The Ladders 'n me: The passive-aggressive voice

My friend Jill said I should try The Ladders as a job hunting site, so I sent in my $29.95 and signed up. Right off the bat, I got an offer of a free resume critique. I uploaded my resume and awaited the news.

The news arrived the next morning. It seemed about seven pages long, and was prefaced by a raft of baloney along the lines of, "Here at The Ladders, we take only the cream of the unemployed crop, and you were lucky enough to be allowed to send us your $29.95. You are a formerly hard-charging biz person, so I don't need to sugar-coat anything for you. If something isn't working optimally, you want to know about it!"

The rest of the missive basically said, "Your resume stinks."

There were, of course, subheads. Your resume stinks because you formatted it wrong. Your resume stinks because you used old language. Your resume stinks because it doesn't grab the reader.

Within each of these subheads, they had pulled out little bits and phrases that best exemplified the powerful stinkiness of my particular resume. After a few pages, I began to suspect the seven pages were a template with blanks to be filled in. Perhaps everybody got seven pages, lightly customized. Perhaps the folks at the Ladders slogged through every resume fishing for tidbits to toss under each subhead, and voila - a seven page resume critique!

Let me just say that I didn't much like my resume, either. Really, I didn't. I thought it sounded weird and false and full of meaningless biz-speak. Still, the critique was deflating.

Near the middle, though, I began to move from deflated to nettled. It was in the subhead called "The passive voice." This little section said, in a condescending tone, something like this: "You probably haven't thought about the passive voice since high school, but here at The Ladders, we make it our business to think about absolutely everything that makes a resume zingy, and the passive voice is not it. You used the passive voice. You mustn't do that. It's a dreadful thing to do. Busy HR people don't have time for this sort of thing. Your resume will get deleted in seconds and you will stay unemployed for a long, long time. You need professional help! You used the passive voice in the phrase, "consulted with."

Well, no.

In the seven pages, there were no suggestions for improvement. Suggestions are not free. Instead, there was an offer at the end for me to get my resume professionally rewritten, for just under seven hundred dollars. And there was a signature, from somebody with an arch-preppy name like (but not really) Whitney Smythe-Pendleton III.

(Interestingly, Whitney wanted me to know that he-or-she would not rewrite my resume. Some professional rewriter would do that. I suspect I am not the first person to take a deep dislike to my critiquer.)

I knew, truly I did, that this message was not meant to begin a correspondence. But they had hit an English major nerve, and I was cranky. I wrote back.

Dear Whitney, said I, strangely enough, I have thought about the passive voice since high school, and "consulted with" is not it. "Consulted with" is a prepositional phrase, pure and simple. Sincerely yours.

The next morning, my phone rang. "It's Whitney," said the voice on the other end.

"Whitney!," I said. "You are a person! I thought you were a program! Huh. What can I do for you?"

Whitney offered me a price break. For me, this week only, a special: just under six hundred bucks.

I said no. Then I went out and paid somebody else to help me rewrite my resume. I liked her. I never found a job on the Ladders that suited me, either.