To the pickledick who looked at my resume this morning

Dear pickledick,

I'm sorry I don't know your name. Or who you are. My resume found its way into your hands via your hairdresser, an acquaintance of my fiancé. When my fiancé had done said acquaintance a solid, she was asked if there was anything she could do in return. "Find my fiancée a job," she said, half joking, half fed up.

You see, although I've been unemployed for just a few weeks, and have had several interviews, my fiancé has learned that I don't do well without a job. I don't relax. I am the energizer bunny of applying to jobs, doing laundry, dishes, errands, and just not stopping. It's hard to live with, I guess.

The hairdresser said you would be coming in the next day and that you might be looking for a writer for some videos. She said she would pass on my resume.

I wasn't really expecting much from the whole thing, but figured it wouldn't hurt.

So the hairdresser comes in today and tells my fiancé how viscerally the guy reacted to my resume. Under my job duties at the small newspaper I worked at 10 years ago, I have:

· Reported city and county government, agriculture and business news

· Generated, wrote, shot photos and designed features on art, lifestyles, family and

religion for the weekend section under tight deadlines

· Formatted content for obituaries and opinion and pulled copy for food and

entertainment features

· Copy edited paper according to AP style

Straight forward, includes a sense of the many duties I juggled, active verbs, no biggie, right?

Nope.

This guy I guess went off on the fact that I included obituaries and food in the same bullet point. That's a criticism I can handle and consider as I continually revise and refine my resume. It's what came next that makes me hate you. A lot.

You said it doesn't surprise you that I haven't been hired yet because of this resume. That it isn't written in sentence form. That I included obits and food in the same line.

"This guy is a terrible writer," you said. "The thing that bothers me about writers is that I can write better than any of them."

My fiancé, god bless her, took this criticism relayed from the hairdresser and said it seemed a bit overboard. The hairdresser stood on the side of her client, who is a millionaire, so obviously he knows what he's talking about. He said he would look again if I fixed all the issues.

OK, pickledick, here's where you went wrong. You went from professional courtesy to professional asshole. It's a pretty thick divide between the two, so I am impressed with your ability to straddle both worlds.

One, I've been unemployed for a couple weeks, and have already had 4 interviews, so I must be doing something right. Also, your attitude toward writers in general seems overly negative. Did a writer molest you as a child? Is that how you got your millions?

The thing I've learned from reading a dozen books on resumes from supposed experts in the arena is that they are as variable as snowflakes. Format, style, emphasis varies from person to person, based on a multitude of factors including amount of experience, education, work history and skills. Each expert in these books gave different advice that conflicted with each other. You pick what you like from hundreds of examples and make a resume that works for your situation.

What this amounts to is that you do your best to create a resume that is visually appealing, presents information in a logical manner for that candidate, uses active verbs, and doesn’t include glaring grammatical mistakes. To pretend that your vision of a resume is the only possible way to do them is asinine.

At heart in your attitude is something that I think gets at a deep myth of the Midwest and the country at large. Observing my fiancé go through unemployment for more than a year and the reactions she got from people, reading articles and comments on unemployment, and reading the stupefying, simplistic advise from HR professionals in blogs that point out silly errors in resumes - I have come to the hypothesis that the way we view job hunting and employment is ridiculous. We view those hunting for jobs as flawed, that there must be something they are doing wrong that they continue to search. In America, all you need is the desire to work and it will come. If you are searching for a job and aren't getting one, there must be something fundamentally wrong with you. It's your fault.

This view is most often held by people with jobs.

The unemployment rate would not support that. There are many people out of work, all applying for jobs, and what makes one stand out above others I suggest is more often down to the whims of hiring managers or the computer systems they rely on. I've applied to jobs that I am half-qualified for, I've applied to jobs I'm more than qualified for. I've taken 4 hours tailoring my resume and cover letter to a specific position, I've shotgunned a generic cover letter and resume to 10 jobs in a day. There is no pattern to which ones have called me to talk other than that it's more often smaller companies and that spending four hours on one resume is a waste of effort. Large corporations like GM, UnitedHealth, Cargill and so on send auto-emails that say other applicants more closely matched the position, which is frankly impossible for some of them, as the job is what I have been doing for years beyond what they were looking for and I took pains to include language directly from their posting in my resume.

I talked to someone at Celarity, a hiring agency for creative professionals like me. The guy I spoke to gave me some helpful tweaks to consider, and said part of the issue was that I lived too far away. Now that I am here, and did exactly what he suggested on the resume, I still have yet to hear from them. So the sad fact is you can do everything right even for that particular recruiter and still get stiffed.

This blaming of the applicant is the rally cry of those who have jobs. I'd say it's like blaming the victim, but the connotations inherent in that make me sound insensitive. However, we unemployed are often screwed daily by HR computer systems that reject us for jobs we are more than qualified to do.

In an economy like this, there are many applicants out there with perfectly good resumes that don't get a chance. That's the reality of the market. It's like publishing. I've read a lot of incredible novels and short story collections that will never get published, not because they aren't worthy, but there's only so many books the publishing industry can support.

So, as you get your haircut and throw your judgment around, consider the idea that many others are finding my resume appealing and I haven't been out of work very long. I appreciate the constructive criticism and advice, it's the judgment that you can keep.

And on behalf of all writers and journalists who have been honing their craft for a dozen years, article after article, story after story, novel after novel; on behalf of those who have sought an education in writing to pursue a field of work that, like politicians and teachers, everyone thinks they can do better; go fuck yourself.

Sincerely,

Fargo Jones