THE WORTH OF A RESUME IN HIRING…

This is the game: the employer has his purpose “to get people who can work,” and, the person who wants the job but cannot work has the purpose “to overcome my future employer.”

Yes they have to be smart to get the job. So, how do they do it, the first step is they contact a professional who puts together their resume and there are companies nowadays that offer this service and they can paint a beautiful picture; literally take a little piece of information, a little tiny scrap of experience, and expand it so it sounds like the person has been running a multinational company.

I was looking at a resume recently, the person said “I have a successful history working with market research and translations. I was working in the UK for large corporations such as Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and IBM, translating from Scandinavian languages into English. I am also a specialist in a complex computer system.” When you read it very quickly it sounded very impressive.

I interviewed this person, what she actually did was sit in a phone booth with a little piece of paper, a telephone and a computer screen. She called companies in Sweden and asked them “Do you like the new Microsoft XP program?” The guy replied in Swedish “Yes, I like it a lot.” She then typed that into a computer system in English. That was her job. But on the resume it came across as WOW! Unbelievable; very qualified!

Don’t take me wrong, I still look at resumes, sometimes they can be informative, but you have to know that they can also be very falsified.

You should know the game is: how can I make almost nothing sound like something?

Now, let’s take the guy who really knows how to do a job. The funny thing with this guy is he very often isn’t very nervous about how he should present himself, very often he thinks: all I have done, it’s nothing to talk about really, I will just write a simple little resume.

Then this simple piece of paper crosses our desk and we read it and go “Oh no, no, no, no! Not this guy!”

TO SELECT PEOPLE BASED ON RESUMES TODAY IS A VERY DANGEROUS PROPOSITION.

The way we look at resumes today is as a notice of interest. We have actually no idea who wrote the resume and if any of the information in it is true. Some of the nicest looking resumes I have ever seen are also some of the most falsified.

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