Get More Employment Interviews: If Resumes Could Talk

How to Tell the Real Story, As If We Could Ever Get Anybody to Read It All

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Now that I am over 65, and retired from the job of seeking gainful employment, it has dawned on me that most people who might have read any of my resumes and job applications, could not have appreciated the experiences I actually had.

What follows, if resumes could be written as memoirs, is an excerpt from mine.

In 1992, I got my MS in Management from Antioch University. This was a degree in the people side of management. A change agent’s dream. This might seem an odd leap, but I was driven.

I had spent six years bucking packages, wearing a brown polyester uniform, and hoping in and out of truck-looking “package cars” for United Parcel Service before grad school. My customers knew me as Elly UPS, no relation whatsoever to Alley Oop!

I liked it because something new happened every single day. I got to know who lived where, which businesses did what, and who was related to whom in that third generation alcoholic, former machine tool town situated between the Connecticut River and Unity New Hampshire. Just north of Old Fort #4. And yet, every day on my industrial route in Claremont was pretty much the same. It was the rules and roles of the company that made sense to me at first, and the money, $17.50 per hour in the 1980s. Pretty good back then, but we had to run fast for it, usually 9.5 hours per day.

I once created a database of hard to find customers. Because I was frustrated by the same old systemic mis-delivery problems. I took database and public speaking classes on the company dime. Used tuition reimbursement, a company benefit. Then I presented how we did it, for three years in a row, at district-wide Service Awareness Conferences in Manchester.

The biggest problem however was that my fellow drivers stopped sharing information with me. They’d learned things the hard way. Their area knowledge belonged to them. At least, I thought, we could have stopped calling up our PO Box customers, and once we’d found them and the package was delivered, discarding their location information. Technical solutions can’t always solve human behavior and process problems.