Category Archives: bird

Last Saturday, I heard a ratta-tat-tat outside my window. And though a gray, cold day, it was not yet one filled with midnight gloom, so I had no reason to expect a raven.

I stepped out onto the back deck, and what should I find by a red-headed woodpecker drilling, or rather resting between drills. He was perched on the gutter and appeared to be drilling against the inside or edge of the gutter. As there is a dead tree nearby, the top half with the branches ripped off by a storm a few years back, I had to wonder what lived in aluminum that was so tasty that a woodpecker would pass up a tree that was certainly host to more interesting and edible things, if duller looking.

Now, you might ask, what has that to do with the idea of when to redo your resume. Probably nothing directly. I don’t expect that the woodpecker is carrying around a resume, but it does raise the question of when, while searching for a job or a meal, do you need to change your tactics, if only moderately.

I had to make such a decision recently when I redid my resume. Resumes have never been the best arrow in my writing quiver. But I thought I had a good one. Turns out somebody at a company I had applied for didn’t think so. This information was relayed to me by a recruiter at an agency I was using to apply for the position. There was nothing specific said, other than there were some errors.

After being a bit startled, I went over it, and I enlisted some help in going over it. There were a few things, some of them more a matter of preference, such as for many of my positions further in the past, I had simply listed the year I started and the year I left, with no month on either end. And in a couple of places, I had listed a couple of bullet points in the present tense, while everything else was in past tense. My defense for that was when I put the resume together, those things listed were underway, but not year completed. I was seeing them to their completions. And there were a couple of syntax errors.

I decided to redo the entire resume. I adopted a different style of resume from the one I had been using. I’m not sure I like it as well, but I have been assured by more experienced heads than mine that it is a style more anticipated by those on the receiving end of resumes. And after all, that is who the resume is for.

Now maybe the woodpecker was attracted to the shiny metal of the gutter and missed the tastier, dull-looking thing nearby. Birds are often attracted to shiny things. And maybe I was too attracted by my shiny resume and putting it in the new format allowed me to see some things that might make it a better product. Only time tell. Or it may never tell. I am now using the updated resume, and those receiving it won’t have any chance to compare it to the old one.

Since the information in both versions is the same, maybe the new version will make some of the information easier to see, and I’ll look “tastier” to a potential employer, if not quite as shiny.