If you’ve mastered parts 1 and 2 of this series, you know everything there is to know about how your resume should look and what types of information to include. This episode deals with the meat of resume building: the experiences you rely on to show how valuable you are as an employee and a colleague. Assuming there are no glaring errors and the document is generally clean and easy to read, this is the most important part of the document, and therefore the thing you should spend the most time on.
It’s easy to just slap your jobs together in a bulleted list and call it a day. You might think it looks impressive to have a list of ten or fifteen past positions, including that time you worked as a carnie for two months in college and when your friend paid you to help him move to a fourth-floor walk-up. But as we covered in Part 1, less is more when it comes to resumes.
Your Past Employment section is not your memoir, it’s a targeted message to your future employer: “Here’s what I’ve done that makes me useful to you.” Therefore you should choose only the jobs that apply most directly to the position you’re applying for and mention only the most applicable skills. Applying for a high-paying job means the job seeker won’t want to waste time sorting through lists of mush to find the one relevant item in your list—they want to look at the page and see what you know how to do clearly laid out.
That’s the first half of what the title of this post means: don’t waste your future boss’s time by filling up your CV with junk entries. The second half should be even more obvious, but often isn’t: don’t lie.
Many people think their resumes aren’t beefy enough, so they add spurious jobs or skills to pad it out. This is just an all-around terrible idea. It might have flown in the days before the internet, when research on a specific company or person was a task for the phone or the library, but now a couple minute’s googling can reveal that “Amalgamated Awesome” isn’t a real firm and the glowing letter of recommendation written by Vice President Biden is nothing more than elaborate personal fanfiction. Even if they don’t bat an eye at a falsified entry, you may be asked to talk about a position or skill you faked during the interview or after you’ve been hired. Plus, if you fake an achievement or talent, there’s a very good chance you’ll be asked to do something for which those skills are actually necessary! Nothing is more embarrassing than claiming you know how to do something and then being called on your bluff.
So get out those red pens (or backspace keys) and start slashing. Your perfect resume awaits.