A good resume is a balancing act between truth, exageration

At this point in your life, you’ve probably attempted to write a resume at least once…. At this point in your life, you’ve probably attempted to write a resume at least once. Whether it’s for a job, an internship, a school program or simply to keep your work history up-to-date, almost every college student has had to go through the process. And yet, without fail, it never seems to get any easier. How is it that writing down your previous jobs and skills can be so difficult? I mean, sure, there’s always the basic easy stuff, like employment history and educational background. But for every simple section that you get to write, there’s one that can cause hours of headaches and stress.

In my opinion, the biggest difficulty in a resume is the “skills” section, specifically because of the need to make one’s self sound good without lying. For example, is it okay to say that you have a “customer service experience” after working the register at 7-11 for a month, or to include your tenth-grade computer class as “training in Word, Excel and PowerPoint?”

Creative exaggeration is a very useful skill to have when writing a resume, but one has to be careful not to inflate the claims too broadly. For instance, it would most likely be OK to count your two years of high school Spanish as “some knowledge” but probably not as “non-native fluency.” There’s a very fine line between exaggerations and outright lying, one that the careful and experienced resume writer knows how to walk like a tightrope. For college students, however, it can be a very different story, and that particular skill is one that we can really only learn with time and experience, as well as testing the boundaries a bit.

One of my worst fears in an interview situation is that the other person will take a look at my resume, see “experienced with Microsoft Excel and Access,” and ask me to format a spreadsheet for them to see how good of a job I’d do. While it’s definitely not a lie that I have experience with both programs, the important distinction – and the one that my interviewers probably wouldn’t be too pleased with – is that I never clarified the extent of that experience.

The fact that the extent basically ends with knowing what a database is probably wouldn’t be music to their ears, but it’s a risk that I feel is worth taking to make myself look attractive to potential employers. It all goes back to that balancing act between inflating your claims to make yourself look appealing and telling the honest truth at the expense of looking good.

In some ways, writing a resume is like a careful application of makeup. It brings out specific strengths and features, while masking flaws and hiding insufficiencies. A resume still shows a great deal about the person who wrote it, just as a girl (or guy, I guess) wearing makeup is still showing their face. However, both the resume and the makeup are designed to make that person look a little bit better than they would without them.

I imagine most employers are completely aware of that fact and take everything on a resume with a grain of salt, but the point remains that if you inflate your claims too much, then your balloon could pop pretty darn quick.

Looking at different resume-writing guides on the Internet, it quickly becomes apparent that writing a resume is not only about showcasing your skills and talents, but also about making them look as attractive as possible. One guide – and I’m totally serious here – says to use off-white, ivory or bright white 8.5″x11″ paper in the highest quality affordable, which, unfortunately for us college students, is usually whatever the campus computing lab is running through the printers. In one statement, it’s made clear that the presentation is just as important as the content – just like a person’s makeup is meant to make them look striking and appealing, as high-quality as possible.

Sometimes people go overboard, wearing more makeup than Bozo the Clown, and it’s obvious that they need to tone it down a bit. So it goes with a resume, too: If your claims and “skills” are too inflated, there’s a point at which it becomes obvious and starts to make you look worse, rather than better. As I said before, it’s all a balancing act, and just like a five-year-old who stumbles across Mom’s makeup chest and uses half a tube of lipstick, we college students have to find that balance between skimping and tacky exaggeration, because there’s rarely a net to catch us under this particular tightrope.

Got some resume questions? Go to Career Services. Need some make-up tips? E-mail Richard at rab53@pitt.edu.