Padding Your Resume

It bears repeating: a surprising many people think that padding your resume means making stuff up out of thin air. They think that if they just pack enough BS into their resume, then they’ll look like a major big shot to whom companies will want to make a big job offer right away. But that’s not quite how it works.

Companies are impressed not simply by skills, but by relevant skills: that is, skills that will help you perform well in the position you’re applying for and help make the company more money. So if you’re applying for a job as a floor supervisor at a manufacturing plant, it doesn’t make sense to claim that you speak French. I think most of us understand this.

But it makes even less sense to claim phony skills when they are relevant to the job. Let’s say you’re applying not for the manufacturing job; instead, you’re applying for an international sales job. Lots of travel involved in Europe, where French is widely spoken (and not just in France). In this case, would claiming to speak French help you get the job? Absolutely. Should you do it? Only if you’re an idiot.

Why? Well, since French fluency is considered an asset, then your bosses will expect you to do a good bit of French-speaking on the job then, won’t they? And if you don’t speak French, then you’ll be found out rather quickly, wouldn’t you say? You may not even make it past the interviewer if she decides to pop-quiz you with a little “Pouvons-nous parler francais un peu?”

A disclosure is in order here. I made this boneheaded mistake myself several years ago. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing, business at my newly formed advertising agency was so slow that I was ready to give up and go back to getting a “real job” working for someone else. I sent out what seemed like 6,000 resumes, and one of the responses I got was from a company that designs and publishes technical manuals for Ryobi, a company that makes, among other things, lawn-care machinery.

I got an interview and did well, and then went on a tour of the offices. They used Macintosh computers for all of their work, and although I hadn’t used a Mac in years, that didn’t worry me. I used Macs for years in the past, and they aren’t hard to figure out.

Then, they handed me a manual for a lawnmower. It had detailed drawings of the fully assembled machine, and dozens more drawings of every component of the machine. Every screw, bolt, handle, engine part, wheel, etc. I asked one of the designers what they used to create these drawings, and she said, “Illustrator.”

As in, Adobe Illustrator, the program. I vaguely remembered having a couple of lessons in Illustrator when I was younger, but they mostly consisted of drawing

This seems self-explanatory, but it happens every day – people padding their resumes with skills and claims so outlandish that they’re caught almost immediately. Mine was accidental, but trust me, that didn’t make me feel any less dumb. Remember this: your immediate focus may be getting a job, but what you really want to do is keep a job. Don’t make ridiculous claims on your resume just to help you get a job that you have no chance of keeping.

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You may have started out in the mail room in 2003 and moved up to receptionist in 2004 and up to personnel manager in 2005, but you don’t need to give details about every single step you’ve made in order to get where you are. More important than the mundane details of your ascent are the details of your current position. So, rather than a resume entry that looks like this:

Acme Corporation

Mail Room, November 2003 – March 2004
Receptionist, April 2004 – January 2005
Personnel Manager, February 2005 – present

Try this:

Personnel Manager
Acme Corporation
November 2003 – present

This is smart padding. Did you lie? No. Did you work as the personnel manager at Acme Corporation? Yes, and you still do. Did you work at Acme from November 2003 – present? Absolutely. Did you arrange the information in such a way that the employer – you hoped, anyway – would believe you’d been the personnel manager since November 2003? Yes – and that’s smart padding for you.

Will the employer call you on it – will he ask you if you were indeed the personnel manager the whole time? It’s very unlikely – he has no reason to believe otherwise. But even if he does, it’s not a big deal. You simply answer: “Actually, Acme moved me around to assist in a couple of other departments during my first few months before they settled me into my personnel manager position.” And that’s the absolute truth. And what if he presses you? It’s unlikely, but let’s be prepared. Which other departments, he asks? And you rattle off several: “Accounting (or wherever you were a receptionist), HR, Marketing, Communications (that’s the mail room). I asked to see the workings of as many departments as I could, so I could get a comprehensive feel for what the company does.”

That’s a glorious piece of bullshitting right there – truly excellent stuff. Not only did you hide the fact you only recently became a personnel manager, but you also made yourself look great with that whole “show me how this company works” bit.

The point here is this: although your experience may seem unimpressive to you, it can still seem very impressive to prospective employers if you just know how to frame the information correctly. A Burger King shift manager may believe she has a very mundane existence and nothing that would impress an employer. But in the world of resume-speak, she’s got all this going for her:

• Oversees weekly grossly sales of $30-$35k
• Responsible for staff of 25
• Face-to-face interaction with 1,500+ customers weekly
• Generates daily sales and labor reports

Sounds a lot more exciting on paper than in the real world. But that’s the point – resumes are supposed to make you sound powerful, accomplished and ready to take the next job by the horns.

And contrary to what many applicants think, employers don’t have a sixth sense for detecting resume padding — they WANT to believe what you say. It’s extremely rare to sit down for an interview with someone who’s trying to excavate fibs from your resume. Much more often than not, they’re very eager to talk to you and are crossing their fingers that you’ll be great and they’ll get the chance to hire you.

Here’s a real-life example of this padding principle from my own resume:

When I got out of graduate school, I went to work for Cox Interactive Media, a company that had online city guides in a couple dozen cities. I was hired by the Phoenix site, called AccessArizona.com, as a “content producer” – essentially, a cross between a webmaster and a marketer and a journalist. They hired me to do the Travel and Recreation sections of our site, which entailed posting someone else’s story and pictures once a week. I’m serious — once a week. I worked 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday. On Saturdays and Sundays, I was the only person in the office all day long – I unlocked the shop in the morning and locked it up on my way out.

I have no idea what I did with all the extra time, but I know I got to listen to music on headphones all day, surf the web high-speed (not everyone could in 1999) and drink all the Starbucks I wanted. On the weekends, an occasional nap was taken. Ballgames of all types were watched at my preferred television volume. And I got a salary of $35,000 for it. Not a bad gig.

Cushy working conditions notwithstanding, I do remember putting my nose to the grindstone a little. After all, it was my first job out of graduate school, and I was determined to let all these Arizona State graduates around me what a superior crop of people the Missouri School of Journalism was producing. I’d take on extra work (I certainly had plenty of time to help out), and if things were going rough in the evenings, I’d hang out until 9, 10, or even later if things needed to be done. I’d just moved to Phoenix and had absolutely no social life, so I was happy to score points with the bigwigs for giving freely of my time.

About three months later, my boss – an incredible lady named Claudine Langan, who now teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – got a promotion. She also got to name her successor, and she named me. I was overjoyed, being the newest hire among six other content producers, and three months into the job I’d leap-frogged up to become their boss. Of course, many of the other producers were a tad less than overjoyed, and in the coming months, one by one they left the company.

But those of us who hung around didn’t despair; we just became more efficient with the people we had. Eventually, about a year after my original hire date, I was promoted again, this time to “Content Manager.” My duties didn’t change, but my salary got bumped to $60,000. Also, in terms of the company as a whole, I outranked my peers who held similar positions in cities like Seattle, Miami, Atlanta, etc.

Life was good, but there was trouble on the horizon. Our entire staff was in the meeting room one day for a conference call with our CEO, who announced next year’s objective: take 50% of Yahoo’s local market share. Yes, you read that correctly: take not 5%, but 50% market share — of the most popular website on the planet at that time. In one year.

I couldn’t help thinking of Peter McNeely, the sacrificial lamb for Mike Tyson’s first post-prison boxing match, who barked about how he planned to knock Iron Mike back to the prison boxing league. He lasted about 37 seconds, as I recall. Gee whiz, I thought. Why don’t we just wipe out hunger and usher in world peace while we’re at it?

I wasn’t the only one in our office who thought the idea was nuts, but apparently I was the only one who thought it was so incredibly nuts that it was time to get out of there right away, while a position at AccessArizona.com still meant something to people locally and before Yahoo! and AOL bitch-slapped us into obscurity quicker than you can say “Pets-dot-com.” I snapped up a job at a software company across town for $75,000 and abruptly bid AccessArizona.com adieu.

So there you have the summary of my 1-1/2 years at Cox Interactive: hired as low man on the totem pole, enjoyed leisurely weekends on the clock, then got a quick promotion, basically because my boss got her own promotion. I trudged through a few months, got another promotion, then bolted like an escaped fugitive at the first sign of trouble.

Content & Marketing Manager, AccessArizona.com

http://www.accessarizona.com

May 1999-October 2000

Duties:

• Responsible for all content and marketing operations for Phoenix city site and 12 partner sites, drawing 150,000+ unique users and 3.5 million page views/month
• Managed content, graphics, marketing and technical staff of 12
• Supervised the implementation of all corporate e-commerce and advertising initiatives
• Supervised design and creation of partner sites and advertiser microsites, including Power 92, The Zone, The Edge, KGME, Xtra Sports 910, KFYI, Bucky’s Casino, Prescott Resort, Cox 9, Greater Phoenix Ford Stores, Honda of Tempe, etc.
• Managed content for multiple advertiser accounts
• Wrote weekly email newsletter
• Responsible for monthly & yearly usage projections

It’s all true, and it sounds a hell of a lot better than the previous paragraph, doesn’t it? Notice that I have one position listed, and that’s the last and best-paying one. I even beefed it up with the part about being the marketing manager, which I’ll talk more about in a second. But in dozens of job interviews I’ve had with this resume, not once has anyone asked even one question about whether I was “Content & Marketing Manager” during my entire period of employment at Cox Interactive.

Oh, by the way: a year later, Cox Interactive Media was out of business, eaten alive by competition. Which leads me to my next principle.

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This is especially useful for those of you who were working, or at least in college, during the heyday of the Internet. If you worked in an industry that was even close to being associated with the Internet, chances are you did some work for a company that doesn’t exist today. That was a real downer back then, but it does have some usefulness today. Ever heard the phrase “dead men tell no tales”? It applies here.

If I were applying for a job today, I’d certainly list my experience and achievements at Cox Interactive. But there’s no place for them to call and verify anything I say on my resume. The phones are disconnected. The offices are empty. Most of the people have moved away and left the industry altogether, so there’s no one to call.

This is inconvenient for your prospective employer, but it can be very helpful for the resume padder. It enables you to do things like beef up the name of your position a little, like I did above with “Content & Marketing Manager.” Not only that, but it allows you, on paper, to assume the job duties of somebody else that you worked with. For example, let’s say your cubicle neighbor at your old job was Robert Robertson. You sat next to Robert and talked to him every day for two years, so you know exactly what his job responsibilities were.

Now, fast-forward to the present day. Would Robert’s job responsibilities look good on your resume? Furthermore – and I can’t stress this part enough – are you familiar with the ins and outs of those responsibilities, and can you actually perform those responsibilities? If the answer is yes, then I recommend adding them to your resume as padding. If you can do the job just as well as Robert did it, and neither Robert nor your boss is around any longer to prove otherwise, then for all practical purposes, you might as well say you did it. Your prospective employer would strongly disagree if he/she could read this over your shoulder, but who cares? This is a section on padding. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

And let’s be practical here: if you can truly do the job, why would anyone’s suspicion ever be aroused? If you claim Robert’s job of doing weekly budget reports in Quick books, and during your first week on the job you crank out some masterful Quick books projects for your new boss – what is there to be suspicious of? Will your boss come over to your desk and say, “Wow, Jane, these are excellent Quick books reports, and you really are excellent at Quick books, just like you said on your resume. BUT….did you REALLY do those Quick books reports at your last job, or were you padding your resume?” Of course not.

Remember, I’m talking about job responsibilities here, not job title. It’s a lot easier to fly under the radar by simply adding these responsibilities under the heading for a position you actually did hold – or, as in my case above, for a position whose title has been modified only slightly. On the rare chance that you meet up with someone who worked with you and Robert Robertson and happened to be examining your resume, she might remember your job title and Robert’s job title and smell a rat. On the other hand, would she remember every little detail of every task that you and Robert performed? Not likely.

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This isn’t only a principle of padding; it’s a principle of good resume writing and, for that matter, all good writing. But I mean to take it a step further here in our padding section to remind you that even seemingly frivolous or even fun things you’ve done on the job can be described as a highfalutin’ responsibility that you never failed to meet. Let me give you a couple of real-life examples:

During my time at the aforementioned Cox Interactive, I attended a weeklong senior producers’ conference at our home base in Atlanta. We had plenty of time to interact with senior company management and we had some seminars to attend, but the overarching theme of the conference was to get together with other senior producers to share ideas. Ideas about how to make our sites more successful, how to manage and motivate our people (which I really needed, since many of my people were still bristling about my promotion).

That’s the idea, anyway. But the company failed to realize what happens when two dozen 20-somethings with company Amex cards get plucked from their jobs and whisked off to a 4-star hotel in an exciting city for a week. More than a little “cutting loose” took place.

We got together, all right, and to be fair, we did shoot the breeze about our jobs quite a bit. But most of it came after our heads were clouded with multiple mixed drinks, and eve then, we were usually just bitching about our bosses, bitching about our employees or bitching about how far our corporate management had its head up its ass (we were right on the latter). And I recall a handful of my colleagues stumbling off to spend the night in rooms that were not their own. Oh, the scandal!

Thanks to this drunken carousing, very little was learned in our early-morning seminars, other than where the closest drugstore was located that sold Halls cough drops to get that awful gin smell off our breath. Late morning seminars weren’t much better. Afternoon seminars were skipped in favor of a little “nap therapy.”

In retrospect, I’m surprised we learned anything at all during the entire week. But this kind of stuff happens at conferences all the time. If the conference involves young people, multiply it by 3. If it involves the marketing profession, multiply it by 5.

Now, what does this have to do with your resume? Well, just because my conference turned out to be little more than 25 gin-soaked Internet yuppies groping each other for a week doesn’t mean that it can’t make a meaningful statement on my resume…..

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