De-Tooling a Resume

Dave Atkins’ resume was good enough to land the last job, but just barely. It’s amazing what a little perspective will do. When I re-examined my resume that I had simply updated with my current job information, I was shocked.

I had already sent the resume to an awesome company, Carbonite, which is building out data centers to support their online backup solution, and where I am pursuing a position as their Director of Operations. But after having someone else read over my resume, I realized what I had constructed two years ago…is not me. As a critical, skeptical person, I had listed the activities of my jobs to prove that I knew what I was doing. But in doing so, I think I gave the impression I was a “tool”. I need to fix that.

Here’s an example of how I described my work at QuitNet.

As a senior member of a small, cross-functional team of 7 engineers, I am responsible for troubleshooting technical issues involving our database servers, web servers and related systems. I work with a database developer, several web developers, a product manager, project manager, and chief technology officer to coordinate the overall workflow and troubleshoot problem areas. I also coordinate work with a remote hosting company as we transition from self-hosting to managed hosting of our web services.

In addition to managing the growth of our technology infrastructure from beige-box servers in a closet to collocation in two cages at a commercial facility and ultimately managed hosting, my principal individual contribution has been as a database developer and administrator of 15 Microsoft SQL Server databases. I have developed dozens of custom monthly and ASP/VBScript-generated Excel reports that are a key deliverable to dozens of our customers.

OK, it is accurate and it describes that I did hands-on work. But it sounds like I was just along for the ride. I asked myself, what results did I actually deliver in the 4 1/2 years I served at QuitNet? What did I do, from the day I walked in and met Mike, our programmer guru who single-handedly built the software powering the service and performed weekly miracles, and Matt, who managed IT operations and handled the helpdesk? Did I just pitch in and help? No. I:

• Planned and executed multiple server relocations to collocation facilities with minimal service disruptions to meet scaling requirements as demand for services grew.
• Architected failover, redundancy, backups and disaster recovery procedures for applications and database components of the online service critical for serving large corporate clients and government agencies.
• Created custom service reporting metrics to provide additional value to clients and drive internal, data-based decision-making during product development.
• Drafted operations architecture, IT security compliance, privacy and legal components of responses to RFPs and grant applications.
• Managed small team of developer and systems engineer to deliver professional service results with minimal budget and resources.

My original resume also included this pathetic section at the end:

Technical Skills
I am not looking for a programming job or to be a sysadmin, but I have hands-on experience with the technologies I manage. I am capable of quickly getting up to speed on whatever is necessary and working with engineers at the implementation level.

It actually make me angry to read that. I guess I felt I needed to prove that I had substantive skills? I didn’t want to sound like I was “just a manager.” The inner gremlin of self-doubt was saying, “people won’t believe that…you need to show that you know SQL and can read code…” I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t want to be boastful, arrogant, entitled–whatever.

But the fact is, I am capable of anything. While I was working at QuitNet, I thought about becoming an attorney, so I took a night class, studied for and passed the Massachusetts Bar Exam on the first try–10 years after graduating law school. When I was a student at MIT, I couldn’t decide on a major, so I got two degrees. In law school, I was looking for more creative things to do so I published a weekly newspaper and organized a Presidential campaign…then ran for County Chair of the Democratic Party.

But in crafting a resume…I tried to narrow it down…to avoid confusing the reader. I don’t know what to do with all these other things that are a part of who I am and I find myself embarrassed in an interview where some guy asks me what the command is to install a binary rpm. I’ll tell you what the command is…it’s “google rpm install.” Now what’s the command to fix DOS carriage returns that get copied over to a unix system in a text file? That would be “:$s/^v^m//g” I figure it out.

So my task is really to work over that resume and make it all about results, not about how I spent my time jogging over to the colo to push the power button on the frozen server, but how when we upgraded our bandwidth and changed the circuit, nobody noticed the disruption. I’d love to tell the story of all the unanticipated things that went wrong and how I dealt with them, but…that’s my job. It should just work. And because I’m good, it does. But I’m great and I deserve to find a company that will challenge me to prove it.

My LinkedIn profile is not my resume–it is broader and designed to communicate the larger story of who I am. And if you want to learn how I’ve used blogging to become engaged in my community, you can read this magazine article about me. But I need my resume to be much more effective to get the right attention. I’m getting there and of course, I’ll post a link here when it’s done.