Resume Fudging
Shirleen Holt, writing in The Daily News, has some common-sense advice for those whose career paths contain a few more potholes than they'd like or had expected:
With the job market returning and companies hiring again, now comes a new wrinkle: How do you write a resume that explains what you've been doing for the past four years?
This was a period, after all, when people with master's degrees drove cabs. When tech workers bounced from temp job to temp job. When the titles "self-employed" or "consultant" were euphemisms for "out of work."
Should you give job gaps a rosier tint? Should you list that stint at Domino's? Should you lie?
The answers are yes, maybe and never.
The important thing to keep in mind, she suggests, is the existence of business cycles, of a the permanence of change. Job markets operate like housing markets, among others, with the balance between buyers and sellers of job skills shifting at regular, if not predictable, intervals.
Recruiters might be more forgiving in coming months. Economic forecasters in Washington predict that employers will add about 5,000 jobs a month this year. That means renewed competition for the best workers.
"Just like a housing market flips from a buyer's to a seller's market," Hanson says, "I think we're at that point right now."
The one thing that employers will never value, however, is a person who knowingly misrepresents his job experience or abilities- not even for a job in a fudge factory and never for one as the FEMA director.
Linked at: Adam's Blog; Choose Life; Euphoric Reality; Conservative Cat; Point Five; Stop the ACLU; Stuck on Stupid; Samantha Burns; The Uncooperative Blogger.