Writing an Honest Resume

By Sarah Roberts
Resume-Templates.com

Your resume is your opportunity to brag about all your accomplishments and experience. If you write your resume effectively the recruiter will conclude that your background would be a great fit for the position being filled. Your phone will ring, and you’ll be invited to come in for an interview. At this point the interviewer will drill into your resume. He or she will ask you questions to determine how well you know what you claimed to know. Hopefully you were honest. If you weren’t, it’ll show. I promise it will be obvious.

It’s amazing how many people stretch the truth on their resumes. I’ve seen surveys that say that up to 53% of people do it. Some of the lies are so obvious that the person is never even invited in for an interview. Some are less obvious and are not discovered until much later. Sometimes people get in so deep with the lies that they can’t get out of them. Eventually there are serious consequences.

A survey by Christian & Timbers found that 23% of corporate executives lied on their resume. What did they lie about? Just about everything. The lies were found in job descriptions, sizes of teams, academic history, and accomplishments. Some even inflated the number of years they had been employed in a position. In fact, 71% of executives fibbed on that point.

So, if the people at the top are doing it, why can’t the people at the bottom? Because you could get caught, and there might be serious consequences. Take the example of Michael Brown, the director of FEMA when Hurricane Katrina hit. He was embarrassed in front of the entire country when the media discovered that his resume had been padded. He claimed experience “serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight” when he really worked in a position that was closer to that of an intern with no authority. Lies in executive biographies have hurt stock prices for large corporations in the past. A lie rarely helps in the long run. Writing an honest resume continued...

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