Resumptuous

Last updated on: February 3, 2009 at 5:18 pm by Fred Clark

Resumptuous 2009-02-03T17:18:23-05:00 Fred Clark

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When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, 'Give this man your seat.' Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, 'Friend, move up to a better place.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted

– Luke 14:8-11

I'm trying to update my résumé.

I really, really, really don't like updating my résumé.

This is partly due, I think, to an inherent WASP-ish aversion to self-promotion, coupled with something like the idea expressed in the parable quoted above. A résumé, the guidebooks all say, is an "advertisement" for yourself, and advertising myself makes me squeamish. I'd much rather advertise anyone or anything else.

That squeamishness itself makes me a bit squeamish because to be perfectly honest it's motivated by an inseparable mixture of something like genuine humility and something like colossal arrogance — the sense that it's wrong or unseemly to pat oneself on the back entangled with the sense that it's wrong or unseemly for me in particular to have to do so.

I've written several times about the foolish pride of faux-reluctant political candidates. We seem to have at least one of these every election cycle, hovering off to the side of the campaign, waiting to be drafted and swept into office by universal acclaim. These clownish figures always strike a pose of extravagant humility, refusing to inflict themselves on the electorate because it would seem uncouth or crudely ambitious for them to travel around marketing themselves to voters. Underneath that humble pose, of course, lurks the opposite idea: that campaigning for office is somehow beneath them — that someone with their qualifications shouldn't have to stoop to sound bites and campaign rallies.

It's easy for me to make fun of such candidates because I understand them. I recognize what they seem to be thinking in all of its comic arrogance.

"Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled," that's relatively easy to understand and to follow. "He who humbles himself will be exalted," is a bit trickier, introducing the possibility of self-exaltation as a motive for humility, and thus for humility as a form of self-exaltation. Eliot's fourth tempter is never far away.

And but so that's probably also part of why I don't like updating my résumé.

But there's more. It's a remarkable thing about human nature that such an arrogant sense of entitlement is not at all incompatible with a wretched insecurity and fear. Putting one's résumé out there, after all, is a form of putting one's self out there and thus introduces the possibility of rejection, or of utter rejection, or of utter rejection with derisive laughter, or of failure, or success or a dozen other potentially unpleasant outcomes.

And then there's the actual task itself. It involves something like writing, but in a form that requires one to avoid all of the ingredients that can make the task of writing a joyful one. Your intended audience is an Internet search engine or, even worse, a human who has been hired to act like an Internet search engine. You're not striving for clarity, concision, economy, accuracy, originality or beauty, but for key words and "action verbs." The relationship between the particular and the universal in résumé-writing is precisely the opposite of what that relationship is in good writing.

Résumé-writing, in other words, is not just an odious chore, but a self-damaging one. It's probably true that everything else being equal, a good writer will compose a better résumé than a bad writer might. But doing so repeatedly, over time, will probably also make that good writer less of a good writer. (For an illustration of this effect try reading almost any corporate annual report.)

Finally, there's an air of pointless ritual about the whole exercise. I like ritual, but not pointless ritual. And résumé-writing is something of a boondoggle.

This isn't really how the job market or the process of job-seeking, job-finding or job-filling usually works. "Sending out your résumé" — or inviting others to send in their résumés — is, like any other kind of cold-calling, an act of desperation that one only resorts to if one has no viable leads to work on. Most sales do not come from cold calls and most jobs are not found or filled from résumés.

And yet, they are necessary.

You will, in all likelihood, land your next job interview the same way you got your last one: through someone you knew or someone you met. I landed the interview for my current job via the actor playing Conrad in a production of Much Ado About Nothing in which I was playing Verges (slapstick and fart jokes are classy when they're Elizabethan slapstick and fart jokes). But when that someone you know/meet offers to arrange said interview, that someone is going to ask you for your résumé so that the person or persons conducting the interview will have something to hold when they ask you what your greatest weaknesses are and you tell them that you're a bit of a perfectionist and a workaholic (mmm, workahol).

Which is why I'm taking the time afforded by my not-quite affordable "furlough" to create, design, implement, install, administer, attain, increase, improve, develop, innovate and provide an update to my résumé.

So, two questions:

Any advice or suggestions? And does anyone know of any Shakespeare auditions in the Delaware Valley?

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