Everybody has their weakness, that one irrational fear that triggers an uncontrollable-squeal-like-a-little-girl reaction in you. Do you know what I’m talking about? There’s no explaining this fear; it’s primal and undeniable. For some people this fear is manifested in spiders, or snakes, or even squirrels. Mine is frogs.

I’ve always hated frogs, ever since I was a little girl. Strangely and perversely enough, one of my dad’s more “interesting” hobbies was frog jumping. My dad would load the family into the trusty station wagon, along with a plastic container with water and frogs, and we would head off to Knott’s Berry Farm to participate in the Annual Frog Jumping Contest. This was back in the day when Knott’s Berry Farm was still an actual farm, with dirt back roads, open spaces, and little mom-and-pop motels in the surrounding city.

Driving down the dusty road to the Frog Jumping arena was always a memorable experience, slowly rolling past dead, splayed-out, flattened and dehydrated frogs littering the dirt road. It’s difficult to keep frogs from escaping and the end result of this brief taste of freedom can bring disastrous results to the erstwhile competitors. And to someone who has an irrational fear of frogs in the first place, well, I’m sure you can imagine how pleasant these weekends were for me.

No matter what happened with the frog jumpers that day, win, lose or draw, our little competitors would come back to the hotel room with us and reside in the bathroom over night as they awaited the next day of competition. Did I mention to you how difficult it is to control frogs? Suffice it to say that on numerous occasions, our little athletes escaped the confines of their loosely covered plastic bucket and waited… patiently… for little Nancy to open the door in the morning… and seeing their opportunity for freedom would hop directly at me and out into the room in a desperate bid to escape.

Fast forward to present day grown-up Nancy, opening her swimming pool up for the summer. Slowly, the lid to the skimmer is lifted and there is a suspicious movement in the water below. Amongst the decaying leaves, dead spiders and seed pods that our skimmer has efficiently removed from the surface of our pool’s water, there is happily living a frog. A cute little frog about the size of a fifty cent piece that has the power to reduce a grown woman to that drop-whatever-you’re-holding-squeal-like-a-little-girl in about 1.8 seconds. What do I do when confronted with this type of emergency? I call in the big guns, the expert, the one person whom I know I can count on to remedy the situation: my husband, the frog relocator.

You may ask yourself what this has to do with recruiting or job hunting. It’s simple: everybody has their Achilles heel. There is one weakness that we all have that we like to ignore or avoid, and for the most part, we live successful lives ignoring and avoiding that one thing that sends us into a tizzy. However, if your weakness happens to be your resume, your interviewing skills, your ability to source candidates, interview effectively, etc., you may find yourself on the long end of an unemployment cycle or the wrong end of an approved vendor list.

In today’s market, nobody can afford to ignore their weaknesses. It’s time for some honest self-assessment and the creation of a strategy to address your weakness. If you have a weak resume, search out and find a real specialist to help you craft an effective resume. If your weakness is in interviewing, join a Toastmasters group and get ideas on how to get your ideas and responses across more effectively. If sourcing is your Achilles heel, take some on-line or in-person courses in order to sharpen up your skills.

Information is so prevalent and accessible – be honest, avail yourself of people and tools who can help you to overcome, and change your life.

And watch out for those frogs.