Taking a new approach to my employment search: The Extended Resume Project

I’m actually pretty awesome. I even fight Daleks on occasion.

They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I have been networking, doing daily job searches, setting up alerts, applying for jobs, and sharing my work experience in the same way for nearly four years with no success. So clearly, a different approach is needed, because this really is beginning to feel like insanity.

When it comes to my job search, I do have one massive flaw: when I’m out networking with people or I’m in a job interview and they’re looking at my resume, and someone asks me, “so tell me more about what you did while you were at [X],” I freeze. My mind goes blank. The night before, or even earlier that day, I could have written pages or expounded on many tales of my time spent here or there with friends over dinner or beers. But stick me in a situation where I feel like I have to be professional and on my “best behavior,” and it’s like a wizard snuck up behind me and whispered, “obliviate.”

So I got to thinking that obviously my resume doesn’t tell the whole story. It can’t. That’s not what resumes do. And I’m clearly both unable and incapable of telling that whole story in an interview. I apparently have some deeply-ingrained context switching protocols that don’t allow for it. But I do have a blog. And my potential employers have my name. And Google. So the solution became clear: I will blog in my typical style about each of the jobs I’ve had and the work I’ve done. And it won’t be that self-promotional resume garbage–or at least, not all of it will be. I’m going to talk about the good, the bad, the ugly, what I learned, what I wish I’d known, mistakes I made, what I loved, what I hated…all of it, at least as far as I can remember. I’m going to be as honest as possible about what I think about myself and my abilities. I’m going to come off as cocky and as a braggart. But I’m done being humble, and I’m done doing this the “right” way. For this little project, I’m doing this my way.

I figure this project might help me in a couple of ways. It’ll give me pre-prepared material to draw on for interviews; it puts my work experience story out there in a somewhat different way than normal; and it might help jog my memory about things I’ve been leaving off my resume.  I’ve also found that if I’m trying to speak to someone about something I’ve written at length about, I tend to do much better. But perhaps most of all, I hope that this might help one or two employers see that my resume isn’t puffed up or over-exaggerated, and that truly, the traditional resume format does me a disservice.

Instead of looking like a person who can wear many hats and has many talents of equal strength, I look like someone who can’t decide what she wants to do. Yes, I’ve been a journalist, an editor, a policy analyst, an academic researcher, an online PR consultant, a convention customer service director, and more. But I’ve never abandoned one opportunity for another before I had a chance to see the first one through to either completion or a good place to hand off to someone else, nor have I shifted from one discipline to another because I was bored with the last one. I just take the opportunities that match my talents as they come, and sometimes they’re quite a mixed bag.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “isn’t this what a cover letter is for?” But even in a cover letter, I have very limited space in a fairly stringent format to get a couple of primary points across that are things that everyone would like a potential employer to believe about them. But for me, every one of them is not a trite platitude of “please, sir, give me this job because I have shadows of these desirable qualities,” but rather they’re the politest and most professional way of trying to convey the following, which I am stating in somewhat stronger terms that I would feel comfortable using in a cover letter:

1. Even if I haven’t done a job just like this before, all of these varied other jobs on my resume have similar elements that will help me learn this job as quickly as someone who has done a job just like this somewhere else.
2. To that point, I’m a fast learner. And I’m not talking “fast learner” in the general sense, I mean, I can be shown how to do moderately to actually complicated things once or twice, and as long as I can take notes or access some documentation and be able to ask a couple of questions for a week or two, I’ll not only be able to do the task(s) as well as someone who’s been doing it for a year, I’ll probably figure out a couple of ways to do it better. And that’s a conservative estimate all around.
3. I’m really smart. Like, an actual genius. But I know that telling you that will make you think that I’m going to act entitled. Nothing is further from the truth. I use the self-knowledge of my intelligence to encourage myself when faced with hard problems. And the intelligence itself helps me to see patterns, combine skills and knowledge acquired from a wide variety of experiences, and make connections in new and unique ways.
4. And I don’t just keep my knowledge all to myself so I can take all the credit. I love to share knowledge. I love teaching people to do new things and about the world around them. Destroying ignorance is one of my favorite things to do, whether I’m giving a briefing on network neutrality to legislators or I’m explaining to a friend why India Pale Ale is called India Pale Ale.
5. I know I don’t know everything. The flip side of the “being really smart” coin is knowing when you can learn from someone else. And in the end, that’s the first thing (after, you know, actual money ) that I want out of a job–to be able to learn from the people I work with. Being the expert is fun, but it gets boring after awhile.

Over the next couple of weeks, I hope I’m able to illustrate the above in my narratives about my various jobs. Because at this point, I’m not seeing how word vomit and brutal honesty are going to hurt me (as long as I don’t burn any bridges).