Ask A Manager: should you list a fun but fake fact on your resume to intrigue an employer?

[minoanmiss]

A reader writes:

I am currently job searching and have heard that sometimes people put one fun thing on their resume that normally wouldn’t belong, which might seem to make them more interesting to a job recruiter who would want to know the rest of the story. One such suggestion was to list that you are Time Magazine’s “2006 Person of the Year.” Now, this wouldn’t technically be a lie. Time Magazine listed “You, yes You!” as their person of the year in 2006, so technically everyone can say that. But as a way to get a foot in the door, do you think listing that is overstepping the bounds of what is professional on a resume, or is it fun creativity to create a discussion between you and a potential employer to help you get your foot in the door?

(I almost hesitated to ask you this, in case you use it on your blog for fear everyone will start using this trick if it’s legit).


Noooooooo.

I’m sure there’s some hiring manager out there who would enjoy this, but the majority will either know right off the bat that it’s not real, in which case they’re likely to be annoyed that you’re not just giving them the actual facts about your qualifications, or they won’t know and then are likely to be annoyed and feel foolish when they ask you about it.

The way to make your application stand out is very straightforward: write a compelling cover letter, have a resume that shows a track record of achievement, and be friendly, responsive, thoughtful, and enthusiastic. That’s the only path, at least if you’re screening for competent managers (and you should be).

If you’re trying to get the hiring manager’s attention via anything not related to the actual quality of your candidacy, you’re probably getting too gimmicky and losing focus on what managers care about when they’re hiring.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Context: I found this whilst reading Ask A Manager as I job-hunt. Please tell me stupid advice you've heard about job-hunting.

[xenacryst]

I'm not sure about stupid advice, but vaguely along the lines of this letter are the handful of candidates I've interviewed who have seemed great in the technical side, and then we go to lunch, and we're all enjoying things, and then they come out with something ... bizarre. We ended up hiring the one who talked for a few minutes about his travels in southeast Asia and all the drugs he encountered there - he's been ... fine. I guess we're still waiting to see about the one who was doing great until he started going on about alien contact, UFOs, and government coverups. Where it ties in to the letter is that in both cases I can't be certain that the folks didn't just throw these bombs in to see how we'd react, rather than them actually being true.

So, non-stupid advice: don't be a wackadoodle in the interview as a way to gauge your potential employer's reaction to wackadoodle. There are better ways to get that answer.

[jadelennox]

we did have the one who came in wearing a swastika pin and then handed us a brochure at the end of the interview about his organization which was reclaiming the original religious meaning of the swastika. I don't remember what he was like as a candidate, because I spent the entire interview freaking the heck out.

[xenacryst]

This is one of those bits of knowledge that I'm not sure if I want to know, but if I were in the situation I would be in desperate need of knowing it: if I were the hiring manager starting the interview and noticed such a pin - how to tactfully and forcefully inquire about its meaning and end the interview right then and there. (I realize that it might not be legal to end the interview, depending on circumstances, but agh, no way in hell would I want to manage such a person.)

[jadelennox]

Right??? Since he was wearing it for explicitly stated religious reasons, your ability to end the interview because of the pin might be limited. And, don't get me wrong, I feel sorry for the people whose religious symbol was co-opted by The Worst Humans for The Worst Thing.

But I'm afraid that ship has sailed in the West, and so walking into a job interview in America wearing a swastika pin is... Yeah. You are not a person who is going to be a good employee, almost certainly. Or at least, you are going to take a little bit of growing up. (Simply on the grounds that you don't bring religion into a non-religious job interview, honestly; I've had observant Jewish coworkers who didn't walk into the interview wearing a button that said "by the way I will not shake the hands of my female colleagues." And I recognize that I'm expressing a double standard on religious symbols, and wouldn't expect somebody to cut off a job interview just because they wore a crucifix or a cross or a chai into the interview. It was a SWASTIKA. Right handed, Square, an abbreviated legs -- out of all of the different ways to draw swastika iconography, it was the one that was unmistakably the same variant the Nazis used.)

Giving us a religious flyer at the end of the interview probably was legitimate grounds to end the interview. (And I was very young at the time. If I had been 10 years older, I would have been able to come up with an excuse to end the interview after 10 minutes anyway.)

[minoanmiss]

Putting aside the 'religion in the workplace' aspect, which is totally true: I am always infuriated by people trying to 'reclaim' this particular symbol, not least because there is a Native American tribe (I should remember more specifically) who signed a document (every adult of the tribe) repudiating this symbol due to the horrors committed beneath it, even though it was therirs for thousands of years.

I mean, they had absolutely no culpability and live as minorities in a country which has systematically robbed and disenfranchised them, and they reached out in empathy and said "we will not contribute to your pain." So any edge lord who thinks they can somehow tell people "you aren't allowed to be horrified by this symbol of genocide anymore, we're -reclaiming- it" can, IMHO, STFU.

Rrrr.

[minoanmiss]

And here I'm worried because my honest answers to "What's your favorite movie" are SF, political, or both. No, I shall not be a wackadoodle in my interviews, to the best of my ability.

[jadelennox]

We once had a job search open for technical employees, and we brought in several people whose resumes were very detailed about the skills they knew, and yet they didn't know any of the things on that section of resume. I mean, they couldn't even identify any of the words. Finally I noticed that all of the candidates for this particular job where we had been having this problem, all had an identical chunk of half-page boilerplate on their resumes, which was basically 4 inches of all of the detailed things they had learned in a specific course at BU. Now, first of all, even if you are a recent graduate, dedicating half a page to what you learn in a specific course is a bad idea. But when we went back and looked through the pile of resumes, we saw that a ton of our incoming resumes had this 4 inches of boilerplate (we would have noticed it sooner if more of them had made it through our HR department).

we called BU to confirm, and they said yes, the instructor of that course was giving people that boilerplate to put on their resumes. We told them that leaving aside that this was terrible and nonprofessional practice, we were getting such poor correlation between what the boilerplate claimed they had learned and what the candidates knew, that we were switching to a policy where we told our hiring department to flat-out reject anyone from this particular BU certificate program. We begged them to change their minds about what they were telling the students, because it was literally hurting the students.

They did not.

[minoanmiss]

... now I'm envisioning that 'instructor' handing out this boilerplate and spending the rest of the term with his feet on his desk serving the Web.

[nonethefewer]

A good fun resume item was an interviewee who listed, among his other technical proficiencies, Windows 3.1. We hired him; he went on to be a fabulous senior QA person in charge of one of our largest clients. A+, would hire again.

An accidental what: I went to work-lunch with an interviewee, and he started asking me about whether I was religious, did I want to know more about his church, &c &c.

[minoanmiss]

Oh lord witnessing. AUUUGH.

[cereta]

We had a candidate who used her service to her church as an example in nearly every answer she gave. She wasn't proselytizing, but somewhere around the fourth time, I started to squirm. Once or twice, okay, fair enough if that's one of your major activities. But over and over...it just showed a lack of judgment, I thought.