just like me

I have looked at hundreds amd hundreds of resumes as a director of multiple adolescent and adult treatment programs. The tendency, my tendency, is to take any resume more than two pages and aim it as the nearest trash can. Because reading and evaluating resumes can be crazy making. Like when there’s 50 for one position, with the occasional cover letter as mini-memoir.

So, it’s kind of surprising it took me to the middle of last week – in this multiple-months search for work and needed income – to realize my online resume, the one uploaded to the employment site ‘Indeed,’ the resume accompanying every application I’ve made, prints out at four pages. It’s right here next to me now – all four pages – with references making (gulp) five pages. Ouch, and Duh.

Fortunately, better late than never stories can have some curb appeal, and Friday morning I took out my literary pruning shears and carved, slashed, nipped, and snipped those four pages of (some of) my work history and came away with two. Fresh, clean, facts and statistics kept to a minimum. Now it’s more about general observations. Summary of experiences. The fact is, there’s a genuine “Once upon a time” reading experience with Winston Cushman Jr’s resume now. Yay!!

Who knows how it will translate to the Human Resource robots and AI nerds making those rather important decisions of who gets to share some of their cogent (and relevant to serving others) life skills and work experiences, and who doesn’t make the cut. Dazzled and quite pleased with myself – feeling a bit goofy and devious – I uploaded the lean resume onto ‘Indeed’ to take the place of the brontosaurus already there. Think of the two-pager as more like a grinning raptor.

“Kicks just keep getting harder to find,” may be the case much of the time. But, gratefully, not all of it.