Consider this list of words like you would a wall of retired jerseys. They were all good, they all had their time, but now we have to hang them up. We need to find new ways to be passionate and motivated, ways that actually show off the fact that we are, or we will be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack.