I teach resume and cover letter writing to my composition students as the final assignment of the semester. I do this in part because I work at a New Jersey community college, where the vast majority of the student body are working-class, first-generation, minorities and/or immigrants who have never been coached in how to apply for anything above menial or minimum-wage labor before (its the sort of skill that middle-class white people tend to take for granted–and that rich kids with well-connected families tend not to worry about at all). My students are generally at a community college because they want something better for themselves, but can’t afford anything more name-brand; and since the socio-economic deck is already stacked against them to begin with, I try to give them whatever little advantage I can.

I’m pretty good at teaching resumes/cover-letters, I think; the college Business & Entrepreneurial Club asked me to give a presentation on good resume & cover letter writing just last semester. I myself had learned how to write resumes & cover-letters as a side-hustle in grad school. A buddy of mine had worked for the Utah Department of Workforce Services as an unemployment counselor during the Great Recession; he worked specifically with the “chronically unemployed,” i.e. people seeking for work who had been out of a job for at least one calendar year. It is one of those grossly unfair facts of the job market that, even in times of low unemployment, employers still prefer to only hire people who are already employed (it’s the same irrational urge that makes us pine for lovers who already have boyfriends/girlfriends–or turn down single people who seem too desperate, even when we’re desperate ourselves). He was trained to help these poor souls get their first real job interview in months.

He got good enough at it that when he went away to law-school, he started an online business writing professional-grade resumes & cover-letters as a way to help mitigate his student loans. Whenever he was slammed with exams, he sometimes sent clients my way. Being a broke PhD candidate myself selling plasma to make ends meet, I didn’t turn down the extra grocery-money.

But part of me always wondered if the resume-writing principles we were using were actually effective, or if we were just scamming our online clientele. The rubber finally met the road for me, however, when I then had to apply for those all-too-rare tenure-track positions after getting hooded. Classmates far more brilliant and qualified than I were striking out across the board (even pre-pandemic, we were in the worst academic job market since the Great Depression; college administrators have been slowly but steadily replacing tenured professors with adjuncts for over 50 years now, “oppressing the hireling in his wages” and condemning their own souls). Indeed, I personally knew wonderful scholars and dedicated teachers who’d applied to over a hundred positions nation-wide but only land 2 or 3 interviews tops.

Hence it was with some relief that I, by contrast, landed nearly 30 interviews, at 19 different schools, became a finalist at 7, with job offers from 3. Again, it’s not because I was smarter or more qualified than my peers, mind you, but because I knew to do basic things like, say, emphasize my job achievements instead of my job duties, and adapt my cover letter for the position I was actually applying for (my boss later told me I was selected for interview because my cover letter at least acted like I wanted to work at a community college–something that their many Ivy-league applicants failed to do; the latter obviously assumed that their name-brand degree would overawe the yokels at the junior college level after they had struck out at the university one). Having proven to myself that I really did know how to write an effective cover letter, I have tried to pass on this knowledge to my students.

All of this is ironic because I have always hated resumes and cover letters. Like, with a burning passion. Hate them, hate them, hate them! In all of the resume workshops I sat through as a youth, there wasn’t a single one that didn’t feel like a total and painful waste of my very limited time in this mortal probation. I once told a mission companion that it was my goal in life to never have to write a resume to get a job; he politely wished me luck on my “insane” goal, which was fair, because so very few of us ever get to escape the systems that constrain us–and resumes and cover letters all constrain us indeed. I hate their rigid formalism, their blandness, their artificiality, their fundamental dishonesty, the way you’re expected to curate and market “the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect least,” as Joey Comeau would put it.

Joey Comeau, for context, is a Canadian writer, best known for the acclaimed webcomic A Softer World that he co-created with photographer Emily Horne, which ran from the early-2000s through the mid-2010s (back in the Wild West days of the internet, before social media and SEO-optimization strangled all the life out of it). One of his side-projects was Overqualified: a series of mock-cover letters first posted online, then collected into book form by ECW Press in 2009.

As Comeau tells the story, back in the 2000s when he was a young, job-hunting college-grad himself, his brother was severely injured in a car accident. Suddenly the whole, asinine job-application process struck him as almost comically trivial, a total waste of our one wild life upon this earth. As he describes it on the book’s back-matter: “And then one day a car comes out of nowhere, and suddenly everything changes and you don’t know if he’ll ever wake up. You get out of bed in the morning, and when you sit down to write another paint-by-number cover letter, something entirely different comes out.

“You start threatening instead of begging. You tell impolite jokes. You talk about your childhood and your sexual fantasies. You sign your real name and you put yourself honestly into letter after letter and there is no way you are ever going to get this job. Not with a letter like this.

“And you send it anyway.”

Hugh Nibley, incidentally, would have classified Comeau’s worldview here as “eschatological”–that is, looking towards the Latter-end, or perceiving the world as though it were already ended (something that should interest those of us essaying to be Latter-day Saints), wherein you become suddenly cognizant of just how radically few things really matter in this life. It is a manner of viewing of the world that typically gets triggered by a near-death experience–whether of one’s own self, or of a close loved one (as happened with Comeau). It is an experience that Nibley himself attempted to describe in his devastating Parable of an Eschatological Man^[1]which I in turn used as the basis of a short-story I got published in Dialogue last summer, as noted here just the other day. Hell, it was a perspective shift I myself suffered when my mother died of cancer two days after I got home from my mission^[2]as detailed in a book I’ve also harped on rather shamelessly. Hence, Comeau has often felt to me like a kindred spirit of sorts, someone courageously impish enough to do what I’d always been too shy to try.

I’m not sure when the original run of Overqualified was removed online; all I know is I couldn’t find them when I checked last semester, because I had needed a break from all the dry examples I was sharing in class and business-club workshops, and thought some cover-letter parodies might help to liven things up a but. But oh, how quickly we forget just how quickly we can forget, even in the digital age! For all of our Internet Archives and Waybackmachines and cookie caches and very real fears and anxieties about personal-data-mining by governments and corporations and how nothing ever really disappears online, it can be easy to forget just how so much still regularly vanishes without a trace. “Look into the Bulk of our Species,” wrote the 18th-century essayist Joseph Addison, “they are such as are not likely to be remembered a Moment after their Disappearance. They leave behind them no Traces of Their Existence, but are forgotten as tho’ they had never been”–and this has been proven no less true in the digital age^[3]Perhaps even more so; our total internet archives are but a single solar flare away from oblivion.. It’s why printed books are still so important! (Heck, it’s why the Book of Mormon was written on gold plates). So, I asked for a copy of Overqualified for Christmas; I needed something I could “heft” in my hands, and help save from oblivion.

Having now at last re-read it for the first time since a young college grad myself, I can confirm that Overqualified is one of the most Punk Rock books I’ve ever read, and I mean that as the highest compliment. Because he really was mailing in these cover letters, you see! The book version sadly doesn’t include it, but I distinctly remember him having to post an apology letter to his site, after one of the companies he’d sent a cover letter to had called the cops on him to do a wellness check; from then on out, he decided to only post his mock-cover letters online, so as to not cause anymore stress to real life people just trying to do their own jobs. That was genuinely humane of him! Notably, however, the project didn’t last too much longer after the apology letter: the prankish fun of the project didn’t just lie in writing parodic cover letters, after all, but in actually applying for real-life job-postings with them! Once the thrill and the danger was gone, so was the allure. He put out the book shortly thereafter, wrapped up the project, and then followed his muse onto other things.

In all honesty, I wish I’d had the nerve to try something similar when I was applying for jobs back then. Indeed, shortly after graduation, I interviewed to be a copy-editor for the Deseret Morning News, based on encouragement from a girl I briefly dated in Rexburg. I wrote a real cover letter and everything, and was even invited by HR to take the copy-editing exam (I’m told I was one of the few candidates to catch that “His favorite musical is Lame is Rob” should actually be Les Miserables), but didn’t get the job. Didn’t get with the girl, either. It at least got me to apply to the MA program at the University of Utah, so I suppose I had that going for me.

Halfway through my MA, I was then encouraged by a friend of a friend to apply for a paid internship at Church magazines. Everything the lead HR lady said they were looking for–prior journalism experience, a publication history, relevant college degrees–I had in spades, or at least she so told me. I submitted a laborious portfolio of all my printed articles from my internship in Mexico. Made it through multiple rounds of cuts. Dry-cleaned my old mission suit and nailed the group-interview, or so I thought. Still only got the generic rejection email–no explanation for what I could’ve done better, or if I could’ve done better.^[4]The cynical part of me wondered which GA’s grandchild got it instead.

In my more impish moments, and with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I’d sent more a Joey Comeau-esque cover letter to both Deseret Morning News and Church magazines. Something like:

“Dear Hiring Committee,

“It is with great pleasure and enthusiasm that I apply for the position of copy editor. I was previously a copy editor for the Guadalajara Reporter in Mexico while an English major at BYUI. It was an unpaid internship, which as you know is ‘oppressing the hireling in his wages,’ against which the Lord will come out as a swift witness, per Malachi. You and I both know that we must raise the warning voice against this generation, decrying their exploitation of the poor, and making his pathways straight. Of course, I’m not naive; I know keenly well that such would not be politic, especially here in the great state of Utah. Hence why I wish to be a mere copy editor! Opinion columnists either get ignored or denounced by angry readers; you can’t keep preaching repentance to people who cancel their subscriptions.

“No, you and I both know we need a lighter touch–someone who can tweak the headlines just so, to embed those coded messages deep within the numerology of your articles. Your readers will think they are reading a write-up on the latest rivalry game between the U and the Y, or the groundbreaking of yet another Wasatch Front Temple, but in reality, every second sentence will subtly spell out, say, ‘Awake! Awake! The Master of the House is even at the doors, and will suffer thy wickedness and abominations no longer!’ None but the cranks will consciously get it, which will ironically provide us just the cover of plausible deniability we need. But if we have any hope of surviving the burnings to come, we must steer this people back towards the principles of the United Order, where there be neither rich nor poor among us. Time is running out.

“I have enclosed a resume detailing my further qualifications and look forward to interviewing with you soon. Sincerely…”

I of course would not have gotten the job; but then, I didn’t get the jobs anyways.

In any case, I have found Overqualified to be a useful corrective for me, a reminder that the only valid reason to teach cover-letter writing to my freshmen is so that they can carve out a more humane place for themselves in a fundamentally inhumane world. Cover letters are a means to an end, not an end unto themselves–just as human beings are not a means to an end, but an end unto themselves. Yet how depressingly often do we confuse the two! Hence I look forward to the eschatological day when cover letters and resumes will be abolished entirely, because, like God Himself, we will have learned to value our fellow human beings for who they are, not merely what they can do for us.