XylaWorks Insights · March 2026 · 7 min read
At some point in the last decade, someone told you to take it off.
The board seat. The volunteer coordination. The mentorship program you helped build at your church. The three years you spent coaching youth basketball on weekends, managing a roster of fourteen kids and their parents with the same organizational discipline you bring to your day job. Whatever it was — somebody reviewed your resume and told you it didn’t belong. Too personal. Not relevant. Hiring managers want to see professional experience, not extracurriculars.
You listened. You removed it. And your resume got a little shorter and a lot more generic.
That advice was wrong. Not slightly misguided — wrong. And it’s costing professionals a competitive edge they don’t realize they have.
The Bad Advice and Where It Came From
The “remove your community involvement” guidance has roots in a version of hiring that was more transactional than it is today. Through most of the twentieth century and into the early 2000s, the hiring question was narrow: can this person perform the function? Skills, credentials, and years of experience were the primary inputs. A resume was a functional document for a functional evaluation, and anything outside the professional lane was considered noise.
Resume advice evolved to match. Keep it focused. One page if possible. Every line should connect to the target role. If it’s not directly relevant to the job description, it’s wasting space. This logic sounds clean, and in a purely functional hiring environment, it held up.
The problem is that the hiring environment hasn’t been purely functional for years.
The Society for Human Resource Management’s ongoing research into hiring practices has documented a steady broadening of what employers evaluate. Cultural contribution, community engagement, and values alignment have moved from “nice to have” into core evaluation criteria — particularly for management and senior roles where candidates represent the organization externally. Deloitte’s human capital research has tracked the same shift: organizations increasingly seek professionals who bring value beyond their job description, because those professionals build stronger teams, stay longer, and contribute to institutional trust.
Meanwhile, the resume advice stayed frozen. Professionals are still being told to strip their backgrounds down to keywords and functions at the exact moment employers are looking for the whole person.
What Community Work Actually Demonstrates
Let’s be specific about what’s being left off resumes, because the generic label “community involvement” undersells what these activities demonstrate to a hiring evaluator.
Board service — whether for a nonprofit, a homeowners’ association, a school district committee, or a professional organization — demonstrates governance experience. You’ve sat in rooms where decisions had consequences. You’ve navigated conflicting stakeholder interests. You’ve been accountable for outcomes that weren’t tied to a paycheck. At the management and director level, governance experience is directly relevant, and most candidates don’t have it from their professional roles alone.
Volunteer coordination and program management demonstrates leadership in a context where you can’t rely on positional authority. Nobody reports to you. Nobody has to show up. You lead through persuasion, organization, and earned credibility. That’s a harder leadership test than managing a team that’s contractually obligated to follow your direction, and hiring managers at sophisticated organizations recognize it.
Mentorship demonstrates investment in others — a quality that predicts managerial effectiveness more reliably than almost any technical skill. A professional who’s spent years mentoring junior colleagues or community members has practiced feedback, coaching, and the kind of developmental patience that organizations desperately need from their people managers.
Community organizing and advocacy demonstrates the ability to mobilize people around a shared goal, communicate effectively across audiences, and sustain effort on long-term initiatives without the structure or incentives of a corporate environment. These are transferable skills in the most literal sense of the term.
None of this is padding. None of it is filler. Every one of these activities develops capabilities that hiring managers evaluate and that most resumes never mention.
The Differentiation Problem
Here’s the practical cost of removing community work from your career materials: you look exactly like everyone else.
Consider what a hiring manager sees after reviewing fifty resumes for a director-level operations role. The qualifications blur. Everyone has ten to fifteen years of experience. Everyone managed cross-functional teams. Everyone drove operational efficiency. Everyone can point to cost savings and process improvements. The action verbs vary slightly. The formatting differs. But the substance — the professional story each resume tells — is nearly identical.
Now imagine that one of those fifty resumes includes a section showing three years of board service at a regional workforce development nonprofit. The candidate chaired the programs committee. They helped design a skills training initiative. They managed a volunteer team of twelve.
That candidate isn’t just qualified for the operations role. They’re interesting. They have a dimension the other forty-nine don’t, and it directly reinforces their professional narrative: this is someone who thinks about building systems, developing people, and creating value outside the boundaries of their job description. The community work doesn’t replace their operational credentials — it amplifies them.
Differentiation in a competitive job market isn’t about being louder. It’s about being fuller. Showing dimensions of yourself that the other candidates aren’t showing — not because those candidates don’t have them, but because someone told them to leave them off.
The Values Signal
There’s a layer beneath the skills argument that matters even more, and it’s harder to quantify: community involvement sends a signal about what you care about.
Organizations talk about values constantly. Mission statements, culture decks, DEI commitments, social responsibility reports. But when they’re hiring, how do they evaluate whether a candidate actually shares those values and doesn’t just know the right vocabulary?
They look for evidence. And community work is evidence.
A candidate who’s been involved in health equity advocacy for five years isn’t claiming to care about equity — they’re demonstrating it with their time, which is the most credible evidence available. A candidate who’s spent weekends coaching underserved youth isn’t performing community-mindedness in an interview — they’re backing it up with a track record.
This matters more now than it has at any point in recent hiring history. Research from Cone Communications found that the significant majority of employees say they want to work for a company that shares their values, and employers report that candidates who demonstrate values alignment are evaluated more favorably in hiring. The mechanism is straightforward: community work provides the evidence that values claims alone can’t.
Professionals who include this work in their career materials aren’t padding their resume. They’re answering a question the interviewer was going to ask anyway — what do you care about beyond the paycheck? — with evidence instead of assertions.
How to Position It
The objection professionals usually raise when told to include community work is a fair one: “I don’t want it to look like filler.” Neither do hiring managers. So the positioning matters.
Community involvement shouldn’t be a list of memberships dumped at the bottom of a resume. It should be integrated into your professional narrative in a way that reinforces your positioning themes.
Consider a hypothetical: James is a senior HR director targeting VP-level roles at mid-sized companies. His professional background is strong — fifteen years of progressive HR experience, talent strategy, organizational design. His community involvement includes serving on the board of a regional college’s career services advisory committee and volunteering as a facilitator for a professional development program that serves first-generation professionals.
If James lists these as bullet points under “Community Involvement” at the bottom of his resume, they’re afterthoughts. A hiring manager might glance at them. They probably won’t connect them to his candidacy.
But if James positions them as part of his professional identity — if his narrative says “I’ve spent my career developing talent inside organizations and my community work extending that commitment outside them” — then the board service and the facilitation aren’t separate from his HR career. They’re proof of it. They’re evidence that his interest in developing people isn’t performative. It’s a pattern that runs through everything he does.
The difference between community work that reads as filler and community work that reads as differentiation is framing. The activities are the same. The positioning makes them visible for what they actually are: a professional dimension that most competitors aren’t showing.
What You’ve Been Hiding
The deepest cost of the “remove it” advice isn’t a weaker resume. It’s the message it sends to the professional who follows it.
When you’re told that your board service doesn’t belong on a career document, you internalize something: that the parts of your life you’re most proud of aren’t professionally valuable. That the volunteer work is personal, separate, irrelevant to the serious business of career advancement. That the version of you that mentors young professionals or serves on a community health board is a different person from the version of you that manages teams and delivers results.
That’s a false separation. The person who shows up on Saturday to coordinate a volunteer event and the person who shows up on Monday to lead a department meeting is the same person. The leadership skills transfer. The organizational discipline transfers. The values transfer. The only thing that changes is the context.
The career industry created an artificial wall between professional identity and community identity. It told people to present half of themselves and hope it was enough. For a lot of professionals — particularly those whose community involvement reflects core aspects of who they are — the result has been a persistent feeling that their career documents don’t represent them. That something’s missing. That the resume describes someone who does their job but doesn’t capture someone who matters.
What’s missing is the third dimension. And it was there all along — you were just told to hide it.
What would your career story sound like if you stopped separating the professional from the personal — and let the full picture of who you are speak for itself?
