I Double Dare You To Apply For a Job This Way

And then PLEASE report back with your success & failure rates 😁

As much as it seems like everyone wants to be an online entrepreneur these days, millions of people actually love having a job and going to work. It fills a particular gap that working from home doesn’t.

But let’s face it, no job is a sure thing. And when you’re in the position of having to find a new one, job hunting sucks donkeys. It’s such an anonymous, personality-lacking, soul-sucking crap shoot out there.

Nothing screams, “You’re not getting this job!!!” like hitting the submit button on a job search site and being notified that 486 other desperate souls applied for the same job.

How in the hell is anyone supposed to stand out in a three-foot stack of lifeless resumes that hold centuries’ worth of work years gone wrong?

Resumes should be required to read like an epic saga…

I have a resume folder on my laptop that contains at least 30 Word docs. They’re all different versions of resumes and cover letters I’ve put together throughout my working life.

My favorite one is labelled, ‘Work Permit Resume.’ That’s the one I created so I could conduct business in Jamaica after I dumped life here in Canada.

I never delete an old resume because each of them is a snapshot of every skill I’ve ever acquired. You never know which ones you might need to copy, paste, mix up, and mash together down the road.

If I were to write my resume as a story from the beginning, the title would be something like:

“Excuse me, Miss? WTF are you doing with your life?”

Without a doubt, the most boring variation of my resume is the corporate version from way back in the day. A third of my career years were spent working for the government.

I’m shocked that nobody has figured out yet that corporate life is not real life.

What a corporate applicant’s resume says isn’t who they are. It’s just a one-dimensional paper version of Tetris consisting of odd, block-shaped pieces plucked from the sky.

The blocks are carefully pieced together to build a human Roomba — someone who floats around at ground level, occasionally bumping into walls until it figures out which way to go next.

The human story behind my corporate resume would be:

“This woman was a single mother who needed the security and benefits of a well-paid, union job. She also needed a mortgage but unfortunately, due to the cost of single-parenthood and groceries, she never did get one.

She can type pretty fast and learn office jargon as well as the next guy so hire her. She’ll stay for the long haul because she needs you.”

Then we arrive at the brave part of life:

This is the footloose and fancy freelance part. This resume is a paint-splattering of skill sets the applicant learned accidentally on purpose because she felt there had to be a better way.

The freelance resume is more like bobbing for apples than a Tetris game.

She held her breath, stuck her head underwater, and whatever she latched onto was jotted into a document resembling a resume. Except this document is full of charm, personality, and horn-tooting - something she never had the luxury of doing before her great escape from Tetris.

The most interesting aspect of the freelance resume is that the dates overlap. If you look closely you’ll notice she began freelancing while still corporate-ing. Much of her travel blog was built on government company time. *wink wink*

This portion of the resume carried the freelancer for many years before she began seeing the benefits of an actual paycheck again.

Still no mortgage, but she’ll be damned if she didn’t write a book, build websites for money, and manage social media all the way to fifty thousand hits. (50K was pretty good in the dark ages of the internet 😁)

Again, the dates begin to overlap.

Except she refused to backpedal to corporate so she fabricated an entirely new identity. She spiced up her resume with complete lies about a skill set she didn’t have.

No job is rocket science unless you’re an actual rocket scientist. Hence, her lies paid off and she entered into an industry brand new to her - hospitality. Turns out she was really good at it, too.

Her late life resume looked like an average person’s early life but she earned the same amount of money in half the hours of cubicle dwellers. This allowed her to freelance to her heart’s content by day and mingle with strangers by night.

She still can’t get a mortgage but she can lounge around in sweatpants every morning and do yoga at noon. It sure beats gossiping by the office water cooler over lunch hour.

💦💦💦

According to my resume folder, I’ve lived several wildly different lives. If I were to compile them all into a single document, A) it would take up sixteen pages, and B) nobody would have a friggin clue what this woman is doing.

All anyone would see is a lack of focus when in fact, each of my work lives has fit into precisely the right slot at the right time.

Would I ever choose to go back to the beginning of the story and completely rewrite it? Maybe, maybe not.

But just think of all the adventure, learning, and outright lying I would have missed out on if I had stayed shackled to a desk.

Weirdest resume contest.

I published an alternate version of this newsletter on Medium a few years ago and

Jan M. Flynn

commented, “One day we'll have to have a ‘weirdest resume’ contest.”

I think this is a brilliant idea.

Have you ever thought about your resume as an untold story? As the evolution of who you were in your floundering years compared to who you are now?

I want you to write it. And I definitely want to read it, so if you decide to accept this challenge, please tag me somehow.

You don’t have to go all

Ash Ambirge

and hammer out a 286-page resume, which, by the way, is the best work story of all time and you should definitely read it.

I challenge you to open up your resume folder, dust off all those Word docs, and write the best damn story you can find hidden among those boring-ass sections we call, “employment history.”

And when it’s done? I double-dog-dare you to apply for a job using it.

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