The bad résumé from the barely known

I didn’t get a job in my field right out of college.  In fact, it was most of 19 months between my graduation and when I started working as a technical writer.  In that interim, I had dedicated slots of time for job-hunting.  I spent an hour on it every morning, and my entire Wednesday after work.

Now you can’t tell kids shit, so I didn’t believe him, but my dad told me I needed to be calling and writing people I knew at least as much as I was combing the want ads.  “You’ll get jobs through your personal network,” he said.  Heh.  Yeah, whatever.  He’s a nice guy, but what the hell could he possibly know about this world?

I have pursued and obtained four positions since he told me that, and each one of them was through personal contact.  (Seems the old man knew something after all.)  The currency of these transactions is, of course, the résumé.  I have sent and received many.  As long as I am working, I expect that to continue.

I’m quite happy in my current job and therefore am not looking, but when I am, I try to be picky about the folks who receive my résumé.  I want them to know something about me, mainly—to be able to vouch for me because of personal experience.

I have not found that everyone is as discriminating.

I’ve been doing this since 1994, and that’s a lot of contacts.  There may be as many as 200 people who could send me a résumé, and I’d react enthusiastically.  There are perhaps 50 for whom I’d advocate especially hard.  And there are 4 or 5 for whom I’d go to the ends of the earth.

But it’s these people I barely know who often drive me crazy.  “Hey Bo, can I send you my résumé?”  I say yes, because well, hell, what else can I say?  “No, I’m sorry.  I can’t be bothered to read your email and perform two mouse clicks to get the attached document into my company’s HR database.”

The first problem is that I may not know the person beyond saying hello in the hallway, but even that can be mostly overcome with an excellent résumé.  The second, and far tougher, problem is the bad résumé.  What do you do with it?  Say “hey, you know, this really sucks, but I’ll help you with it for $70 an hour”?  Say screw it and pass it on?  Tell the person you passed it on, and throw it away instead?

Moreover, am I comfortable passing on a document with which I know the person is wallpapering the tri-state area?  Does that say anything meaningful (and negative) about the person’s judgment?

So jump up three paragraphs—am I now at “No, because your résumé might suck”?

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