What We're Reading

Written By
Tom Parrish
MetaTech Sales Guy

Resumes. Thousands of resumes. We love reading people’s resumes. When my wife asks me what I’m reading this weekend, I say, well…I’m reading this really great resume. It’s based out of Boston, and it’s this incredible story about this guy who works as a software engineer for a capital management firm. But what’s really interesting about him is that he’s written this thing in a way that he’s actually accessible to me as a person rather than as a two-dimensional abstraction of him.

And of course, this is the trick in resume writing – creating the “illusion of reality”, so to speak, not unlike a great short story, wherein the reader has access to the thing-in-itself, the real, living person, under the covers of symbolic abstraction.

I used to work for a staffing company where the recruiters would come up to me and say…”Look at this guy! Doesn’t he look great for the blah, blah, blah job?!” And I’d think, well, first off, this isn’t a “guy”, it’s just a two-dimensional symbolic abstraction of a guy. Now, as we all know from our History of Western Philosophy class, getting at the thing-in-itself is notoriously difficult if not impossible, due to the problem that human beings really only know the world through symbols, (i.e. - language, mathematics, art) and don’t have immediate access to being like, say my cat Angel, who’s blessedly not burdened with the fact that thought and language are inextricably bound.

So if you’re sending us a resume, it would be helpful for us if you wrote this thing in a way that we can somehow see you, the real person, so we can move on quickly to what we’re all here for, having a meaningful conversation with you about how we can help you advance your career.