Are You Misleading in Your Resume?

Your resume is a powerful tool to represent your work experience and skills in a way that is both concise and relevant to the job for which you are applying.  Handing in an effective resume requires choosing what information to share and how exactly to word it.  Unfortunately, this can lead to lying in your resume--which is definitely not a good idea.

According to the survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, 96% out of all HR professionals do, in fact, check up on references in candidates' resumes, more than half being found to not contain the whole truth.  And according to the survey on resumedoctor.com, HR professionals absolutely hate misleading information on resumes, ranking it as one of their top annoyances.

The most lies found in resumes are:

-inaccurate job titles

-covering up the dates between jobs

-exaggerated salaries

-claiming to have a completed degree, when only half is done or even simply purchased

-blatant lies about job duties and responsibilities

-exaggerated accomplishments

The problem is, sometimes it is hard to tell where the line is between shining light on a particular relevant piece of information that wouldn't ordinarily get shined on and flat-out falsehoods.  Sometimes there is more grey between black and white than we would like to handle.  Here is some advice from Liz Ryan, HR leadership veteran and workplace commentator for over 25 years:

1. Do not change your dates of employment.  Period.  If there are times when you were hired as a contract person but not actually as an employee, don't fudge the numbers.  Just explain it on your resume.  But your dates of employment must match the employer's dates.

2. Altering your job title is acceptable, but only to make it more recognizable as to what exactly you do.  To change your title to imply more responsibilities or higher status in your workplace is unacceptable.  It's all about motivation here: are you changing your job title so that HR personnel can better understand what you did, or are you trying to make your position sound better than it was?

3. Do not change your academic credentials.  Like dates of employment, no fudging the numbers here.  Be completely honest about what credit you have already earned and what you are in the process of earning and most definitely which degree you actually got.  To do anything different is a crime.  Literally.

4.  Leaving gaps in your resume between relevant jobs is okay.  That is not lying.  It is simply leaving information out that HR could care less about.  No one hiring you for sales work wants to know that you were a kindergarten teacher during that 2-year gap on your resume, nor is it the purpose of the resume to list off every single job you have ever had in your life.

5. Finally, don't lie about your experiences at a company that has since shut down.  Just because your company may not exist anymore does not mean you can get away with rewriting history.  There are websites (like LinkedIn.com) devoted to keeping you in line by enabling HR to contact the people who employed you.