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Earlier this week, I read that employers are worried about the proliferation of inflated and fake resumes.
As a free-lance writer, I occasionally prepare resumes for clients. Some colleagues sneer, but I've found that writing resumes requires insight and creativity; it provides the challenge of any good writing assignment.
The most common mistake is the one size fits all
resume, wherein people inflate their education and
experience -- a wrong turn en route to the brewery in
Golden becomes attended Colorado School of Mines
or
a stint as a short-order cook swells into nutritional
analyst.
Instead, each resume should be tailored for the job in
question, and inflated or deflated as appropriate. If you
were just another strong back on the loading dock, and
you're applying for white-collar work, then you should
inflate: you were a materials-flow agent
or a
production inventory rotation specialist.
But inflation isn't always proper. Employers don't like to provide underemployment to overqualified people, because such people tend to move on quickly. Sometimes a master's degree is about as helpful as a dishonorable discharge.
So if you want to hire on as a roofer, don't even hint
that you went to college. Just list the part-time jobs you
held during those years: truck driver, hay hand, motel
maid, etc. Degrade any white-collar employment: teaching is
hauling books,
journalism is paper transport,
etc.
After adjusting your education and experience, consider your skills. Don't inflate your abilities for blue-collar work -- you can hurt yourself if you can't really drive a forklift, and your colleagues might beat you up if you don't know a pipe wrench from a stove bolt.
But for white-collar work, remember Casey Stengel's
dictum: It ain't braggin' if you can do it.
When I interviewed for my first newspaper job 20 years ago, I assured the editor that I could take pictures, even though I knew nothing about f-stops, ASA ratings, shutter speeds and the like. That was a Friday. Saturday I cornered a press photographer who told me the rules: Get close and bracket your exposures. I reported for work Monday, and no one ever suspected that I was other than an experienced photographer.
The modern proliferation of electronic office machinery offers another option -- lateral obfuscation of your non-existent skills. Of course you're good at word-processing, but you just walked into a WordPerfect shop and your expertise is MultiMate. You're familiar with networked computers, but these wimps use NetWare and you're a Unix guru.
There remains the moral question. Is it fair to mislead potential employers? The answer is simple. Has an employer ever lied to you about pay, working conditions, benefits, schedules, vacations, raises or opportunities for advancement? The answer to one is the answer to the other.
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