This past week I had a meeting with one of my regular clients. When he entered the room he said,

“Can you tell me what you think of this? I was just speaking with someone about coming to work for me. We had a great conversation, so at the end of our meeting I told her, ‘This has been great. If you can get a resume to me, we’ll go from here.’”

“Oh,” she said, “You can just check my LinkedIn profile.”

!!!!!!!

I said to him, “You can’t hire her.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” he said. “But I wanted to see if I was being too harsh.”

“No,” I said, “this is someone who is supposed to be making your life easier. She hasn’t even got the job yet and she’s making your life more difficult. You can’t hire her.”

Now it’s possible there are those among you who find my assessment too harsh.

In fact, some of you are probably thinking, “But that’s how people communicate these days. Nobody has a resume anymore.”

Perhaps.

That said, her future boss requested one. Whether or not looking online is what ‘everybody does these days’ it’s not something he wanted to do. He wanted a resume.

With this in mind, should you wish your career to advance my suggestion would be that when a potential boss says, “Jump,” you say, “How high?”

Should this post have brought up some uncomfortable sensations (None of us handles everything perfectly—I can attest to that, again and again and again….) Here’s the formula for a graceful apology, “Apologize Once and Move On”.