I grieved it for one week. Then I built the resume.
The resume required a translation I had not done before. When you work in one place for eighteen years, you stop describing your work in terms that make sense to people outside that place. You use shorthand. You assume context. My first draft used phrases like “managed account portfolio” and “assisted with client relations” that made me sound like a middle manager in a generic service industry rather than someone who had maintained a thirty-percent-of-revenue client relationship through two contract renewals and a scope expansion.
Sophie read the first draft and said it was too modest. Sophie has known me for eleven years, since we both lived in the same apartment complex in our early thirties, and she has a directness I rely on specifically because it is calibrated to accuracy rather than comfort.
She said: “You’re describing yourself as supporting the work instead of doing the work. These should be active sentences.”
I rewrote it. “Managed client portfolio representing thirty percent of annual company revenue” is accurate. “Developed exception management protocols that reduced service failures by measurable margins across a multi-carrier network” is accurate. “Led account relationship and quarterly service reviews for major retail client over nine-year period” is accurate.
All of these were harder to write than the modest versions. All of them were true.
The resume went out in the third week of September. Four applications in the first week. Two callbacks. One interview.
The interview was at a mid-sized freight brokerage. The hiring manager asked intelligent questions. I answered them well, I thought. I left feeling cautiously good, which is my version of optimistic.