My Real Good Communication Skills
A moral conundrum
Way back when, before most humans had ever owned their own computers, when only a very few of us could connect to the Internet and even fewer had email, my wife had a Word Processing Service.
She was able to do this was because her husband was a geek. I knew about computers and I had bought her one along with a beautiful daisy wheel printer. That printer was expensive, but it distinguished her from the very few other people providing these services because it produced output that looked like it was typed. Even better, it could proportionally space that output, which was very impressive for the time.
Her business did well and, at the request of some customers, expanded into offering a resume preparation service. She was well suited to this as she had worked a number of years for a head hunter. She knew how to turn a hand scrawled list of jobs into a very professional resume with an introduction that she knew would get attention. She was very good at that.
Sometimes people preferred to write their own resume and only wanted her to print out multiple copies. That was a waste of her talents, but the customer is always right.
Or are they?
One night she showed me a resume she had been asked to prepare. The first line was a bit unusual.
Objective: To work in a company where my real good communication skills will be appreciated
I raised my eyebrows. “You have to fix this”, I said.
She shook her head. “This is what he gave me.”
I protested that he could not possibly get the job he was seeking with that introduction. Sooner or later someone would explain this to him and that would reflect badly on her. He might even blame her.
“But it’s what he gave me!”
I saw her point. A note attached to the resume explained that because his work experience was highly technical and very unusual, she would have to be very careful to prepare it EXACTLY AS HE WROTE IT.
“We cannot let him do this!” I insisted.
She countered with “How do you tell somebody with real good communication skills that they have real bad communication skills?”
Yeah, that might be a bit hard to pull off.
I remember going back and forth on this for a while. It truly was a difficult situation. I do not know what we changed it to, but we did ultimately make a significant change to that sentence.
And then we wondered if we were complicit in lying by omission to whoever would hire him.
I hope that he did get the job and that his real good, no doubt extraordinarily real good, communication skills were appreciated.
And I hope that he got to keep the job for a while.