John O’Connor, Career Pro of NC, Inc.

A November 2008 review by the Wall Street Journal examined the careers and resumes of 358 senior-level executives and directors at 53 publicly traded companies. The result: At least seven top executives at America’s largest companies invented academic degrees they didn’t have.

“Inflated academic credentials in the nation’s executive suites may be more common than generally thought,” wrote the author Keith J. Winstein in the November 2008 issue of The Wall Street Journal. But is it really a problem? And amid the heavy competition for a jobs, where‘s the line between putting your best foot forward and outright lying?

In times when competition for a single job is high, it’s easy to entertain the thought of embellishing a resume. But it’s still true: Regardless of the job-market climate and regardless of the level of the candidate’s experience, personal integrity matters, and it counts on a resume.

Resumes do not have to provide every conceivable fact to the potential employer. You can leave out dates, certain past employment and material details. The truth is you can lie. Yes, you can. But you do it at your own peril. Attorneys who represent employers find this is as good a reason as any to prove you wrong in court.

Courts are holding that material misrepresentations on an employment application and resume constitute just cause to:

• terminate an employment contract
• reduce or deny benefits, including disability benefits

If you are an excellent résumé writer, you will counsel someone who may feel desperate enough to lie to not do so. Each and every certified professional résumé writer and career coach I know encourages clients to tell us the truth so we can coach and create proper documents and search strategies for them. In fact, it’s hard to coach someone on a lie anyway. Most career professionals and the clients they serve agree that a résumé needs to be a marketing tool, a persuasive document that does not need (even in the case of federal résumés) to dump information on the reader just to be truthful.

It wears well to use credible, reliable facts and achievements to build the case for our career-transition clients. That’s what we do, in the most inventive ways. Clients pay us for that keen and uniquely individualized perspective. But it’s not what we do that gets clients into trouble. They get into trouble by permitting themselves to lie to us and ultimately to potential employers.

People lie to their professional resume writers — and if they then populate these lies on LinkedIn and other professional, bio-driven sites, they are creating even more problems and fuel for attorneys. Falsification has had a nice run on the Internet. Many people use the same techniques as an identity thief. The Internet provides a fountain of information, resources, databases to hack into, mock degrees and everything else for someone who wants to do this wrong right.

How big a problem is resume fraud?

It has been reported that 90 percent of the personnel directors surveyed by the SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) reported finding resume untruths ranging from past salaries to personal identification.

Further, it costs companies and organizations billions of dollars to hire new candidates every year. These candidate costs can often average $5,000 or more to find, hire and properly onboard a new employee. Looking at the big picture, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimates that occupational fraud and abuse costs organizations more than $600 billion annually, or roughly 6 percent of gross revenues.

Educational backgrounds seem to be the most fertile ground for fraud. It gets easy to make false scholastic claims; changing areas of concentration; and adding majors, minors and degrees never obtained. Usually fraud comes through in changes in employment dates, salary manipulation, job titles and duties, and omitting negative records that may come up on background checks.

Although it’s not their job, career coaches and outplacement specialists continue to advocate honesty in their practices, to teach and even educate clients how they can creatively and imaginatively promote, but not falsify, their backgrounds to earn new positions, promotions and job assignments.

Recruiters look for incongruities and evidence that demonstrate the candidate does not have the background to match her qualifications. But even with strong recruiters, background checks and previous employer verifications, many clients squeak through. Time becomes a factor, and companies sometimes figure out that they can prove resume fraud later if they need to so it’s to their advantage perhaps not to invest company time and money until they must.

Let’s turn the tables a bit: Have you done a background check, employment verification and criminal records history on every babysitter who has ever worked for you? Wouldn’t you like to know who will be watching your kids? Should you do this? Are your kids worth it? But the answer is probably no, isn’t it? It’s human nature to take the easy way out of situations, and unfortunately it’s people who handle hiring.

So there you have it - tell the truth, whether it be on your resume, your job application, or who broke the window with the baseball. Very few people have a blemish-free past or the perfect credentials for the perfect job.

It is far better to know how to face the blemishes of your career head-on than simply to cover them up with lies. Good resume writers and career coaches can help job seekers gain perspective on imperfections and imaginatively present your past, thus eliminating the need to lie. Tell the truth in securing new work opportunities. You will face enough challenges and worries once you have the job. Don’t take short cuts to get there; take the higher road.

One job seeker told me she produced a white paper that simplified a business process in her industry. She attached it to her VisualCV profile.  Then, she searched blogs, Twitter and Linked-in groups that hosted discussions related to her industry and expertise. She posted helpful ideas and suggestions while at the same time referring to the white paper on her VisualCV profile when it was appropriate to do so. She was seen as a subject matter expert rather than a desparate job seeker. As a result, her efforts led to an interview.

If you are interviewing, or started a new job (even better), I want to hear from you.  What is working for you?

What happens next? You wait and never get any response.

I’m not surprised. It went to “The Resume Black Hole!” 

Hiring managers and human resource reps receive hundreds of resumes on average in response to a single job posting. In many instances, they prefer to interview ten or less candidates.

Countless hiring managers and human resource professionals are overworked and not trained in best recruiting practices. They can either screen every resume and find the best of the best, or screen just enough resumes to get the minimum required to interview. Typically they choose the latter because screening resumes takes a lot of time and recruiting is not their only task. In addition, they feel most candidates are not qualified and probably did not comprehend the position description.

In the end, the majority of companies don’t even notify you that you were not selected. This can lead to much frustration, especially when you do not know who to contact for a status update. That is why I call it, “The Resume Black Hole.”

In May of 2008 I attended a career conference sponsored by The Ladders and Kennedy Information as well as Career Directors International. A lot of well-known folks inside Career Management Alliance and around the globe attended. As the conference blogger and photographer I also represented one of my key vendors. This experience put me back in touch with the kind of thought leaders that drive the career industry. Again in October I attended the Career Directors International Conference in Seattle with multiple and too many to mention thought leaders. 

One of the talks in May by Richard Leider focused on people who suffer from what he calls the “inner kill” and that kind of nails a lot of what I work on with my clients. He calls it the art of dying without knowing it. How many people die by a million small cuts? I mean people work so hard and then find out they are not fulfilled. If you want to be an achiever your job usually must mean more or should mean more than a paycheck. Richard Leider, Susan Whitcomb, Liz Sumner and Laura DeCarlo and really a lot of conference participants spoke about practices to help clients revitalize, renew and capture your work-life balance or as I like to put it your work-life mission. You can view this in a secular or non-secular way. But you should not pretend that it does not matter. It does.

Unfortunately most people only realize problems when they become a crisis. Or recessions and downturns in the economy show how people respond to setbacks and layoffs.

To prevent job or career crisis management I recommend that you ask yourself these questions first:

1. Am I completely fulfilled in my work-life? Remember your worklife does not have to be only what you do to make money. It can absolutely be a combination of work, family/home, volunteer and anything that adds to your worklife.
2. What am I doing to challenge myself to stay focused, happy and productive at work?
3. If work ended tomorrow what would I do short-term and long-term?

One way that I advocate you look at your career is to focus on your career third person, like you are a business.

From a work point of view consider this:

Would it surprise you to find that your company has been sold, your division cut or that your new boss decided that despite your obvious, multi-year contributions that you were expendable? How would you handle a career transition now? What if the ‘what if’ happened and you faced unemployment in the next 12 months? How would facts like these affect your attitude and your economy? In the 12 years of coaching clients and developing outplacement and job search strategies, few lessons learned come to mind quicker than most people at all levels of careers, entry-level to executive, run the business of their career this way – crisis management.

To run your career properly treat it like a business, anticipate change, embrace change and remember that you have made a rather serious business investment. Whether you own your own business or not you need to know that transforming change takes place daily. On a small scale the sand shifts underneath you as a business leader, business owner or person who works for an organization or company. Will you be ready for small changes? Will you be prepared to accept total responsibility for your business and career? Will you take ownership and not make excuses for challenges during your career? Will you embrace the new digital economy and challenge yourself to think differently? “Unfortunately I want to get out of management for a number of reasons,” a recent Fortune 100 human resources manager and client exclaimed to me. “Maybe it’s me but all I seem to do is babysit, deal with personnel issues and try to get people to understand the new realities of today. I wish people at every level would think about their job from the owner’s point of view.”

You own the business of your career. Now what do you do?

We are not claiming this is the silver bullet or some great new idea. However, ResumeSpider is a common-sense approach to networking and targeted list building. Both activities are crucial to a well rounded job search and should be incorporated as soon as possible. For example, all you need to do is call into a company, find out if they hire your profile, get a contact name, phone number and email address. Now duplicate that task 250 or 500 or 1000 times.  Unfortunately this effort can take weeks or months with our own time and resources. ResumeSpider offers a proven time saving approach to this strategy. It is important to remember that your time is worth something!

Our matching technology closely resembles relationship matching websites; like Match.com and eHarmony.  You are matched to companies in our network based on your job function, industry experience and desired locations.  Then we email your profile to those select Member Companies. We have 1000s of companies in our network and add 400-500 new companies, on average, every month.  The Member Company network consists of employers and recruiting firms that have joined ResumeSpider to receive resumes.

To get more information on Resume Spider, read How it Works, Why Join, and some Resume Spider reviews and testimonials.

http://www.resumespider.com/

1. Accept Change. To open a door to a new career jobseekers must focus on accepting change as reality. So look at the ways you have learned and enjoy learning. Express this in achievements and keywords in your resume and career marketing materials. Be ready to respond swiftly to the needs of corporations by offering different aspects of your background. No longer are resume just dry ways to demonstrate your employment during high school, college, through internships, military or other experiences. You must give line and verse about what you have done and how it applies to the position you are going for next. That means get ready to edit your resume for each position you apply for online or offline. Change happens abruptly in business. It happens abruptly throughout many a career path. What’s in our control? You control your actions and your attitudes; that may be about all you can control. Control the content within your resume. Develop your volunteer experiences, key class projects, athletic or other achievements. Everything must be looked at, developed and considered. Some new graduates think they have nothing to offer. You do if you market it properly. 

2. Look Beyond the Surface. According to career authors and other representatives from the major search engines, something less than 5% of leads are advertised on the big job boards. So where does the typical jobseeker or the typical new graduate spend their time looking for jobs? I would argue they spend 95% of their energy focused on Internet job boards. This is a good starting point. In fact, sites like Craig’s List offer opportunities and danger too. As a new graduate you need to search and find your target audience. Recruiters don’t just look on the major sites for resumes. They are working the social networking sites like Facebook and the more professional networking sites like LinkedIn. Those are not the only ones either! So if you information isn’t loaded there and you don’t know why you need to campaign in that way then you are out of date. You are not savvy or sophisticated. Weddle’s Guides and Peter Weddle himself an Internet guru stated personally to me that there are dozens of sites for niche industries being developed weekly. In fact, he suggested that recruiters are more interested in finding you doing something they might want to hire you for than downloading your CV from the big sites. So where could you go and what could you do to be seen as someone serious? Remember you must think this way even if you are in a path toward law school, med school or are not sure what you want to be when you grow up. 

3. Go for Your Mission not Just a Job. Take an entrepreneurial approach to your future. How do I want my life to be in 10 years and what career path may be the best vehicle to that path? What do I want my reputation to be in five years? What is my Worklife Mission? Everything you do should be geared toward these goals and aspirations. If you are looking for a job and not a career a lot of this advice might not matter. If you are just trying to pay bills then who cares what you do or who you do it for. But if you can compose more than your 30–second commercial - develop a Worklife Mission statement. Pick career opportunities that may advance you toward who and what you want to be in five or more years. Current Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers suggest that 65% of people don’t like their jobs. But what do they do about this dissatisfaction? Where do they go to take proactive, positive action on finding their professional calling, their next steps? To properly research new ideas you can use the big job boards like Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com. Other sources of information may come as easy as finding articles and information from a variety of sources: industry journals, company websites, blogs, volunteer organization sites, DOT, OOH, ONET and other resources. In a competitive job market, it’s hard enough for job seekers on a steady career path to get their resumes noticed. If you are pursuing a new direction, it’s all that much more difficult to convince hiring managers to take a chance on you. Study and read. Utilize insiders to help you network. Pick jobs that will give you part of what you want to be in 10 years. Move toward something specific. Also, please stop looking for a job and start looking for opportunities. Employers want people who want opportunities. If you want to stand out then take the attitude that you want an opportunity. 

4. Lastly, start dealing with the gaps and mistakes you made during college. So you didn’t get that internship that you wanted? You didn’t really have that great of summer jobs? You didn’t do all those volunteer things you thought you would do? Well then start doing them now. Start volunteering. Ask for the experiences you need and give away your time and expertise for free. No, don’t wait. Do it right now. In the meantime you may have to get two jobs, three jobs or even put up with being underemployed until you make up this lost ground. Mistakes that new graduates make usually means that they want to utilize the same poor decisions they made during school as they attempt to compete in the marketplace. That just simply won’t work. As professionals, many of my clients need a makeover and to understand they must self-study in order to research, define and emphasize key qualifications for these new goals and objectives. If you have not earned them start earning them now. With that attitude you will probably be hired into a position you want. 

5. Your Resume Must Be Outstanding. What do the potential hiring managers want to see in a resume? Here’s a tip - they want to see what you can do for them now and how you will drive revenue and reduce cost for them now. What do they want to see in you if you ran a construction operation but now want to consider selling industrial products? Hire a professional to interview you and market you. Good writing, proper use of keywords and a marketing oriented resume sells in person and online. You need to ask yourself tough questions to come up with original documents. In a behavioral interview for major account management, how will you relate your transferable skills or the experiences you gained to date? What if you were in the military and you want to be in a federal job? That may make sense. But how do you relate your class experiences, jobs, internships, military experiences and whatever you have into a corporate assignment in finance, sales or operations? The list goes and could go on forever. They don’t need to know dry work history or a listless listing of dates, times and responsibilities but they do need to understand the transferable skills, keywords and strategy you intend to take with them in communicating your specific and immediate value. Any savvy jobseeker and especially a career changer may need to clearly write down, analyze and synthesize raw data to feature why they are marketable and why they should be interviewed. A great resume or personal marketing material must brand you across many platforms - online, offline, personal, professional. 

Congratulations on earning your degree. You must look for an opportunity not a handout. You want to earn your future. Now go out and fight with passion for your career life and your all important worklife mission. And get out of the basement room at your parents house!

Read Part One.

Start with a new paradigm, a new mindset. Find organizations that support your worklife mission and fight to join them. Generations ago it was your parents and even grandparents that thought they would be in one career path and maybe with one company. That was the dream of dreams. Then you could settle down in life.

Well, forget that mindset. If that’s the lottery you want to hit you will probably have lottery odds to get into one career path, climb the corporate ladder and retire that way. Who checks time with a watch anyway? It’s on your IPhone or PDA or whatever. In many ways, you need grasp the idea that you will have some major career shifts and, most likely, change careers during your career. A career must be viewed as a sequence of jobs and probably a sequence of career paths.

How can I make this claim?

All industries change and as the industry changes then you must change with it. It’s Internet warp speed. No industry remains stagnant and if a business that serves that industry does not change then that business faces changes of its own. Look at the way the construction business or housing industry has changed in the last year. Look at the technology and software industries. Have they changed? How about the music and entertainment industry? Any changes you noticed? They change daily. How about the oil business, the airlines and others? Okay, you have the point. Either the business, technology, people and economies change or something shifts. For those shifts any jobseeker or person who intends to have a long career must embrace change.  

Jane Harding, a top medical pharmaceutical sales representative, says that investing more in her personal brand could have gotten her hired faster. Here’s her story…

She interacted daily with regional medical health centers, gave educational presentations and felt strongly that her portfolio of drugs helped patients recover more quickly from surgery. She made $100K+. One drug she represented was recalled and lawsuits piled up. The company she worked for abruptly laid off even top performers like Jane. After a successful career, Jane now found herself unemployed. Weeks turned into months during her job search. It began to take a toll on her financially and emotionally. The job search dragged on. A topsy-turvy pharmaceutical market caused competitor companies to brace for uncertainty in the industry and thus slowed their hiring during this time. The future for Jane looked bleak.Previously, when she was at the height of her career, she found that her passionate involvement in volunteerism waned. She was too busy to support events for organizations that meant a great deal to her like the Muscular Dystrophy Association, Autism Speaks, and the United Way. Her commitment to children and adults through volunteerism, however, never waned in the slightest. “In my mind I was really committed to my company and my passions,” Ms. Harding expressed. “But that’s the problem – it was in my mind. I really feel that had I made more of my natural abilities in reaching out at a time when I was comfortable, I may have had an easier road in my new job search.” 

Although Jane Harding’s career path may differ from yours, her dilemma probably does not. She became so focused on work that she ignored an important part of her life. She neglected the volunteerism that gave her great personal satisfaction. When you have a great job most people focus on that work. Most of your time and creative energy tend to be invested where you will get the most monetary return. Accolades and awards may result –and they did for Jane. But, like Jane, you may have lost the focus of your personal brand.

What is your personal brand and why is it important to your career?

Simply put, personal branding can be defined as the initial and authentic lasting impression you want to give people.

True career entrepreneurs understand that personal brands should be built during times of career comfort. Pushing yourself to build your personal brand when your career is soaring can be inconvenient. But, success is often built on inconvenience. “I recommend inconveniencing yourself,” says Jane Harding. “That would have made my job search much easier. I could have made this voltage happen earlier, though I finally did.”

Whether you are job searching or you are at the, height of your career, it’s now time to develop your personal brand. We will go over the five steps that you may consider in developing your brand. First ask yourself, what matters to you volunteer wise and what do you support that could help you revitalize your career path?

Read the Five Steps.

Associations Work, So Work Them. Immediately after noticing her lack of participation in groups supporting her volunteering efforts, she jumped back into those groups and took on leadership roles. “My network probably increased directly by 200 professionals overnight,” says Ms. Harding. “I put the causes and organizations first in my efforts, but also utilized this time to professionally let people know what I was looking for inside and outside of healthcare.”

Use Your Expertise to Contribute. “With some coaching,” says Ms. Harding, “I developed and delivered three speeches, filmed them and posted them on YouTube and to my online web portfolio. I started my own blog and wrote book reviews on Amazon and Barnes & Noble online. Additionally, I authored four articles and published them in a volunteer magazine, on an online blog and in a regional sales magazine. It’s really stuff I could have and should have done while I was working; I learned that looking for a job is about branding yourself, not just pumping resumes out. The funny thing was that by doing this I got more responses from TheLadders and other postings too!” Join groups like Toastmasters and industry-related associations. Network and find ways to contribute productively first then ask for advice. Build relationships first and focus on what you can do for others. Then find subtle ways to introduce your needs. 

Stop Making Excuses about Building Your Brand. Ms. Harding states, “On the surface I was successful and busy, but when I visited some young cancer patients during my job search I realized how lazy I was. I always had time, no matter how busy I was, to give back. I will never make excuses like that again.” For example, Ms. Harding hated writing, but she did it anyway because publishing helped her personal brand. She always seemed to be too busy to do the fundraiser, put in an hour at the hospital for volunteer stuff or to capture and edit video during her educational and other appearances. “So many opportunities are available to you to build your personal brand while you are deeply focused on your work. Even my former boss asked me why I hadn’t thought of it while I worked with him.” Ms. Harding also states, “I did things during my job search to take my own excuses away and it worked.”

Define Personal Branding for You. “What I found out is that personal branding is not a phony line made up by an advertising person,” says Ms. Harding. “For me it was about reinventing myself to be more like myself, if that makes sense. I decided to start by committing to things that mattered most to me – kids, volunteer activities, causes – and this inspired me to push myself way out of my comfort zone. I developed new, strong and enduring relationships. I became more like myself.” This advice can work for you. It simply does not matter if you find yourself in a high-flying sales position or in a low-profile operations position; you need to light a fire under your career and the core values of your personal brand. In today’s world of intense competition for the best jobs, becoming and staying proactive in developing your personal brand alongside your career is a must. Don’t wait until a layoff like Jane Harding. Staying proactive about your personal brand while employed is mandatory. Lightning can hit any global or highly-exposed industry at any time. For Jane Harding, the skies didn’t seem to be gray. It may take a forward-thinking friend or career coach to push you to work on your personal brand when you’re comfortable. So, what should you do now? Stay proactive about personal branding and it will drive current and future career opportunities. 

Here is an example of a good plan…

• Get a calendar and journal, and start to document your daily activity. If you don’t track your activity, there is no way for you to make a good decision if you need to change something.
• Make contact with AT LEAST 5 new people a day that have influence on the hiring process. Not through a job ad, but on the phone or in person. This can be done by using services like Jigsaw, Linkedin, Zoominfo, and ResumeSpider. Each has a unique system for building a network.
• Setup job alerts on SimplyHired, Indeed, and Jobster. These services aggregate jobs from multiple boards, which saves you time from scouring hundreds of job boards.
• Go to at least one networking event a week AND meet people. You can find a listing of networking events in your local paper.
• Read one book a week that has a positive influence on your attitude.
• Subscribe to blogs and newsletters that are in your targeted industry or discipline. This is another way to stay connected and know what is going on in your field.

Are you doing these tasks? If not, get out of your rut and start a plan today.

All these activities take work and time, and WILL yield results.

Don’t expect to get lucky like this guy…