Listing

I can stomach the unbuttoned Valentino jacket with the dark, tapered Levis, a forgiveness resting largely upon this man’s choice of dress shoe. What I cannot abide is the over-starched, triangular vegetable knives he thinks are throwback lapels, urgently threatening my jugular as he leans in to introduce himself. They’re screaming at me in an electric lime and harkening to a decade, three shy of this guy’s birth. Too much retro, not enough metro. It’s a fraught dynamic when there’s a wrinkle in your forehead older than your interviewer.

Now, Jack at the coffee cart, who syncs my daily brew and fresh buttered roll with the uptown express bus opening its rear doors, will tell you that the primary moment of truth in a job interview is the smiley, first impression you make the instant you set foot in the honcho’s office-office. Addie over at the hair salon, I call a barber shop, claims we never quite evolved from the grip mythos of a deal-sealing handshake. She says firm is still key. Mike, the polished, unaffordable, $300-an-hour professional career counselor who owes me twelve favors and is hoping to parlay them into just one big one, has been coaching me on my elevator pitch and repeatedly regaling me with his old client’s personal moment of truth back in ’05.

The way Mike tells it, some wiz visited his target company several days early and pinpointed the best reverberation point in the echo chamber of the all-marble, Citibank corporate lobby. Later, on the day of his interview, he waited in that spot for the hiring manager to come spinning through the revolving doors and then he faked a quick flip-phone call that was a conversational version of his own pitch. His voice bounced all over the walls and floor. Detail, detail, detail, the guy was hired without even having to go through an interview. His moment of truth was characterized as acting on a longshot.

When it comes to landing a decent position, though, those tropes are only really “moments of truth” for the person conducting the interview. They are barely what one could call moments. Not a lick of them has got anything to do with truth. Each is a castaway mote on an imagined periphery, something meant to take a random foothold in a stranger’s recollection that they can later fashion into a bonus check for “finding” you. Yes, you. You who braved thirteen questionable rush-hour stops on the pre-dawn J train; one downhill urine puddle; two codeine pimps; one service dog trying to eat someone else’s comfort dog; a blockade of pushy flyer guys; a barefoot beggar with no shirt and inexplicably nice pants; six randos side-toting volcanically active gyros at eight in the morning; the bubble boy; an open fire hydrant; eleven million pigeons; the invisible forcefield around obvious lawsuit lady; a line of smelly campers waiting for Taylor Swift tickets; the elbow of the jogger going against foot-traffic whilst checking his throbbing neck; a questionable jackhammer operator; a child-swallowing escalator; and a radicalized would-be terrorist who is having a challenging day with his girlfriend — just to plop yourself three feet in front of this stranger’s schnoz. Boom, he found you!

No. In a job interview, I only get one moment of truth, real truth, and that’s right now. It’s not a very impressive little signal, but I can spot it like a hawk on a dying field mouse. Berluti Oxfords is going to pull out of this combination handshake and overly welcoming off-hand to my shoulder to invite me to sit. I’ll thank him. He’ll do his best GQ fierce around the titanic hickory desk whose purchase price could’ve fed three ex-employees’ families for a year while I bend into the armless, most artsy, minimalist, visitor chair, trying to defy gravity in a way that doesn’t cause a fake fart noise on the leather cushion. I’ll adjust once, to greater pains than before, and then sit motionlessly at attention. He’ll end up in a gently diminishing sway in his sasquatch cathedral of a chair, striking some pose where he tries to make lumbar support look breezy and cool. I’ll gesture to hand him the résumé from my leather binder. It’s arduously formatted, painstakingly constructed, and expensively printed on thirty-two pound linen paper in eggshell crème. It’s made it through a nerve-wracking minefield of transfers without a single blemish or ding to any corner — Kinkos manager; to Kinkos kid; to wrongly sized free folder; to overpriced manila envelope; to sauna subway tunnel; to kitchen table covered in sweaty glasses; to wife’s hands; to mine; to cleaner wife’s hands at my insistence; to lopsided drawer; to zipped binder; to little wobbly table by our door; to unzipped binder when I checked the résumé was still in there; to the same on Tuesday when I forgot the answer; to coffee cart proxima; to three public transportation hubs; to unique pronoun receptionist who handed it immediately back; to this yahoo’s interview.

He’ll refuse it. He’ll verbally note that he has a copy on his desk, indicating the last of his office’s mistakenly Valentine’s pink, bulk order printer paper upon which the job search website has parsed and incorrectly re-congealed the demanding triumphs of my career into a useless Courier font that spills over margins set to imaginary numbers. That one has been spooled to some refurbished travesty of off-brand Meca Godzilla, streaking faint vertical toner lines down the length of my hard-won history and crimping on select legible text in favor of revealing how their printer wildly misaligns every lowercase g, q, j, and p, all while failing to print page two. Then he’ll ignore the pink printout to look at my entry on his phone. I’ll replace mine to its protective pocket, accidentally dog-earing every corner in the maneuver. He’ll spend forty-five seconds futilely trying to figure out how to scroll in all four directions on his tiny screen before giving up. Then, he’ll place the phone, face-up, at arm’s length onto whatever part of the desk most amplifies vibration and, right there, I have my moment of pure and unadulterated truth.

His transition back, from touchscreen to actually starting the interview, has a tell. We’re only a few seconds into our acquaintance, but he’ll either jump directly to the all-important, interview eye-contact harped upon by everyone from my bow-legged postal carrier, Sonny, to Darla, the loneliest TSA agent at LaGuardia, or he’ll engage in a quick wrestle with the pink résumé, looking for something to talk about. When it’s the latter, I know he hasn’t read a single line.

In the Himalayan mass of bothersome derelictions that pass for a 21st century applications process, such is a capital peeve of mine - interviewers who haven’t read a résumé. You can tell in a matter of milliseconds. There’s one type of glance at the page that’s just a person tardily making certain they got my name right, three feet and as many seconds ago. Sometimes there’s a pat glare verifying that the assistant who did the heavy lifting of putting a single sheet of paper on his desk, chose the correct person’s documentation. Apparently, that’s a rampant problem in the corporate sector that no one thought to reverse by changing hiring practices. There’s also this tiny, down-up glimpse, at speed, that I’ve since determined has something to do with false confidence in instantly sizing-up hundreds of résumés on-the-fly, but full-on corporate anxiety attacks at even the mere inkling of someone having submitted a proper curriculum vitae. But the last look, the wided-pupil, page-bouncing, tight-jawed, noggin dance that resembles the panic when your cainophobic friend’s favorite donut is sold out behind the glass display, that one’s the tell. Again, it’s milliseconds in delivery, but fully detectable by the onlooker when you know how to spot it. These extra-fractional tics are spent frantically scanning your now impossible salad of wordage for some shared key term to break the ice. He wants to find a single spot that reads, “Harvard” or “Boeing” or “Footsie.” But, too rushed for eyes to land on anything other than my professionally metaphoric use of “concierge,” which he silently misunderstood as “consigliere,” and we’re off to the races with an opener resembling, “So tell me. Why DO you want to work here at Idiot, Moron & Lunk?”

My interviewer had two jobs, and he thinks that sitting on his ass through the second, successfully fakes that he’d completed the first. It’s an insult because I’ve been ignored. It’s a peeve because it’s, nowadays, going on a 50/50 shot, citywide — who does and who doesn’t consider reading comprehension a skill outside of poorly captioned ’Grams and loose delivery promises in the Temu fine print.

There’s an entire industry devoted to identifying and discerning creative methods to convey any applicant’s highly individualized, personal pluses to a hiring manager, often in a fashion that absolves them of reading. It’s called outplacement, an unfortunate name for an industry too often confused with outsourcing jobs overseas or displaced people needing social services here at home. It resembles neither. It’s a wildly successful sector offering frequented high-end seminars, trainings, mock negotiations, franchising opportunities, skills refreshers, pitchbook construction, career matching, pitch building, interview coaching, and even redeployment within the organization you do not wish to leave. But getting through the résumé basics with ten experts on the case is a chore.

Repeat these key words to supplant the digital gatekeeper. Use active terms versus passive ones. Grate numbers over the whole of your accomplishments like a parmesan cheese. Type “synergy” a lot. Tiny, square bullet points are all the rage. Dare to use a complex sentence in your cover letter, but only if it’s surrounded by simple sentences, contains no more than one comma, and the whole of the body is limited to a single paragraph not exceeding 200 characters. Remember, people don’t want to see your semi-colons. Avoid accent marks, even if that’s how you spell your name. If you earned more than $60,000 a year, your résumé should fill two pages, but three is a cardinal sin. Printers hate narrow margins. Adverbs on a résumé are veritable career suicide! Yet even with all that and ten thousand other hoops hurtled through to get into the torture device I am only ironically referring to as this chair, there’s still the matter of concocting a wow factor, on or off paper, as if a résumé were a post-hypnotic suggestion grenade.

1988, the twenty-fourth candidate for a lighting design position in an off-Broadway theatre walks though their double doors and forks over a résumé. Everyone had similar experience, but in the header where the lot had identified themselves as lighting designers, this person self-described as “Designer of Light and Shadow.” Hired! No reading.

2005, the eighth graphic designer whose résumé had landed them preliminary interview time enough to show off their portfolios was the final person in the full bunch to have constructed their résumé from plain Microsoft Office templates. The ninth incorporated her own graphic design elements into her original résumé. Hired! No reading. No portfolio review.

2016, last interview in a series of three each, for three separate, short-listed candidates seeking the Department Head role in English at a well-known university. That was, until the newly minted and very green vicechair pointed out that pursuant to an HR typo in the questionnaire meant to accompany each application, every last candidate had both missed and personally repeated in their answers, the word “compliment,” when the context called for “complement.” Hired! No reading. Almost no pertinent experience. Vicechair was now Provisional Department Head, skipping four levels from his previous station.

My interviewer cannot yet tell that the bulk of my experience hails from the outplacement industry. Mainly, he cannot tell because he clearly doesn’t read résumés. I am insulted for all job applicants, not just myself. He cannot fathom I am sitting here with a colleague’s best advice running on a loop in my head, “Either he’s going to hold your age against you, or he’s not. If he is, there’s nothing you can do about it. If not, there’s nothing to worry about.” This guy’s lax review practice is the darkest shade of an abysmal quasi-morality that is the sudden social acceptance of what many other interviewers do as a matter of course. They read the résumé and immediately disregard its content. I should not be surprised when people who video-chat all day to minimized, 2D faces in the crooks of their aching palms cannot make eye contact across a deep desk for more than one blink. Or worse, making in-person eye contact gives them anxiety enough to forget what they’ve asked and to not listen to my answers. My industry only exists, can only, at all, function on the driven predilection that there also stands a low bar, a hard deck at the base of common human decency, respect, and communication below which even the worst hiring manager is unwilling to go. We can study everything that might proceed from that hard deck, all that might occur above it on a histogram. But we cannot study what you don’t do, what you won’t do, what you failed to do.

While I begrudge none of the storied hirees either their landed positions or their noteworthy, wow-factor methods, from echo chambers to the now novel idea of demonstrating a competitive mastery of English when looking to head a department named after English — I remain conflicted. Having navigated a career in outplacement means that I know, for every story I hear about the woman who landed her dream role simply because her stellar business reputation preceded her or about the fellow who got a magic foot in the door by joining his boss’ niche online group of fantasy-subway-map enthusiasts, there are between eighty and a hundred other people a pop who, for months upon months, drudged through every last particular they were supposed to address to perfect their résumés and make shine their interview techniques. Against the backdrop of the thousands of thoughtless, spammed, knuckle-dragging résumés from Myanmar that bots have piled up digitally on the company email servers, this handful of folks have researched and personalized every cover letter, targeted specific best fits, heeded guidance about every minor detail from staple placement to kerning to accessibility mainstays to editing until the narrow breaks between résumé sections would fall right where folds would appear should ever civilization crash and we start mailing things again. They have spent a huge chunk of their lives, reducing said lives to a list. They write, and re-write, and again, all while a nonstop chorus of expert advice harmonizes almost demonically with the voices of every Tom, Dick, and Harry at the library and the dry cleaner chanting, “Start over! Make your list more exciting! Start over again! Make your list a readgasm!”

I like when folks find a shortcut to a job, a good one. To whatever degree one might refer to America as “an experiment,” amidst whatever else, it only ultimately succeeds if everybody who can work, does. Laudable shortcuts embolden that, they help make it happen. Yet, there remains something lugubrious about an increasingly common job search landscape which ensures that, not only will these impeccable, dazzling documents, remain forever unread, but, as in my case today, remain completely untouched as I attempt to hand it along. And this to the one guy who is supposed to want to see it. Did I say untouched “documents?” I meant unvalued lives. Welcome to my life as a list.

So, today, I’ve taken a wow-factor cue from those who’d leapfrogged the process. I’ve tried something new. Here’s the moment of truth that I’m seizing. My interviewer, all up-branded watch with his drop fade haircut and pounding Paco Rabanne cologne, he’ll make small talk about what they are looking for in a candidate and he’ll listen with half an ear as I answer whether I think I’d be a fit. I’ll crowbar in some commentary about my career highlights, driving home an anecdote about the boisterous, billionaire captain-of-industry who insisted I should use him as a reference and dare to place his name and personal cell number right at the bottom of my résumé. I’ll mention off-handedly that the captain is a bit full of himself and refused to get sidelined to lesser documents bearing the contact information for my second-to -last, since-fired middle-manager and my most recent interim head of HR looking to avoid further unemployment payments. At the name drop, this guy will salivate a little, jerking his attention from incoming texts in his not-so-peripheral vision to an excitedly renewed interest in the pink page in front of him. He’ll report that he doesn’t see the name or number there and I’ll remark on how his company's web platform wouldn’t allow me to individually parse non-résumé data into the résumé section of the site. Offering him a bone, I’ll say something like, “Don’t worry, I’ll leave you with my own copy when we’re done.” We’ll move on, chatting and discussing my professional merits via his now honed focus on my candidacy, a conversation into which I’ll sprinkle a humble-sounding, but not too overdone, cavalcade of lucks into which I’d fallen when several predecessors turned out to be sadly unable to do their jobs correctly. We’ll finish on some high note. It will include a shared laugh. He’ll round the desk again for a final handshake. I’ll cut that one short, feigning that I’d almost forgotten to leave him my copy. I’ll tender it. He’ll take care not to rudely read it right away while we are still interpersonally trademarking our pleasantries. I’ll to the elevator and he’ll shut his door.

When he doesn’t see the name and number at the bottom of that one, he’ll start going through my most excellent content. However, this time, rather than listing out everything I’ve done professionally and every place I’ve worked myself to death, impressive job titles and spans of years that peg me as nearing AARP; I’ve replaced each section with an aspersion on poor HR practices, each bulleted entry with a pet peeve. It’s a menu of misgivings about the employment process, a list of well-phrased wrongs, starting with an objective section that speaks of my intention to root out insulting, disrespectful, and half-assed interview habits, city-wide. Behold my Peeves Résumé, the trainwreck one now cannot refrain from reading in full! My would-be profile section will plainly paint me as a finder of flaws, after which, what would have been job titles and responsibilities catalogued in their greatest scope and scale, will instead flush out all the hiring manager “don’ts” of an application process. I doubt he’ll realize that the order in which I’ve listed them could only so closely match the order in which he’d demonstrated each transgression pursuant to my seasoned experience in such matters. “Experience,” a word mentioned fourteen times in their job post and eighteen times in the recruiter’s breakdown of the role before sending me to HR K-pop and their leader, Don YouTube.

I do, though, think he’ll take particular note of the adage where my special skills section would otherwise be. We never covered my research skills or my ability to take the most esoteric corporate practices and assess their impact on the bottom line, but I always perform my due diligence and I hope it shows through. That last passage notes how I’ve already honed the included points into both a pitchbook and a departmental overhaul proposal that I’ve presented to his C-Suite ahead of his boss vacating her own higher position a week from now. If Nick Jonas ever flips to page two, he’ll see that I’ve included a parenthetical.

(Don’t worry, I told your CEO that I’m sure your department would never engage in any of these heartless, costly practices. I furthered that all we need to do to start saving a cool $2M is to canvas honest assessments from a list of applicant phone numbers we already have.)