Thomas M. Reid

Things have been a bit crazy over the last year and a half, which was the last time I updated this blog. The best of intentions and all that. This is a fresh start. I have made a promise to myself to do a better job balancing the desire to post more regularly and the need to make sure it’s something worth posting. We’ll see how it goes. . . .

I’m still on the hunt for a job, and certain things have come to a head recently that make it all the more urgent that I find one. As a result, I recently completely revamped my resume. In doing so, I discovered a couple of things about both myself and the job-search dance that I hadn’t been fully aware of before.

First, while it’s hard for me to brag on myself — I’ve never been good at tooting my own horn; I’ve always lived with an attitude of, “stay humble, and if what you’re doing is noteworthy, the right people will notice” — I discovered during the course of reworking that document about my professional career that I’ve actually done some pretty cool stuff over the last 20 years. Yes, two decades’ worth of work does tend to make an impressive collection. Clarifying that collection was oh, so important to my sense of self-worth. I definitely needed that shot in the arm to get me enthused about hunting for work again.

The second thing I discovered was that my previous resume was woefully out of touch with the modern workforce. I was using a book that claimed to be all hip and caught up to today’s modern internet-savvy job market, but it was a deceitful lie. All of its suggestions were directly contradicted by good advice from a handful of friends who looked it over. Everything from the font to the use of bullet points needed to be changed. My resume was polished, thorough, and completely unsuitable. Everything was too long, too blocky, to rigid. It looked like an ill-fitting,  middle-management suit. I realized in the middle of this overhaul that we now live in a society where everything is parsed down to the barest minimum of words. If you can’t say it in 140 characters or a hundred abbreviations, you’ve already lost your reader. So everything I had — everything — got pared down. I rearranged it, added a bunch of highlights and notable achievements at the top, and it looks a million times better.

So now I’m shopping it again, and already the change is notable. I’m getting more attention with it, more interviews set up. It’s night and day from before. And before was wearing me down, making me feel unbelievably unmarketable. Hopefully this one simple step will change everything. I sure hope so. Lots of things are riding on it.