The writer Monica Byrne has created an Excel spreadsheet of everything she’s ever failed at. Well, not everything — there are almost certainly some childhood spelling bees or soccer games, or both, left off. But her spreadsheet, which she calls her “anti-résumé,” does include all the rejections she’s received for her creative work over the past six years — over 500 of them.
“Of all the things I’d ever submitted to or applied for,” she writes at The Washington Post, “I’d gotten only 3 percent of them. That’s a 97 percent rejection rate. That means I got 32 rejections for every acceptance.”
The purpose of the anti-résumé wasn’t just to add up the numbers. After two big successes — a book deal and a sold-out run of her play — she writes, “I had a very clear awareness of the context of those victories and felt a growing need to share it.” Or, as she put it on her blog last year:
“This is just my attempt at stating, as plainly as possible, that rejection is the typical landscape of an emerging artist. Or of any artist, period. Some think that there are just some pre-ordained Golden Children who Get Everything, and that’s really not the case — at least, it hasn’t been mine.”
And, she writes at The Post:
“The anti-résumé remains my deceptively simple answer to the question, ‘How do you do it?’: that I persisted during all those years of rejection for no other reason than that I loved writing so much I wanted to spend all my time doing it. Writing must be its own reward, even for the most talented and hardworking writers, or they’re going to have a tough time.”
Hers isn’t the first anti-résumé, but others have sent a very different message. In 2012, a man named David Crandall got some media attention for a slide presentation he called “My ANTI-Résumé Manifesto.” He quotes the author and blogger Seth Godin: “Having a résumé begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine.” And, he assures his audience, “I am not a cog!” Rather, he is someone with “superpowers” including “a superhuman ability (and willingness) to consume large amounts of information and implement it in the real world.” He also makes another brash move, listing the qualities he wants in an employer, like “You believe failures point to a better path to success” and “You appreciate a love for technology and art.”
At Vault, Cathy Vandewater praises Mr. Crandall’s ingenuity. She writes that “traditional resumes alone aren’t really cutting it anymore” and that “with companies too scared to commit — either by refusing to hire externally or making unrealistic qualification and experience demands for outsiders — simply listing a matching job history doesn’t seal the deal anymore.” Mr. Crandall, she argues, “is doing the critical thinking for the company — not expecting them to know where they want to put him, to tell him what his job is, or to motivate him.” And, she writes:
“In the spirit of ‘anti’ résumés, here’s a quick ‘anti-hiring’ list of what companies aren’t looking for:
- Someone they have to train
- Someone they have to motivate or direct
- Someone they need to find a place for
- Someone who’s going to crack under the pressure, workload, or boredom and quit in six months — necessitating yet another long, expensive recruitment process”
Whether it’s reasonable for companies to want employees they need neither train nor direct is a matter of some debate. But whatever the case, the anti-résumé as, essentially, an unusual résumé has become relatively common. In a post titled “Hire Learning: 5 Ways to Craft an Unforgettable Anti-Résumé,” published on Shutterstock’s blog, Lindsay Comstock writes:
“The act of printing out documents has increasingly become a relic of the analogue world, so why think of your résumé in terms of 8.5 x 11? Landing that dream job requires standing out in a sea of boxed, one-dimensional lists of accolades, where the curriculum vitae can be as carefully curated as your social-media presence.”
She also offers several examples, including a video résumé and a video game résumé.
These experiments with the résumé form may reflect a fatigue with the strictures of the conventional job application process, or the fear that, per Ms. Vandewater, our economy now requires an outsize effort just to get a foot in the door. Whatever their motivation, they’re still essentially functional documents, meant to lead to a job.
Ms. Byrne’s anti-résumé isn’t the opposite, exactly — it’s not, presumably, meant to cost her any jobs (she notes that she doesn’t mean to criticize any of the outlets or people who rejected her). If anything, it seems meant to impress on readers that writing isn’t a job, or at least isn’t the kind of job where recognition and money are the main goals. She writes at The Post that she’s already working on her next book:
“I’m 20,000 words in and reminded that just the daily practice of sitting and writing is still the best part. And, like I found that no amount of failure would change that, I hope that no amount of success will, either.”
Ms. Byrne’s message isn’t necessarily applicable to conventional job seeking — it’s hard to get comfortable with rejection if you need to succeed to pay your rent. But when so many areas of life — including résumé making — encourage us to emphasize success, there may be something powerful in cataloging failure.