WRITER · CAREER STRATEGIST · NARRATIVE PARTNER
I find the story buried beneath the noise.
I’m Zechariah Borden. For more than 15 years, I’ve helped people make sense of complicated careers: the nonlinear ones, the difficult transitions, the work that became much larger than the title, and the professional identities that no longer fit inside a familiar box.
That is the work people usually know me for. It is not the only thing I think or write about.
zebo. is where those threads come together: work and identity, language and judgment, ambition and uncertainty, parenthood and relationships, the outdoors, and the strange stories people construct to explain themselves to themselves.
I started as a writer.
Before the credentials, the client work, or the career strategy, I studied English Writing at SUNY Plattsburgh. I wrote fiction, experimented with form, obsessed over sentences, and learned that slowing down a moment can reveal far more than rushing toward its conclusion.
That education never really ended. It simply found different material.
A complicated career is its own kind of narrative problem. The facts are there, but chronology alone does not create meaning. Someone has to notice the patterns, decide what matters, preserve the right details, and build a structure another person can understand.
The resume may be the artifact. The real work is interpretation.
That instinct became a career.
Fifteen years ago, I began rewriting resumes after hours because I could not stand meaningless buzzwords—or watching capable people undersell work they had spent years learning how to do.
Since then, I have worked with more than 1,500 professionals, from emerging leaders and career changers to executives and deeply specialized experts. I have built resumes and LinkedIn profiles, developed career narratives, taught positioning, created curriculum, coached professionals, and stepped inside established programs as a specialist delivery partner.
The work kept expanding because the document was rarely the whole problem.
People needed to understand what their experience added up to. They needed language for their level, evidence for their value, and a credible bridge between what they had done and what they wanted to do next.
That remains the center of my professional work: helping people tell the truth about what they have accomplished in a way other people can understand.
How I approach the work
Clarity without flattening
A strong narrative makes complexity understandable without sanding away the details that make it valuable.
The life outside the work
I live in Connecticut with my wife and three daughters. When I am not untangling someone’s career, I am usually writing, reading, spending time outside, or thinking too much about parenthood, relationships, language, belief, and the systems people build to make life feel more orderly than it is.
Those subjects are not a detour from the professional writing. They come from the same impulse: slow down, pay attention, challenge the easy explanation, and try to understand what is actually happening.
Some of that thinking becomes an essay. Some becomes fiction. Some remains an unfinished argument in a notebook. The worthwhile pieces eventually land here.
The formal version
- Certified Professional Resume Writer | CPRW
- Certified Digital Career Strategist | CDCS
- Certified Professional Career Coach candidate | CPCC(c)
- BA in English Writing, SUNY Plattsburgh
Credentials matter. They establish training and professional standards. They are not a substitute for judgment, curiosity, or doing the work well.
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