How to Write an Impressive Resume Without Lying
It is a question that needs to be asked: how can you write an impressive resume without lying? You know the job market is tight and you are competing with hundreds, perhaps thousands. If you are re-entering the workforce with gaps in your job history, or after years of being a stay at home mom, it can be even more of a challenge, especially if you are looking for a telecommuter job where your resume will have to impress all the more. So what to do?
Well, first of all, as we all know we absolutely must not fabricate. An untruth on your resume is no longer as easy to get away with as it once was. Our society today is all about background checks and internet records. If you are making something up, sooner or later you will be caught and potential employers may likely share their discovery with friends in the entire industry.
If you look, you will find that there is a grand tradition in any profession of lying for a good job and getting caught, even at the highest levels; the CEO of Radio Shack, David Edmondson as well as the CEO of Bausch & Lomb, Ronald Zarrella are prime examples. They claimed imaginary qualifications and achievements. Read more at: When the Résumé Is Not to Be Believed
So take that as a cautionary tale; don’t inflate your resume with falsehoods. What you want to do, instead, is to highlight and augment the positive.
It happens when there are uncomfortable truths about your past that are really not that important. Sometimes, the complete truth is actually not advised. Maybe at one point you quit work a year to better take care of your very young children; maybe you skipped from job to job ten to the year at one point. How do you fudge in situations like these? To begin with, for a problem with chronology, a good way to fudge is to just create a resume that is functional – and not laid out year by painful year. You’ll then have no holes in your resume to patch up.
What happens when they come out and ask you questions about things, honest answers to which would not really be discreet. For instance, you could have departed from your previous job rather in a hurry to leave behind an unpleasant boss or maybe a workplace romance that didn’t turn out well. If you bare your soul about the real reason you had to leave the job behind, it will make you look unprofessional. Spinning and fudging a little bit would only make you discreet, not untruthful. You can say that the team play at a previous workplace was not what you had hoped for, but you don’t have to go into specifics. It’s important to use whatever office parlance is in vogue at the time. The phrase ‘culture and personality match’ just happens to go over well these days.
Sometimes, what you would be tempted to think of as a negative could actually work to your advantage if you try to not hide it. For instance, if you had to take five years off to raise your infant children well enough that they could take care of themselves in kindergarten, this is a way to drop out of work that is actually approved of these days. Raising children is a lesson in extreme patience, and these are skills that your employer could possibly use. Unless the sabbatical you took was to lie about at home and watch TV, you could actually spin it to make it sound really good, as it undoubtedly is. Traveling the world, taking care of a sick parent, raising your children, all are considered valid reasons to need to drop out of work for. Just make sure that you don’t call it “stayed back at home”. Stress the skills you learned while you did so – raising young children to be strapping and strong.
Find more tips in the video below. See also: