Fueled somewhat equally by the frustration of trying to ‘sell myself’ with my resume and curiosity about all this ultra-modern networking and interconnectedness that the intarwebz give us all, I decided to try a little bit of an experiment yesterday.
The only kind of resume I’d ever had was the old “throw everything on there in a big old list” style. Functional, accurate, but I knew it very likely wasn’t the best approach, especially for someone like me who has a bunch of skills, but hasn’t had jobs that obviously stressed those skills. Figuring that somewhere amidst all my various contacts who occasionally check up on me via this blog, its LiveJournal mirror, or my accounts on Facebook, Twitter, or a multitude of other sites, would be someone (or a few someones) with a few good pointers, I sent out a plaintive little cry for help. Once the resume was ready (though with my address and phone number redacted), I created three versions (one each for Apple’s Pages, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Acrobat), zipped them up into an archive, and tossed them on my webserver. Then, one little tweet:
Any kind souls want to view/critique/analyse/make suggestions for my resume? http://xrl.us/mdhresume (174KB .zip w/.pages, .doc and .pdf)
Within just a few minutes, I started to get responses. Over the course of the next few hours, I got some very welcome advice, samples, and edits from ccheney, Michelle, firemaplegirl, and ladybriggan, plus some entertaining stories from Ogre_Kev.
So, now, after far too many hours of banging my head against my keyboard (really, for all the number of years I’ve been told how well I write, resumes are a glaring exception — perhaps because it’s not so much writing as trying to distill all the eclectic bits of experience and tech knowledge into a series of bullet points: me as a PowerPoint presentation), a new tweet went out:
UPDATED: Any kind souls want to critique/make suggestions for my resume (again)? http://xrl.us/mdhresume (158KB .zip w/.pages, .doc and .pdf)
I’m pretty comfortable with the resume as it stands now, so as long as I don’t get a “DEAR GOD, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING‽” response, I think I’m ready to start sending it out to employers (and yes, I’ll be customizing it a bit for particular jobs where necessary).
Once again, thanks to everyone for the advice and words of encouragement!