Padding Your Resumé
Not too long ago, I wrote about the tension between managing commitments and missing opportunities. I know that building one's resumé is an issue for students starting as early as high school, maybe earlier. No matter how great you really are, you probably won't get a chance to demonstrate your abilities until you have a job.
It's a strange assumption to make, that people who on a daily basis spend their time handling real responsibilities like feeding a family and maintaining human relationships are somehow less valuable as employees. But that's precisely what employers in general, and law firms in particular, assume. They don't want to talk about your brilliant paper or your work ethic or how your deep understanding of public policy makes you a better lawyer than that schmuck who crammed for finals and forgot everything the moment he saw his 3.9 GPA. They want awards, they want clubs, they want an impossibly high GPA, and they want co-curriculars.
They want Law Review.
At any University, the Law Review is the place to be. It's an academic journal, a place for lofty analysis of legal principles, the kind that judges cite in their opinions. You want a judicial clerkship? Get on the Law Review. Biglaw employment? Law Review. Maybe you want to teach? Law Review again. Editing for the Law Review requires hours upon hours of challenging and often tedious work. But you don't just want it on your resumé. You need it.
I want to edit for the Law Review. At the end of this semester, I will be required to write a casenote and do a technical edit. My performance will determine whether I am invited to participate. For my peers in the top 10% of the class, their performance is irrelevant; they get to participate more or less by default.
I want to edit for the Law Review because I am an academic. Editing articles, analyzing them, writing about them, discussing things from a deeply philosophical perspective, it's what I do.
So imagine my frustration to hear, day after day, from student after student, that they are going to try to get on Law Review, even though they don't really want to. They don't want to do the work to join and they're not interested in doing the work it requires. So...
"Why would you bother?" I ask, feigning ignorance. "It's a lot of work, and if it's not your thing, it's an awful lot of misery."
"Yeah, but I want a judicial clerkship."
"Yeah, but I want it on my resumé."
"Yeah, but employers really like to see it."
A friend of mine suggested this is a lot like young LDS men who serve missions because that's something girls look for in a husband. "Does it not occur to them that it's not the mission they want, but the kind of guy who wants to serve a mission? The kind of guy who values and learns from that experience?"
Indeed. I have no doubt that some of my peers will learn that they really love Law Review, despite their present reluctance. And after all, isn't resumé padding the name of the game? Why should my personal abilities and desires set me apart from my money-grubbing peers? And just what's wrong with money-grubbing, anyhow?
Sorry, I should dial back the cynicism a bit I guess. I'm in jack-borrowing mode. But if I don't make Law Review, I will be angry because someone who is just in it for their resumé will have prevented me from doing something I'm genuinely interested in. And if I do make the Law Review, I will have to deal with people who are not genuinely interested in helping me make the Law Review something great.
Is this the price an industry pays for garnering high wages? The IT industry was much the same in the 1990's (maybe it still is). People who can't really do the job flock to it, ushered by the invisible hand of economics...
But this is turning into a rant. I made it to the semi-final round in the 1L Moot Court competition, so maybe I'll focus on oration instead of editing. In the meantime, there's one more consequence of resumé-obsessed hiring practices. The resumés themselves stop representing the people who write them, focusing on manufactured achievements instead of actual interests and abilities. They turn into something altogether less meaningful.
Wisdom
"And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations.
They're quite aware of what they're going through."
Res Ipsa Loquitur
Media Consumption
What I'm Reading
- Vineland by Thomas Pynchon: I've scarcely begun, but so far its quite compelling.
What I'm Playing
- Chrono Trigger (NDS): Been about ten years since I last played this game. Yep, it's still great.
Recently Watched
- Hancock: A lot of great moments... a lot of stupid moments... a lot of potential both realized and wasted. Worth watching, but ultimately no masterpiece.
Anxiously Anticipating
- 2 December 2008: Grand Theft Auto IV (PC)
- 6 March 2009: Watchmen (the Motion Picture)
- 5 May 2009: Wings by Aprilynne Pike
Comments
Matt
There are plenty of people who are ’successful’ that don’t have either personal ability or genuine interest.
I interviewed with four large corporations when I graduated with my CSE degree and received nice offers from each one (IBM, Microsoft, National Instruments, and General Dynamics). My friend with equal abilities interviewed with all the same places but didn’t receive any offers.
What made the difference? Who knows… Something I did (probably something completely irrelevant to the job) obviously paid off - that and I correctly solved Microsoft’s riddles ^_^
So just play the game. Why should *YOU* get to walk in the front of the line just because you have more interest and ability?! That’s a spot people fight hard for - and they all have their reasons.
Ability and Desire
Indeed–though to clarify, my frustration has less to do with where I think I “ought to be” than with the disconnect between what certain positions are purported to mean and what they actually signify.
As you say, everyone has their reasons, but I think we (as a society) are failing to evaluate those reasons in any meaningful way. It’s obvious that a man who wants to buy a gun to commit murder is qualitatively discrenible from a man who wants to buy a gun to hunt, or defend his family, or because he is a gun collector. I think it is reasonable to say something similar about the difference between someone who wants a job “because it pays well” and someone who wants the same job “because it is interesting” or “because I would be good at it” or even, frankly, “because it pays enough.”
Ability is requisite, but speaking strictly in terms of ability, there is a threshold of competence beyond which candidates become functionally indistinguishable. At that point, I think genuine interest is potentially more important in accomplishing quality work. Indeed, genuine interest can in some cases make up for an absence of ability. I am “better” at math than most people, yet many people with arguably less mathematical prowess nonetheless surpass me, because the most complex calculation I have performed in the last five years was to use the Pythagorean theorem to determine the area of my roof.
In other words, maybe I shouldn’t get to walk in the front of the line just because I have more interest and ability. But I would contend that based on my interest, if not necessarily my ability, the Law Review will be better off with me than with someone whose “interest” is limited to self-interest.
Matt
It’s my opinion that historically those driven by genuine interest have accomplished a lot more than those driven by money or greed. I also agree that the Law Review would do good to have you, as I am familiar with your abilities and interests.
It is a shame that we as society do have such a hard time recognizing such things as this.
So where do you draw the line between bearing false witness and doctoring up our resumes to get a job? Do you think what these money grubbers are doing is morally wrong?
The Way Things Are
Well, “doctoring up” one’s resume is pretty clearly over the line, morally. But “padding” your resume with achievements that aren’t really achievements, or accumulating “bullet-points” just for the sake of having bullet-points seems to be a similar quality of behavior, even though it’s not technically “lying.”
I mean, if you are on Law Review (or whatever other achievement you want to put here), then you probably got something out of it even if you didn’t really intend to. But you probably cheated yourself, and in a sense you’re probably cheating your employer–assuming your employer sees “Law Review” and assumes you participated in Law Review because you’re interested in that sort of thing.
But of course employers know that students do everything they can to “pad” their resumes with achievements. So is it really that deceptive? The question then becomes, if Law Review is presumed to be a bullet-point, how do people who are genuinely interested in that sort of thing demonstrate their qualitative advantage to potential employers?
In other words, if we take achievements at face-value, resume-padders can fairly be said to misrepresent themselves to some degree. Whereas if we assume achievements are all just trials people endure for the sake of better employment, then it is the truly interested who find themselves unable to communicate their value as employees. But neither approach allows people to manifest interest, only achievement.
Exempli Gratia: When I was managing support for Go Daddy, I found this very frustrating. I had difficulty screening applicants because one guy would have A+/MCSE/Cisco certifications and yet be totally clueless when I asked him technical questions, while another guy would have a high-school equivalency and three months experience answering tech support calls, yet be an absolutely brilliant technician. Their resumes were actually worse than nothing because their bullet-points told me nothing and were in fact often deceiving.
I guess that’s why this post is filled with such inarticulate rage. d^_^b It’s not that my peers are doing anything strictly immoral. They’re just buying into a flawed system, which one way or another is flawed at my expense. And I can’t even preach that they should reject the system, because unless thousands of students at hundreds of schools simultaneously agree with me, my peers would actually be disadvantaged by their more strict adherence to honesty.
It’s the way things are. There’s really nothing I can do about it. But it frustrates me all the same. d-_-b
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