The Art (and Science) of Resume Writing

Selfhood and the sell.

It might not surprise you to learn that “T Campbell” is not my birth name. My parents were not huge A-Team fans, nor was I the 20th child in a sequence where they stopped giving us multi-letter names after “Nancy.” So while I use “T Campbell” in many friendly and professional contexts, there are some people—the IRS, for instance—who get the “William Campbell” treatment.

Which one is right for a potential future employer, though? Well, that’s a little more complicated.

For years, I’ve leaned in the direction of “T Campbell” because that’s what I publish under. When you’re telling people “I wrote that book/article/comic series/Substack piece,” you don’t want there to be even a second’s moment of uncertainty where they go “Huh? You didn’t write this, some guy named T did!”

In the early part of the employee-selection process, potential employers are spoiled for choice, usually sifting through dozens if not hundreds of resumes. Any little reason they can find to put something in the reject pile makes their lives easier.

That’s only gotten more true in the era of sorting algorithms that match you with a predefined set of skills. It’s a bit like SEO for your job history—and since that’s a pretty significant chunk of what you spend your life doing, it’s also like SEO for you. Stand up and be judged.

There’s another factor to consider in the era of widespread remote work. If employers aren’t going to be seeing you in person every day, they want some assurance that you’re not maintaining two or three different work identities and checking in with other offices. Failing that, they at least want to disincentivize that kind of behavior. So systems like LinkedIn are relying more and more on government IDs.

I’ve so far resisted the pressure to switch over from being “T Campbell” there to being “William,” but I might change that policy before long. I tell myself it’s a marketing thing: easier to explain that T Campbell did the work marked “T Campbell” than that William Campbell did it. But it might be partly a pride thing. As I said, your work history is much of your life.

There are other unconventional aspects of my career that I’m wrestling with how much to smooth over. One big one is that I’ve been a self-publisher for decades, no matter whether I was part-time or full-time elsewhere. I’ve had part-time positions that overlapped with each other as well.

As a result, I don’t fall into the neat chronology—“Publisher February 2020-current, Assistant Editor May 2016-January 2020, Knowledge Worker October 2012-April 2016”—that the notion of the “ideal” resume promotes. I tell myself that reflects a creative mind and isn’t so unusual in my specific field; some of my friends agree. But today’s employers? Who can say?

Resume-writing experts can probably say, and I’m starting to invest in their advice. A couple of my old offices’ hiring managers didn’t mind, but that’s not always a reliable guide to what people are doing now.

This has only become an issue for me in recent months; I’ve been fortunate enough to have freelance employers—most found through personal relationships—that have kept me contributing to household expenses. But that network’s been eroding for a while. So it's a good time to think about the next phase of my career—and how to position myself to get that phase started.

To be continued as I draw more conclusions. But first, a micross tomorrow…and after that, some crossword prehistory!