The Transferable Skills Trap - Jobseeker Basics III

Greg Wyatt • October 21, 2025

The following is Chapter 4 in A Career Breakdown Kit, my guide for improving your odds in a VUCA jobs market.


Fundamentally it's a chapter about selling yourself, and moving from features to benefits to how it matters.


Similar to the advice I give to employers in how and why they should move from generic copy+paste job adverts to specific, representative content that shows context and has meaning.


The same generic adverts you tailor your CV towards (a chapter for another time).


Put it this way -


Do you buy Pizza because it contains flour, yeast, dough, salt and water?

Do you buy it for the toppings?

Or do you buy it because of the way it makes you feel as a regular buyer or someone attracted to its packaging?


My favourite pizza has a bite, a sizzle, the richness juiciness of its sauce and how it combines with the stretchy delight of mozzarella. Oh, and that spicy kick from the Jalapenos!


Transferable skills are your dough - the basic ingredients - important in the right place, but must be defined in the right way to have meaning for your ideal readers.


Chapter 4 - The transferable skills trap


Maybe your top ten looks like this:


  • Strategic Thinking
  • Leadership
  • Communication
  • Problem-Solving
  • Decision-Making
  • Organisation
  • Analytical Skills
  • Project Management
  • Change Management
  • Relationship Building


If you’re a COO, that is.


If you’re in a different field, your list may look a little different - why not ask a large language model? Gemini came up with the one above.


I expect the results would be similar for an HR Director, with a little people strategy, employee relations and EVP development thrown in for good measure.


Here’s the rub - if these skills are in your top 10 list of transferable skills, they are likely in the top 10 list of your competition’s transferable skills.


And if everyone has the same skills, none of these skills stand out.


If transferable skills are your unique selling point… how are they unique?


The problem doubles down.


If, in our days of generic advertising, a company is looking for a COO or an HR Director, their essential required skills can often include these transferable skills.


Can you communicate at all levels with strategic thinking, fostering an innovative culture?


Me too!


We all ‘know’ that a customised CV is the way to go. (Is it though? Check out Part Three for my answers.)


What exactly are you customising against, if your custom skills are the same as every other applicant who applies to this advert?


This is the transferable skills trap.


Skills that in real life serve you well and are valuable in any context. Yet skills that are common enough they work against you, when you declare them your strength.


What can we do?


Move from transferable to applicable.


Applicable skills are precisely the same skills as transferable skills, with two differences:


  • Direction
  • Definition


The direction of any applicable skills is that of the employer.


How does your skill apply in their domain?


The definition of any applicable skill is the context in which you have applied them successfully. This can be synonymous skills, tools, processes, software, etc.


If the direction and definition don’t reflect each other, you may not be an ideal candidate.


Should you even apply?


And if they do reflect each other, the onus is on you to show explicitly how your skills work in the employer’s context.


In an ideal world employer hiring processes are skilled and knowledgeable.


In practice, you should assume the weakest link in their hiring process is the gatekeeper - an administrator, a recruiter, an HR assistant.

Maybe they’re lazy, maybe incompetent, maybe swamped, maybe inexperienced.


It doesn’t matter - a weak part of a hiring process doesn’t necessarily mean employment is unsuitable but can prevent you from being considered.


Help us do our jobs by showing how your skills apply, and we may see you as a suitable candidate.


With the benefit that this helps skilled recruiters too.


What is context?


This is the relevant background that adds sufficient substance to an assertion.


So, you’re a COO?


Are you a COO within a £2m bootstrapped start-up that’s achieving profitability?


Do you work in a multinational charity streamlining your operations to save money?


Or are you a safe pair of hands to keep the ship steady in your £30m family-owned manufacturing company with 120 employees?


These three COOs may well have the same transferable skills, and might each be brilliant, but their contexts are more important than their job title in assessing suitability.


Going further.


The ugly brother of transferable skills is responsibilities and experience.


In the same way adverts copy-paste job descriptions, how many CVs do the same under each job title in a CV?


There may be hundreds of applications each sharing the same explanations.


Fortunately, you can apply direction and definition here too, by showing impact, by showing your achievements (with numbers and context), and by showing how you can help.


These principles help you move from being a <job title> with a dry set of responsibilities and experiences.

To someone who shows how they can help, how you can solve problems, and how you can heal the pain of the people who might employ you.


It’s the same as moving from features to benefits in sales.


Features are what you do. Benefits are how the customer’s life is improved.


Transferable skills are highly valuable to your next employer. You should be proud of them.


Unless they are specific and relevant to the roles you apply for, they can get in your way.


If you can gain insight into what your potential employer needs, and show how you may solve their problems, your odds will improve.


The frustrating caveat to this is that sometimes you are only given a generic advert to try and glean this from.


If you can’t gain insight, is there any point in showing applicability by tailoring?


Apart from using their terminology (such as if they say Continuous Improvement, and you’re a Six Sigma Black Belt), my answer is no.

Instead, default to a good enough CV. One which plays to your strengths by showing how your skills apply through tools, process, context and achievements.


Apply with what you have, follow their instructions and diarise a follow-up. Then move on.


Treat transactional generic adverts transactionally and worry more about the ones that speak to you personally.


Don’t rely on transferable skills in the hope that others will see how they apply.


Help us do our jobs and see you as a great candidate by showing how your skills apply.


This won’t guarantee interviews. It will improve your odds.


Showing applicability is a strong gain for every aspect of your job search.

How to doorknock

By Greg Wyatt • June 11, 2026
What follows is Chapter 43 from A Career Breakdown Kit. Is it a magic salve guaranteed for success? No of course not. But much like anything in a job search, nothing is guaranteed. What we do is identify which avenues can be effective for your context, and form an appropriate strategy. LinkedIn optimisation is great if people search for you on LinkedIn. Except speaking to my recruitment peers, fewer and fewer rely on it. Would it surprise you if I told you I rarely invested in at all before 2019? I've been working in recruitment since 1996 including at CEO level. Applications, networking, referrals, content, CV databases. All have a place and a purpose. Doorknocking on the other hand - some would tell you it has no place in the modern job search. If my daughter*, her friends and other 18 year olds can get a job from an old school technique, while those employers say "only through Indeed" then that might be a hint it still works. Some of whom are socially anxious, but then it's a replicable process, not a cult of personality. Or the periodic messages I get from CxOs who made their own jobs from direct outreach. Not forgetting Granovetter's seminal research and recent LinkedIn-specific studies in Science journal showing weak ties drive more job mobility than strong ties. And why wouldn't doorknocking work on LinkedIn, when you have a weak tie that suggests a viable employer? But no, it's not a guarantee. It's just an arrow in the quiver of a multichannel job search. 43 - How to doorknock Doorknocking is an old-school sales approach you may well have experienced, such as when a salesperson with a clipboard rings your doorbell and asks you to change electricity provider. My wife even once bought from exactly this scenario. While it’s not uncommon in a business-to-consumer situation it can also work business-to-business… if you can get past security. Although technology has moved on, the principle is the same whether in person, by phone, email, letter or LinkedIn: You approach someone cold and create your own opportunity. This isn’t an approach for everyone and requires chutzpah. If you are used to a high failure rate in applications - what do you have to lose by being proactive? More than that - look at all the advice on LinkedIn on how to improve your odds in a job search. It’s all transactional and applicable, available to everyone - if you all follow it, everyone takes the same step forward. While taking steps others are less prepared to do means the approach alone may stand out. If you encounter the equivalent of a sign which says, ‘Trespassers will be shot!’, pay attention. My own career of looking for work includes many non-transactional approaches: Walked into the local Cinema and asked for a job Walked into Office World and asked for a job Worked for Dad Talked to one of my ex-colleagues and gained some by-the-call phone research work Temped through an agency Walked into an Inn and asked for a job Referred to a publishing, training & consulting company In managing their small-scale recruitment alongside my day job I got to know the MD of a recruitment firm as a supplier. I went to work there Tapped up to return to a more senior role Started my business upon being given the boot - thanks Dave! It’s true I did apply through job boards and agencies. It’s mainly through my own means that I have secured my employment. *My daughter even tried doorknocking for her first job in our local town last summer. It didn’t work for her - she found a nice retail job through an application on Indeed. Her experience was positive enough that she helped a friend do the same - who got a job at the first shop they tried. Doorknocking is about approaching companies by category not because they are recruiting. These categories can be: All the employers in your local business park (often they have websites, with directories and job adverts) Companies listed in local newspapers, directories or platforms (local to me this could be Cambridge Evening News, Bury Free Press, Cambridge Network or Business Weekly) Top 100 employers in your domain Companies that have recently had funding and are about to scale Doorknocking companies you’ve come across through networking and its resulting market map Make contact and make a case for yourself on the principle of the right person, right time, right place, right message, right offer, and right price. There’s an element of luck involved for these elements to all come together. A disadvantage is that they may not be recruiting or ever have a need to employ you and even if they do have a vacancy, you still have to establish the right fit. That means a logically low hit rate. Your threshold for an acceptable failure rate will inform whether this is the right approach for you. The difference is the anonymous rejection of a volume-based application versus the ‘personal rejection’ from your direct outbound approach. Right person, right time, right place, right message, right offer, and right price. Let’s reorder and examine this marketing principle: Right Place Those Categories above. The place is the Company, and how you contact them. You can go in blind if you are a bold prospector or research them in advance. ‘site:’ is a useful command in Google. You can search on specific websites: ‘site: linkedin.com ACME jobs’ Right Person Typically this will be the ‘next one up’ - Head of department, Director, CxO or Owner. Who would be the budget holder at work? Those are prospects. Look them up on LinkedIn, PR, news, video platforms. What can you find out? Right Time While time can be happenstance, can timed factors create opportunity? What might be a hiring trigger? Perhaps you could contact a list of companies that have recently announced funding or a big win - news that may lead to hiring additional people. Or maybe you hear through the grapevine that Janine is about to go off on maternity leave. If their process isn’t time-bound, can you make it time-bound? ‘We aren’t hiring right now’ might mean they’ve run out of headcount in the January to June period and may have a new budget in July. What can you learn that helps you both? If you have radio silence, why not try again in a month or three months? Think about how you buy. If you don’t need something how likely are you to respond to a message no matter how well crafted? If you do need something you might think first of someone who keeps in regular touch. Right Offer You have more opportunity for career creativity in being unemployed than someone entrenched in a 9 to 5 permanent job. What problems can you fix for a company in a non-traditional employment capacity? Let’s say an employer has a problem that needs fixing. They don’t have capacity to do it right now. It isn’t burning enough to seek professional help and there isn’t sufficient work in view to make it a job. What if you caught them at the right time? An out-of-work TA Manager who offered to revamp an onboarding process. A web designer who notes lots of issues with their website. A strategic operational issue that is their unknown unknown identified by your expertise. A swamped team that could benefit from their admin burden being reduced. An orchard that needs pickers at harvest time. What starts out as a short-term, project, or part-time piece of work can become proof of concept. While rare, I know a few people whose permanent full-time jobs have come about this way, including at a senior level. Right message This is both specific and crude. It’s specific because nailing the message CAN create an opportunity a poorly written message may miss. It’s crude because sometimes you can catch people at the right time, no matter how cruddy your message is. This is the case in recruitment - I’ve picked up several senior appointments by calling at the right time. ‘I’m glad you called Greg, I’m starting to think about my maternity cover in June.’ Had I not called, that HR Director may well have gone to the specialist HR recruiters she is also in touch with. If you have a strong hook in your message - such as a key area of rare expertise or a clear issue you’ve identified which companies may have - go in with that. If you don’t - done is better than procrastinating: ‘Hi Greg, I live locally to Bircham Wyatt Recruitment. Love what you do. I wondered if you might be recruiting for an apple picker at any point. If you can’t help, could you point me in the right direction?’ Right price I’ve left this until the end because much of this is variable and subjective. What are your needs? What can they afford? What does the market say? How flexible can you be? Research will help if you can get a sense of what they generally pay through Indeed, Glassdoor or others. Or maybe what comparable companies that are advertising will pay. One approach might be to pro-rate your salary over the period you’ll work there. Doorknocking can sometimes give you access to jobs that are being actively recruited. It’s a happy byproduct of your work, if you find yourself in this situation. It’s worth persevering. Otherwise, it’s too easy to think after 10, 20, or 100 unsuccessful efforts that the approach itself is at fault. There is always an element of luck in any activity. This may be out of your comfort zone, in which case it’s an opportunity to grow. The only certain thing is that if you don’t try you definitely won’t benefit.

Root Canal - No problem, pt 2

By Greg Wyatt • June 4, 2026
Listening to the consequences of your recruitment process is an opportunity. I do find it interesting go through my older articles. How has my thinking changed? Has it improved? How was I so cringy? Looking at this article in its August 2023 form, I hadn't yet focused on Candidate Resentment as an opportunity to improve how we recruit. Not because it's decent to treat people better, but because that is a happy byproduct of strategically assessing our work as it supports our goals. Whether that's filling vacancies or finding people that meet our goals long-term and flourish doing so. Root canal If you recognise that speaking to the potential problems of the people you want to engage is a good idea, you may also recognise why you shouldn't create any problems that push them away. Engagement is an ongoing process that carries through every stage of recruitment, even into employment. Yes, bring your candidates forward, in part by showing how you solve their career problems. But, don’t throw up unnecessary issues that undo your good work. Listening to the consequences of your recruitment process is an opportunity. Why did that candidate proceed? Why did another withdraw? What raised concern? What about the potential candidates we don’t even know about? What influenced their decisions? I’ve spoken to tens of thousands of candidates, prospects, applicants, and everything else, during my career. Out of curiosity, I’m always interested in what influences their decisions in their pursuit of a new career. What fascinates me is that these are the Gemba , the unknown unknowns that we can extrapolate into our own recruitment processes. What problems do they encounter elsewhere, that discourage them from applying, that encourage them to withdraw, and why? And how might we be guilty of the same? While if we are guilty, how can we fix these problems, so that the objection never comes up? Imagine that - the reader that might have walked away, who instead chooses to engage. This may seem an unknowable unknown, but one of the benefits of my job seeker work is hearing about the issues they encounter on their side of recruitment and how that may influence their decisions. Considering these are people that are very problem aware, their appetite for bullshit is in some ways higher than the problem unaware (passive in old speak). While in others, what you may consider normal behaviour, they consider red flags. While we can’t control the behaviour of candidates, we can learn what influences their behaviour and form a process that nudges, draws forward or mitigates when needed. What are we accountable for that might present a problem for a candidate we want to employ? Especially when, in normal life, moving jobs is one of the biggest stresses? How might we unnecessarily cause scepticism or anxiety? Auditing your own recruitment process as a mystery candidate is one opportunity. As is surveying your staff for their experience - with the caveat they are happy to be working for you, skewing their perception. Or perhaps they're terrified of losing their jobs. Do they really want to rock the boat with criticism? But it’s the candidates who withdraw, who hesitate, who object that can be the source of the biggest improvements. What would you say their common complaints are? You can look to LinkedIn for the answer, in their high-engagement posts. Salary on the job description (they mean the advert) ATS data duplication Responsiveness and transparency Tardy, bloated and unnecessary recruitment stages A robotic process that forgot they are human Which becomes your choice. Do you look within and challenge yourself with 5 Whys to see how you can improve? Do you take away problems before they can occur? Saving your candidates unnecessary toothache? Or do you lay blame on the areas you can’t control? Those are the questions. Regards, Greg p.s. I’m available for interesting work - UK key hires, fractional talent acquisition and recruitment writing. Maybe we can talk. p.p.s. A Recruitment AiDE is out now - the discipline for UK key hire recruitment