I've always struggled with resumés. The paper, career-orientated version of my life is one-dimensional at best. Here's what it looks like, more or less: Built one of the first local classifieds websites. Graduated with an honors degree in Computer Science. Worked in educational technology at the Un...
Forget the ‘Now‘ page, or even the ‘About’ page, this sounds like the type of thing every personal website should have. Or for folks like Ben, just subscribe to his website and read everything. Over time you’ll get the same effect.
I’ve had Ben Werdmüller’s post “What you’re proud of” marked as unread since he posted it almost two weeks ago:
I last had to update my CV almost three years ago and I hated it. I always hate it. It’s such a false, fabricated representation that everyone knows is false – we just accept it as the norm and look for a few key words to establish some relevance to the role being applied for.
We make a big fuss about competency (rightly so) and want to ensure that someone will be be a good fit for the team (equally as important) but are not set up to demonstrate this beyond a few crappy questions in interview that are likely to have rehearsed “best fit” answers.
I’ve conducted at least a couple of dozen interviews (as one of the interviewers not the interviewee) over the past couple of years and they always go better when veering off script, when just talking and trying to get a feel for the person rather than ensuring they tick the boxes for the scoring system.
Ben goes on to say:
Blogs are (or should be) “the story of a person” if written well but it is not practical to trawl through the archives to see the bigger picture.
I was mulling this over until Chris Aldrich commented:
And that’s such a good idea!
Whether it needs to be a separate page or could be incorporated into the About page doesn’t really matter, but having something to more easily tell your story and what you’re proud of would be so useful.
Conversely, some kind of “Failure Resumé” – those moments you’re not so proud of and how you’ve dealt with them – could reveal more about you than you realise. (H/T Patrick Rhone)