Work Daze

I know! I know! The idea is completely ridiculous. How could you possibly summarize your entire working life – your accomplishments, your achievements, your awards and your honors – on one side of one piece of paper?

Yet, this is the exact challenge that faces us when we decide to apply for a new job.

For our highly brilliant – and highly overcompensated – managers the difficult part of crafting a resume is in deciding which of their many triumphs to include. The need to pare down a working lifetime of explosive promotions and expanding responsibilities makes for cluttered, ineffectual resumes that never seem to capture the special genius of the person, especially when the hiring manager must consider that the job applicant managed all these accomplishments working with a staff of indolent, insolent ingrates. In a word, us.

For everyone else, the problem is slightly different. Our challenge is to somehow inflate decades of sloth and career somnambulism into enough content to fill a 3x5 index card, not to mention a full sheet of paper. Fortunately, help is available. A recent “Career Journal” article by Dana Mattioli in “The Wall Street Journal” offers tips that will allow even the least of us to “stand out in a sea of CVs.”

[For those of you who are not Latinists, CV stands for curriculum vitae, a small but voracious caterpillar that lives on unprocessed expense reports, found rotting in the file cabinets of HR departments.]

Tip #1: Ditch the Modesty

“The resume is absolutely no time to be humble,” says eager Heather Eagar of ResumeLines.com. This sounds like trouble. If everyone in the job market is being encouraged to blow their own horns, me and thee are going to find it difficult to be heard, sitting in the back of the orchestra, tootling on our piccolos. If we can’t be humble, there’s only one other option. We have to lie.

Since we don’t do much work, we have plenty of time to dream up wonderful titles and accomplishments for ourselves. Be reasonable. You can inflate your title to Executive Senior Group Vice President, but don’t use King of the Known Universe, Lord of Destruction and Defender of the Sacred Regions of Zoron. That title is on my resume.

TIP #2: Review a performance checklist

Apparently, there exists in the working world a group of people who receive so many rave reviews that they cannot remember them all. Personally, I still beam with pride over the memorable occasion fifteen years ago when the boss actually remembered my name.

If you forget to remember your accomplishments, resume professionals suggest that you go back over your annual job reviews to remind yourself of your strengths – one of which is obviously not your great memory. The pros also recommend that you enlist friends, family members, and even your spouse to help you bring back to consciousness various career events that are resume-worthy.

“Ask what you bragged about, or were proud of at work,” counsels Deb Dib, president of Advantage Resumes. This might work for some people, but when I tried it, all I got was, “Well, I remember back in 1998, when you were raving about the new, super-sized jelly donuts that suddenly appeared at the Monday staff meeting,” or “what about that Christmas party in 2003, when you stripped down to your Jockeys and sang ‘Stayin’ Alive’ with the punch bowl on your head.”

Two excellent accomplishments, come to think of it. Let me dust off my resume and put them right on the top.

Tip #3: Measure results

According to Judy Rosemartin, an executive coach and president of Sensible Strategies, Inc. you should pepper your resume with “percentages, dollar signs and time qualifiers.”
I suppose that means that when the boss told you, “We’d get our work done in half the time if you weren’t here,” you could include the metric, “Increased production efficacy by 50% simply by not showing up.” Quite an accomplishment, you have to admit, and better than most people can say, even when they’re at their desk.

One caution given by the experts is to only include awards based on merit. “Just because you sat there for 20 years is not an accomplishment,” insists Martin Weitzman of Gilbert Resumes. We strongly disagree. When you consider how easy it is to fall asleep and slip down under your desk for the day, sitting at your desk for 20 years is a triumph, and deserves an honored place on anyone’s resume.