Making a Good Impression

On Friday I got a call from a woman at the placement agency I'd signed up with a year and a half ago. She has a potential job for me and wondered if I would be interested. Considering that the current project I'm working on is winding down, with an end-date in the next few months, I wondered how sweet life could be to send that my way. I needed to update my resume, of course, so I thought I would work on it over the weekend and email it to her today.

Of course, I don't have my own resume on my home PC - why would I? It's on my sister's, and she's been in NY this past weekend. But I have a key to her house, so I went over there Sunday night to update it and put it on a floppy, but it wasn't on her home PC. It's on her work PC, and she wouldn't be back in the office until Tuesday or maybe Wednesday. So I updated it longhand in my notebook and planned to email the placement agent to ask her to forward my old resume to me at work.

This started off well. I updated it on my morning break, emailed it to her, printed off a hard copy for myself, then put the desktop file in the recycle bin. She emailed me to say there was no attachment. Great - good impression when she's sending me for an admin position! So I opened the document only to find I'd somehow failed to save the update changes. I asked my supervisor if he could scan the hard copy for me, which he did, and I forwarded the pdf file to the agent. She ended up asking me if she could readjust my resume with the updates so it could be a Word document attachment instead of a scanned image.

I suppose I shouldn't worry too much if my current supervisor scans my resume for me, and the agent retypes my resume update in order to present me well. I should just be thankful. And I am.