Creative exaggeration good for resume writing

Chances are at this point in your life, you’ve tried to write a resume at least once…. Chances are at this point in your life, you’ve tried to write a resume at least once. However, with the economy in its current state, looking good among a potential field of applicants has never been more important. As job openings continue to decrease, you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd and make yourself look like the best candidate for the position.

This could be difficult. If you’re like most college students, you probably aren’t the best candidate for any position. Statistically, you’re probably a liberal arts major who had a minimum-wage job in high school, maybe did some community service and had a MySpace account when you were 13 and didn’t know any better. Unfortunately, so did everyone else.

So, how do you make yourself look better on your resume so you can stand above the rest? It’s easy. All you have to do is lie.

Well, not lie, exactly. Lying is bad. What you should do, though, is exaggerate. Take your relevant skills and experience, and … stretch them a little so they sound more interesting to a potential employer.

For instance, computer skills are basically mandatory for any white-collar job in today’s employment market. But unless you’re a computer science major, you’re likely not too well versed in Web design and programming. No worries!

Remember that mandatory computer science class you took in high school that taught you how to use Excel and PowerPoint? Because of that class, you can list ‘Extensive training in a variety of computer programs’ on your resume. Don’t be too specific, but be specific enough that it doesn’t sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Or how about those two semesters of Spanish you took freshman year to pass Pitt’s mandatory foreign language requirement? That, my friend, is ‘One year of training in Spanish.’ It doesn’t matter what grades you got in the class, because you’re not mentioning the actual grade, just how long you had to endure it.

One of the key aspects of writing your resume is to tailor it to the job you’re applying for. So, for example, if you want to work as a graphic designer, make sure you count all the time you spent doodling in your notebooks as, ‘Classroom experience in art and design.’ But if you’re breaking into journalism, that MySpace you’ve regretted these past many years is both ‘experience publishing for a blog’ and ‘early adoption of emerging online media.’

The most important thing, of course, is to walk the fine line between creative exaggeration and outright lying, the latter being something you never want to do. If you volunteered in a hospital when you were 14, don’t say that you ‘have previously worked in the health care industry.’ You weren’t being paid, so you didn’t work. But do say that you ‘have experience dealing with hospital patients, equipment and protocols.’

What you want to concentrate on when writing your resume is accentuating your strengths and glossing over your weaknesses. In some ways, a resume is like a careful application of makeup: It strengthens your best features and covers up your worst, all in the name of helping you make the best first impression possible.

An experienced resume writer who’s held a number of jobs and sent out a lot of applications is somewhat like a master beautician who knows just how to apply the makeup correctly. Probably most of us are more like the 5-year-old who went rooting through Mom’s makeup cabinet, used half a stick of lipstick and maybe ate a bit of mascara. All an inexperienced resume does is highlight that inexperience and make it all the more glaring.

Creative exaggeration is one technique that can help your resume look better in a field of similar resumes, just like a Ferrari looks especially good when it’s parked in a lot next to an ’89 Civic. It’s not that the Civic is a bad car — in all likelihood, it will probably need less maintenance than the Ferrari — but to someone taking a casual glance, the Ferrari is the only car in the lot.

If you’re not afraid to apply a little gloss and polish, you can turn a humdrum resume into one that employers would jump all over. All you need to do is take what you’ve done and make it sound cooler and more interesting than what anyone else has done. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t actually cooler — just like that makeup, it’s all in the presentation.

E-mail Richard at rab53@pitt.edu.

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