Wolves in sheep’s clothing

I have been spending too much time on my computer recently.  I have been scanning craigslist for employment opportunities and searching for a rental house in the case that we need to move.  After a few weeks of research my conclusion is: things are not what they seem.

I am sure that it comes as no surprise to most people that the things advertised on craigslist are not always what they are advertised to be.  Cover letters and resumes can be  the same but sometimes better than you expect.

When I send off a cover letter or resume I feel like I am sending off a advertisement for myself.  Although you may not me able to guess from my last post, I don’t usually like to call any attention to myself.  I prefer to stay under the radar and make a pretty good wall flower.  Thanks to this blog I feel more comfortable about writing about myself.  It is a good thing too.  I have been spending hours on them trying to let human resources that I am much more than my just my cover letter or resume.  When I look over my final drafts it always seems like the one thing that is missing from these documents is my personality.

We are all usually more than our rehearsed 30 second elevator speech, our bio or our resumes.  When it comes to talking or writing about myself I feel like it is not quite the whole story that I am telling.

For example, in my resume I can write that I have over 10 years in customer service, but what I don’t write is how in little over a year I memorized the names and vessels of over 2,000 different customers.  In my first month working at my last position I observed how my boss seemed to know each customer and their vessel name.  Most fishermen know each other by their vessel name.  It was pretty impressive as I had found that we had about 2,000 different customers in the database.  Each person that came in he would greet like they were old friends.  Due to the nature of our business we only saw our customers once a year.  They would come in for annual service work on their safety equipment.  I noticed how the customers enjoyed that he would remember them and would talk with them.  The customers would comment to me about how they were impressed that he could remember them and how he knew everyone of his customers.  His familiarity with each one of the different customers and vessels gave our customers a sense of trust in him and his company. Trust is important to relationships in business or personal life.  I decided that I since I was on the phone with these customers and would be the first one to greet them when they came in the door, that I would also try to memorize the names and vessels of our customers and vendors.  It took about a year to do this.  Customers would tell me stories.  All kinds of stories, fishing stories, life stories and I would put those stories together with names, faces and their accounts.  Finally I could with confidence, call someone by their name, not just “Sir”.  In the time that I worked there I became more than just the girl in the office.  I knew who they were and they knew that they could count on us to get them what they needed.  I was someone that they could trust.  It helped me to create a real (business) relationship with our companies customers, vendors and make contacts.

Sometimes things are not what they seem.  Sometimes they are better.  Keeping my fingers crossed.