So, on Saturday, I reviewed my resume with the plan to highlight my experience in these particular areas. In the process, I discovered a couple of grammatical and typographical errors. They weren't errors of fact, but errors in presentation.
You know the old joke, about to celebrate its centenary, "What worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm in an apple?"
I'd recently sent my resume in response to a few job postings and those copies had these errors.
I know how it happened. Each time I make changes to my resume, I wind up needing to tweak it in several places to keep it within the two-page limit. Adding working experience with a certain content management system or with PHP or Flash or Twitter means that something else has to come out.
For a while, I've used a functional resume that puts more emphasis on skills and experience and less on chronology. Age discrimination is a real presence in the job market. It's a challenge to show that one has 25 years of experience with UNIX without saying that one has been working with UNIX for 25 years.
Recently, however, I had a conversation with a trusted recruiter who said that most employers still want to see a work history.
As a result, in the process trimming this, adding that, and moving these items to the first page, it's pretty much guaranteed that there will be a few slips of the keyboard. No excuses, but it happens..5Rule #1 of any kind of writing, of course, is using the spell-checker. The errors that I found, however, were things that a spell-checker wouldn't have caught.
No excuses, though.
This evening, I received a robo-rejection email regarding one of the jobs I'd sought. I can't be sure if the rejection was due to the flawed resume, my age, or, most likely, another candidate who was better than me. I get to learn something from each reason. And, as we know, learning life's lessons is just so much fun.
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