Resume Truths

It is worth an effort to exaggerate the truth on your resume, but lies are easy to expose and the truth is easy to verify. Any lie, big or small, brings trouble when it is found out. When you are assembling a resume from scratch, it may be appealing to say you made a little more than you did, or that your title was a little more important than it was.

Such changes here and there can be disastrous and can be easily found out by a potential employer. Your resume is your sales pitch and the ultimate gateway to the dream job you are looking for. It is a unique form of marketing tool and it all depends upon the way you market yourself and showcase your capabilities and testimonials in the most frank and relevant way possible. Any false information in your resume will defame your reputation to a significant extent.

Usually a employer prefers a background check on a prospective candidate that includes basic resume information. The most common areas in which employers catch prospective candidates lying in their resume are academic credentials, employment dates, compensation, job titles, and references.

Every minute information is easy to find online. In other words, you lie exposed even if you fake your credentials in your Resume. It is an established point of view that long-term unemployment can be an enticing factor in fabricating a resume. In order to overcome envy or desperation, applicants force themselves to exaggerate the truth to make their resumes look more appealing.

Don’t fall prey to this greed of making false and over-hyped resumes. You’ll not only sabotage  your candidature for the job you have applied for but also cripple the reputation an employer has for your skills and achievements.

The five obvious conditions, which constantly feature in falsified resumes, are as follows:

1 Distorting job titles

Since the job titles are not uniform these days, overhyping a job title may seem like an easy way to make previous positions sound more important. However, job titles can be checked with just a call to your previous employer. Degrading yourself in front of the employer can put your jobs prospects in jeopardy for this seemingly small, but easily checked, exaggeration of the truth.

2 Tampering with employment dates

Being unemployed for a long time emboldens a candidate to tamper with employment dates to avoid showing gaps in employment history. Such tampering habits can be found out with ease and it is likely to have serious consequences for the prospective candidate. Changing the employment dates is a practice every applicant does and he or she who tries to manipulate his or her resume to a certain extent does so to fill up the gaps between employments.

3 Exaggerating your academic credentials

Initially the first thing an employer checks on your Resume is the academic credentials, which are more likely to be fabricated by any applicant. Mentioning a degree which has already been awarded or the one, which you do not intend to get, will only lead to actual trouble. Any employer who attempts to verify your academic standing will easily find the truth, and if you are short of what actually you are going to get from the degree you’re supposed to have, or a few prerequisites short for the job, your potential employer will become a foregone conclusion as soon as the reality check of your resume is done.

4 Faking references

Obviously, fake references are among the ones, which can be exposed fully. A good reference should include the following: mention only the names of people who are directly connected to you, endorse provided contact information and get an acknowledgment from the person in the reference so that they know when to expect a call from your prospective employer. Information that can be easily traced should be done away with so that you don’t get embarrassed at the time of the interview.

5 Overestimate Salary details

Never overestimate your last pay since it can be traced with a call to your previous employer. Any follow up on this information by the employer to check the facts available would be disastrous because exaggerating your last salary would render you out of reckoning for a prospective job. This will affect your credibility and ability to settle for a  higher pay. A more prudent way would be to mention a range of pay that is commensurate with the work expected.

The nitty-gritty: Applying for jobs can be a stressful business. You may be inclined to expand the truth of your skills and accomplishments, but as far as these five key areas are concerned, your final wordings shown in your resume can be easily verified or unmasked with a few phone calls and search in the internet. Do not let the stress get the better of you, and do not let the truth slip away from your resume. There is no way facts will be erased overnight and it will come out one way or another; let them be on your side. Use them appropriately and effectively.