What Employers Want – Mel Gibson’s Career Sequel

I speak with many job seekers and I get their perspective on market conditions, on job search methods, on resume writing, on career choices they made. I also spend a lot of time discussing the same with folks in HR, head-hunters, recruiters, hiring managers. If you were to put employer wishes and match them with what employees want, you will end up with a complete disconnect. To the point that the two groups just do not use the same words. It is as if they speak two different languages.

Since this section of the site is dedicated to job seekers, let’s try and answer one simple question: What Employers Want? A movie with Mel Gibson is probably the next thing I will focus on, since he did his part in What Women Want so well. But I digress…

In a nutshell, employers are in the business of making money. Some use a fancy cover-up of being environmentally friendly, some focus on specific minority groups, some do it for the sake of our children, while others cater to the generations to come (if these generations are not here yet, who again are they catering to?). So, in the business of making money they focus on two simple things: increasing profits while reducing expenses. This is the most basic law of business, second only to supply-and-demand principle. Most businesses need employees to produce things (goods or services). As such, employees – from the business perspective – are instruments used to achieving the goal of profitability. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now look at it from employee perspective. You, as an employee, want to receive compensation, commensurate with your experience (and then some). You would like to have benefits in the form of health insurance, paid vacation, pension plan contributions, etc. You would like to have a steady (almost guaranteed) increase on your compensation from one year to the next. And you also want to have a career, so that you can grow professionally and monetarily.

All of these things are completely against your employer’s desires. They have somebody (an employee, you), who is willing to do the job for X number of dollars per year. The job does not change from year to year, so why should that somebody be getting more as time goes by? Just because? That’s nice, but it is eating into the profits. They have somebody (an employee, you), who is doing the job, and is doing it fairly well. Why, in their right state of mind, would they want to promote you to do something else – for more money, if they are happy with what you are doing? Add to that the need for an employer to pay for your ever-raising cost of health insurance, and you get the picture.

Employers want to maximize profit while minimizing expenses.

The thing we can take away from this is quite simple: when writing a resume, think from employer’s perspective. What would you want to see in the person working for you? Forget about dedicated, motivated and ambitious. Every resume in the stack has these. Your resume needs to show that you can deliver on the promise.

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