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Curriculum Voodoo

I’m updating my résumé, again. Nowadays, whether you’re out of work or gainfully employed, you’re forced to stand rigid and be fully prepared for those wildly swinging arms of the business market. So it never hurts to keep it fresh.

Going through mine can feel like an archaeological dig. Bits and fragments of former work lives emerge from the dust, nearly forgotten; and apparently from other, smarter people. I don’t remember developing hiring procedures when running a small corner deli and convenience store (a.k.a. bologna and beer stop). I’m pretty sure the procedure was nothing more than looking over chicken-scrawled applications trying to guess which one hid enough talent to handle the slicer. When I supervised remaindered and sale books for a bookstore chain, I forget to mention it was a chain of four locations, the position was actually dumped in my lap, and it was a department of one: me. Considering I still had the title of Assistant Manager for one of the stores, at least I was supervising fellow employees in some capacity. Always a good one to persistently point out when going for those middle-management positions. Ick.

Do I lie on my rez? Well, answering the exact phrasing of that question, no, I don’t lie. I do redefine honesty a bit. I phrase my activities and duties to better aim at a target job. I angle past performance for the best light. It’s not hard to do. And sometimes, it’s necessary.

I have to document a position as Manager of MIS (or MIS-Manager, as I prefer). But what the hell does it mean? If I don’t go through excrutiating descriptions of what I actually did, it gets lost in the translation of a title like that. For example, I managed our Web group (all right, it was just me and a Webmaster). This involved the simplest of text changes to creating graphics to formulating new content to coding cgi scripts, and yes often required making the big decisions on things like layout and design. And it was many sites I watched over.

But having a résumé state the dry “I managed all aspects of the company’s Web sites and online servicing of our customers and employees” says little of how I’d be awakened at five in the morning because something on our “home page” wasn’t working (didn’t matter it would turn out to be a problem our System Admin group dealt with, because guess who ended up explaining what was wrong and how to fix it?). Or that I’d spend an extra hour at work reformatting a press release to html. Or all the times I massaged information for our engineering and marketing and support groups (each required a different take on the data, naturally). It most definitely leaves out all those tools, techniques, and solutions I devised to the benefit of the company.

And none of it was part of the job description. Well, not until it hit my résumé.