How To Be Truthful On Your Resume With Some Exaggeration
Friday, December 26, 2014, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
When you write [or develop] your resume, you want to be truthful but not to your teeth. It’s almost impossible to tell the potential employer everything true. If you have ten items on your resume that you have done working for previous employers, your new employer might be interested in only 50% of your entire resume.
There is no way the manager can be interested in everything you have worked on.
The companies hiring and advertising know very well that for someone to fit the requirement will be like looking for a needle in a hay-stack. They will seldom fill the position that way.
However, in all honesty, that’s exactly the impression you would get from the requirements.
There might be one in a million [so to speak] who would fit the exact requirement if at all. So what do you do? You lie a little.
Come to think of it, the potential employer makes you lie. In other words, the labor you put in writing your resume is forced labor. They make you do it.
However, they [read Human Resources] always want someone who has 100% of the exact experience and skills that the job requires, rather than someone who has most of the skills and experience and who can learn fast.
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So then exaggerate but with your basic skills intact…
Simply having a smart resume won’t separate you from the 1000s of resumes being submitted. You exaggerate by finding the importance of what you did and stating the impact – in numbers. The trick is that you need to back up everything you put on your resume.
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HR is not up to job standard…
The HR department doesn’t really understand what is involved in a given job, because they don’t work with the people in that department.
Therefore they fall back on lists of buzzwords and general criteria. Many of the most important advances in industries have been from people who came in the “side door” without official accreditation.
So find out about the department hiring manager and if possible talk to him or her directly.
In a Nutshell
What you need to do is give an overall description, on your resume, of what you have done [preferably in bullet form] in a concise fashion. But in the end, what do employers go by when hiring? One may never know!
