Recently a dear friend visited from Texas. He remembers her and happily greeted her when she arrived for her welcome dinner and presented her with his stuffed bunny, his challenge to the endeared one to play a game of keepaway.
A few days later when she was leaving, he panicked when he saw the suitcase, neatly packed and deposited by the front door. He pouted, got that hang-dog, world coming to the end, it's all about me and I know this means Mom is leaving again look as he sat, shown here, guarding the suitcase. He jumped to conclusions, as old dogs are prone to do, and he was in fact wrong. And boy did he make himself miserable with worry.
As most things do these days, this makes me think about the job-hunting process and how easy it is for people to make assumptions and then take subsequent actions based on incorrect information. More than one headhunter has looked quickly at my resume and commented that most of my career has been working for the federal government, when in fact I have had exactly one federal position and at least 9 others. Because they don't know what "government relations" means, they assume that it means working for the government but it is really a misleading term for lobbyist, which is vastly different than working for the government. As with old Dallas, trying to convince someone who has made an incorrect assumption that they need to re-examine the facts is probably futile.
My answer to the dog and suitcase problem is to hide the suitcases from him until time to go out the door, then put the dog out the back door while the suitcases go through the front. As for the headhunters or hiring managers, I learn a little something from each of them. I have made changes in my resume to make clearer the positions I have held. The key to survival, and moving a little further ahead in this game is to learn from mistakes, be they my own or others'.
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