1. If you can defend it in an interview, you can write it on the resume. My 21-year-old brother, Erik, worked summers at Blockbuster Video where, predictably, none of the mostly-teenaged employees followed company rules. In a fit of productivity my brother rearranged the displays to be in line with the standards sent from company headquarters. At the same time, store sales increased ten percent. So (as the family resume writer) I wrote on his resume, “Assumed responsibility for in-store marketing and increased sales 10%.”

   At a family dinner, we passed around Erik’s resume. (Yes, we do this in our family.) My 34-year-old brother, Mike, said, “Are you kidding me? This is such crap. No one will believe this.”

   Erik kept that line in his resume, and he explained and supported it well when challenged in interviews. Recently, he landed a job at an investment bank.

2. Don’t tell every minute of your whole life. Tell the stuff that makes you look good.
   Some lies, though, are not in the gray area. Some lies are just plain lies. And if you have a big one on your resume, you need to clean it up. For example, maybe you say on your resume that you worked at IBM for two years, but really you only worked there for one and spent a year job hunting and making web pages for your mom’s bridge group. In this case, you need to tell the truth about IBM: one year.

   But you don’t have to leave a yearlong gap. Be creative. Call yourself a project manager for the year you had no job. You can learn about yourself as you rework your resume – maybe you didn’t think of yourself as a project manager, but actually, you were.

   When it comes to massaging the truth, no two people have the same limits. You need to be very clear on your own limits so you can stay within them. But be honest with yourself. Some people are very, very truthful on their resume, and then, when they don’t get hired, these people complain that everyone else is lying and life isn’t fair.

3. Package yourself like you’re a product. People who get the most job offers are those who know how to package themselves. Figuring out how to do this is a lot harder than just spewing facts onto a piece of paper. If you are not packaging yourself it’s not because you are more honest than the next person, it’s because you are more lazy.

   Packaging yourself takes a lot of time. Turning each bullet into an achievement is very difficult. And asking for help is difficult. Instead of pretending you are morally above that, recognize that you are competing in a marketplace and marketplaces require marketing.
   

So do some serious work on your resume. Make sure that it is not so honest that you look like a loser and not so dishonest that you’re going to be fired.

Penelope Trunk
Columnist, Boston Globe and Yahoo! Finance
Blog: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com
(917) 853-7772
Madison, Wisconsin
penelope@penelopetrunk.com

Buy my book on Amazon.com! Brazen Careerist: New Rules for Success