Resumes for Disaster

Once upon a time there was a pretty young woman, who lived in a pretty apartment in one of the prettiest cities in the world. Now, this young woman had lived in her apartment in the city for a good while, almost 10 years, and over time she had developed an interesting and varied career in the non-profit and technology sectors.

Since she had lived in the same place for a while, and because so much of her work arrived through personal networks, her resume had begun to languish. Updated once a year, and reformatted never, it grew rusty, like an axe left out in the rain.

In April, when she graduated from school the young woman decided to make some big changes, and move to a new city. She chose Toronto, her hometown. It was exciting and full of opportunity, though intimidating, and more to the point, full of people who didn't know our girl from a parking meter.

Totally unlike the pretty little city she knew and loved.

Realizing that word of mouth would not work, our girl decided to revamp and re-think her resume.

Which is where it all began to go so wrong. First she updated, then she began to play around with format. Once she had something she liked she sent it downstairs to a neighbour in the business program for some feedback. Following feedback she made the changes. Happy with the result she sent it to her father and step-mother for comments. It arrived back to it's owner covered in red ink, and reformatted, yet again.

Now our young woman is not adverse to taking comments from people she loves, and the feedback in red was thoughtful and strategic. So she incorporated the concerns, bigging-up fonts and reducing margins, excising repetitive text, changing section order.

However, all this surgery on her work history, was leading her to doubt. With so many authors, was that the poor resume going to suffer from an identity crisis? Who was it in the end that was being represented by the 2-page point form manifest? The young woman evidently had too little faith in her own work to simply write and send a resume that *SHE* thought was effective.

Throwing good money after bad, our nervous and lacking-in-confidence young woman called upon the services of yet another friend. This one had an incredible career and the dream job. "If anyone knows what a good resume should be, she will!" thought the young woman. As always kind and helpful, this friend sent a copy of her recent resume. It was a glowing 4(!) page testament to this friend's excellence and intelligence, her over-all brilliance, and her obvious suitability for any number of careers in technology and communications.

Our young woman stared at the *perfect* resume and then returning to her own frankensteinian creation, put her head on the desk and wept.

There is a lesson in all this she thought, about believing in yourself, and not immediately taking other people's opinion as more valuable then your own. Just so long as you don't forget that again, she told herself with a strange feeling of deja vu, you should be okay.