If you swing a cat down a street, chances are you will hit someone looking for a job or someone counting their lucky stars they have one. ‘It seems no one feels very safe at the moment,’ a friend warned. ‘You should feel lucky too.’
Apparently, one can’t switch on a TV without fear mongering smacking you in face in the form of news anchors warning you, your neighbour and swinging cats in general of the hole in the mud the economy is right now.
And are we? In a word, yes. It seems we have been face first in it for quite sometime, just didn’t know it. Yet even with all these fears, I am still prepping my resume for a excursion into the land of employers.
The word on the street is that for every job posting out there, Human Resources personnel are getting waist deep in resumes. Not like they did not get swamped before, although metaphorically speaking it seems back then it was only about ankle-deep, and that my friends, was considered business as usual. But not anymore.
So, here I am, typing away. Borrowing ideas from one employers’ list of job qualifications and unmercifully pasting them onto my resume. Let’s see… One from that job off Monster.ca… another from Workopolis.com and a third off Craigslist, its like cherry picking in July! The idea behind such intellectual borrowing is that in the end, you have filled your resume with exactly what you can do for the employer, which at times is less than what you can actually perform, however one is not here to prove your ego but to prove you can align your strengths to theirs. If you want to apply for a Marketing position and you can also Ethernet their entire office network on top of that, chances are they will not give you the job. As such, delete the Ethernet part, emphasize your MS-Office wizardry ‘Look everyone! I too can print in Word!’ Thank God for the highly payed government sponsored recruiter who shared that little gold nugget.
‘Tell rather than show.’ That is a good piece of advise I picked off an employment advise website. “Show your accomplishments!’ another generic site went on, ‘Avoid being like the rest!’ Okay, got it! I am so pumped up!
‘Don’t bore a HR manager with crazy antics’ cries another. Uh, alright, so I will use New Times Roman, can’t go wrong with the classics, then BOOM, another site demands you use anything but New Times Roman as it is antiquate and old fashioned. ‘HR Managers see hundreds of resumes a day, they expect you to be different!’ Arrgggh!
Anyone with a pulse will agree of the sheer disgust that is writing your own resume. Akin to a mixture of Chinese water torture and being flambeyed alive; somewhere among those two is in the happy median where the typing and retying your resume resides. It is a necessary evil, of course, ‘Or stay in your crappy job then!’ is often be the rebuttal of many site and indeed they are right.
Thus I hammer on trying to be distinct… HR managers like that… but not too much, HR managers apparently that too. Finally, after two hours, I finally extracted the juice out of the words I originally started with. We are talking liquid gold ladies and gentleman. I write yet another cover-letter and press send. Thank God that is over… Oh wait, there are another nineteen job posting to go. DAMN!
Drip. Drip. Drip.
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