by Chris Thelen

Created on: February 28, 2009

What's in a Name

In the world of resume making, we like to throw a lot of names around of places we have worked. The bigger the name, the more we hope it will impress someone to give an interview. Yet it's the names between the lines on a resume that usually have the bigger impact on a career.

For me it was names like Boyd, Heinze, Dave at Case Tractor, Dennis and Halibran. People who had no self-interest in helping my career people who just gave me an opportunity at a time when I needed it. In some instances, they pulled me up after I was down.

After my company let me go, I had to tell my client Dennis I would not be working with him. "We want to work with you, not those guys," Dennis, said. "They're a bunch of jerks for doing that to you." He promptly told me what to do so I could still work with him as a contractor. The work he provided helped me pay the bills for my young family for eight months until I found another job.

There was also Dave at Case Tractor who put me on track to get my first job out of college. I was a college graduate languishing in grad school, blanketing the country with resumes. "I don't have any job openings right now," Dave called to tell me after receiving my resume. "But I'll let you know if I see anything." I thanked him and expected I would not hear from him again.

A month later, he sent me a copy of an ad for a writer at John Deere. On a brief note stapled to the ad he scribbled, "They're my competitor, but if you get a job there it will always look good on a resume." As it turned out, Dave's efforts helped me land my first job writing advertising for John Deere. He was also right about the John Deere name. It helped me land the job where I met Dennis.

However, Dave would have never seen my resume it wasn't for the name Heinze, an advisor in the college of Agriculture who I met in graduate school. When the Journalism school said, that I did not have enough writing experience, he showed me how to market myself. He helped me take my farming background and turn it into an asset. "Not many kids grew up on a farm," he told me. We assembled a list of businesses in agriculture and sent out more than 50 resumes across the Midwest. Dave received one of those resumes.

Of course, without the name Boyd, I would have never made it to graduate school and met Heinze. When my college said I could not graduate because I needed four more credits of Journalism, Boyd came to the rescue. Boyd was a professor in the Journalism school who I had gotten to know over a couple of semesters. He let me do a four-credit independent study in Journalism so I did not have to do another semester of undergraduate work. Without his assistance, I would not have been able to go to graduate school.

Even with the connection of all of these names, there is another name that started it all Halibran, my high school English teacher. It still amazes me how he could look at a very average student like me and see a writer. His encouragement helped a farm boy like me take a serious interest in writing. That led me to major in journalism in college which led me to great names like Boyd, Heinze, Dave at Case and Dennis.

There are many other names of people who helped move my career forward. Along the way I have tried to live out what Dave at Case told me so many years ago when I called to thank him for helping me get the job at John Deere. "Just help someone else out along the way and I'll consider that enough of a thanks." I hope that I will be a name between the lines of someone's resume.

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