MINDFUL

Fibbing, Faking, Fudging, Fabricating

While I don't aspire to be Miss Manners or one of the morality police, I believe it's time for a few words about lying on resumes.

Some time ago, a message board poster at vault.com asked for a kindred soul to pose as a job reference and offered to return the favor. It's quite possible that this is not an unusual arrangement. But the really eye-catching part for me, the part that kept nibbling at the edges of my brain, was this assertion: since no money would change hands, there could be nothing unethical about the proposal.

Yeah, right. You get an "F" in ethics, buddy, but an "A" in chutzpah.

(I reported the message, by the way, and it disappeared lickety-split. Neither Vault nor any other reputable website will tolerate something like that.)

You may have heard that the latest ethically-challenged CEO is RadioShack's David Edmondson. He resigned in February 2006 after a newspaper reported that the education portion of his resume didn't exactly match his college records. He claimed he'd received two degrees (in theology and psychology). The college said they don't even offer a psych major and he'd earned no degrees. In fact, he'd completed only two semesters. Oops! Who knew anyone would check

Interestingly, the AP story didn't contain any words like "fabrication" or "falsified" or "lies." They used only the word "errors." Resume errors.

RadioShack, in a regulatory filing a few days later, announced that Mr. Edmondson is to receive a cash payout worth at least $1.03 million. Hmm, that's certainly a nice payday if you don't mind a dose of public humiliation.

Which brings us to: why not do it? Just a few tiny errors ... extend the length of that job, add in some extra bits of education, embellish duties here and there, change a title to something more impressive ... Isn't it worth it to get a job?

Well, for one thing, there's the "always looking over your shoulder" issue. Once you put a lie on paper, it's hard to make it go away. Mr. Edmondson's resume was eventually posted on the company's website. When he realized he was on a fast track to be head honcho of RadioShack, don't you imagine that he would have given just about anything to make those errors disappear?

And errors tend to snowball. Say you get an interview because you exaggerated your experience. The next step is to fake it during the interview. If you get the job, you must continue pretending, to co-workers, supervisors and clients, to be something you're not. Maybe your boss will not accuse you of resume errors. Maybe instead he'll think you're stupid or lazy or unwilling to follow instructions. Any of those (or discovered resume errors) makes you a candidate for unemployment. And once you've been fired, more resume errors will be necessary to cover that up. 

Resumedoctor.com chose 1000 resumes to survey and spent six months verifying the basics like education, job titles, duties and previous employers. The rate of "inaccuracies" was 42.7%. That's pretty close to half. If the honesty argument doesn't appeal to you, then the "you're likely to get caught" position may grab your attention. If 40-plus percent are doing it, that means employers are becoming increasingly aware and are going to be doing more checking, thus upping the chances that you'll get busted.

Still can't decide? Here's the story of a guy who went through both -- being caught and being honest.

Paul Knapp tried to get a job by exaggerating his skills and amount of experience. That resume landed him some great interviews, but as soon as a tech person was on-hand to ask a few questions, Paul was exposed as a fraud and had to take the embarrassing walk to the "reject" door.

He finally began sending resumes without errors. His phone stopped ringing. But then he got a call from an agency that had one of the old resumes, and he decided:

"Rather than faking it, which was obviously going to get me nowhere, I took a more honest approach. I said I had some experience, but was keen to learn more.

"When they asked me about something I didn't know, I admitted it, but said I was willing to learn.

"Eventually, I got the job. It all went well and I pretty much haven't looked back since. During my time with [that employer], I sharpened up my skills. I spent many nights reading up and making sure I became an expert in my field.

"I became quite friendly with my boss. He later confided in me that he'd appreciated my honesty. He said he'd interviewed quite a few candidates who'd obviously faked it. He felt they were treating him like an idiot."

And there it is, folks: honesty. What a concept! The new way to stand out from the crowd?

Read Paul Knapp's story

(c) Copyright Jane Allen 2006. All rights reserved.

What Have You Got to Lose?

If you're a regular reader of this column, you know that I prefer to focus on the positive. So this statement may be a shocker: There's a lot to lose when you make a career change.

At the top of the losses list would be: Your Identity. Nothing insignificant about that, huh?

Let's say you're an electrical engineer who's decided to go to law school. You're tired of engineering. In fact after ten years of engineering, you hate it and can't wait to get going on your legal career. It doesn't matter how eager you are to dump what's right now, you're still giving up a substantial part of yourself.

For better or worse, our society pins labels on us and assigns status according to what work we do. (We're quite good at pinning those labels on ourselves, too.) So for ten years, your label has been ENGINEER. You hang out with engineers. You read about engineering. You think like an engineer and react like an engineer. To make the switch, you must give up that identity.

There's more. You have to say bye-bye to some of your self-confidence. Maybe even more than some of it? After ten years as an engineer, you feel pretty confident about handling new situations at work, don't you? Maybe you've become the go-to guy/gal when there's a particularly messy problem to be solved? That reputation makes you special, separating you from the rest of the pack. Oops! Suddenly you're switching to something you know next-to-nothing about. What's your confidence level now? Probably lower than a new kid in town on the first day of 8th grade.

Yep, have to give up the need to be sure, too. You may feel pretty certain that you'll do well on the LSAT, but how about getting into a decent school and managing to snag good grades? Add in the nagging what-ifs about getting summer internships, finding the right job, being successful and -- maybe most important -- the big question that's always lurking: Am I making the right choice? Will I really like my new career?  So many uncertainties.

And of course there are miscellaneous unknowns, those that you don't even know about yet so you can't worry about them -- yet.  Can you? Don't do it! Stay away from the free-floating anxiety. That stuff will drown you.

In a brutal nutshell, a career change means you have to give up your old self for a new self that knows very little, embraces uncertainty, says OK to the loss of control and agrees to live with fear. Career changes aren't for sissies.

In their book, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World, authors Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson tell the story of a woman who, when diagnosed with cancer, realizes that she must make major changes to every part of her life (physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual) if she is going to muster all the strength necessary to battle her illness. Even when faced with that life and death struggle, the changes were not easy. She said, "We'll do almost anything to not go through that loss of the old self. But if we can find the courage to let it happen, we can eventually move to a new place in consciousness."

And that's what your career change may very well require -- a new place in consciousness. How do you get there? There is no handy-dandy template for finding it, no program for inputting data so all you have to do is wait while the solution pops up. Your answer is unique to you.

Moving to the new is rebirth. It's a painful separation from the old self that resists change and can get real grumpy when forced to accept sacrifices and delayed gratification. Temper tantrums from the old self may sound like, "Let's keep skating along with the old ways. Forget this new stuff. You don't need it." Those kinds of thoughts tell you the old self is fighting for its life.

Yet every day, a whole lot of people somehow find enough courage, enough certainty and enough commitment to leave the old behind and walk forward into the unknown. That's what's needed -- not absolute certainty or total confidence or a mountain of courage -- just enough so you can (to paraphrase Joseph Campbell) get rid of the life you planned and get started on the one that's waiting for you.

(c) copyright Jane Allen 2006. All rights reserved.

Did You Hear That? It Sounded Like Fireworks

[C]oincidences are happening all around us, all the time, but most of them don't catch our attention and we just let them go by. It's like fireworks in the daytime. You might hear a faint sound, but even if you look up at the sky you can't see a thing. But if we're really hoping something may come true, it may become visible, like a message rising to the surface. - Haruki Murakami*

Frank was on his way to a career transition. He had already attended the right conferences, made good contacts and done some paid work for a research company. A man eminent in Frank's target field was speaking to a local networking group, so off Frank went to the meeting. After the program he chatted with the speaker who was gracious and accessible. They exchanged cards. While driving home Frank thought, I should call and invite him to lunch.

The next day, Frank's negative thinking took charge. He won't return my call, he thought. If he does, he won't remember me or won't accept my invitation.

We'll never know if Frank was right or wrong because he didn't make that call.

Barb's events planning business had been going great until the dot-com collapse. Now she needed some part-time work to keep her afloat until business picked up again. Her experience was wide-ranging, and she was open to just about anything that offered flexible hours so her few continuing clients would get the care and attention they expected.

She decided what hourly wage she wanted. Actually, she thought the number might be a bit high, but -- what the heck -- Barb has always aimed high. She made a wish list:

• 10 to 20 hours per week.
• Working from home or short commute.
• Flexible schedule.

She started cruising the job boards and telling everyone she knew what she wanted. She noticed a post on a community bulletin board Web site. The job was quite close to her home and specified 10 to 15 hours a week. Excellent. It was clerical and phone work. No problem. And then she made her first mistake. Nah, she thought, it probably wouldn't pay enough. She dismissed it and kept looking.

Two weeks later the ad was still there. Hesitating, she thought, Maybe...?  But she quickly shut that down and told herself, It must be filled by now. They just haven't removed the post yet. Again, she rejected the possibility.

After doing everything right, Barb's only (and big) mistake was not paying attention, not pursuing the message that rose to the surface. But she was lucky: the gods of serendipity refused to be ignored.

Fast forward a month. Barb's phone rang. The caller was the woman who had posted that sparks-producing ad. Through a mutual friend, she had heard about Barb's need for a part-time job. The interview went well, the work (expanded to take advantage of Barb's many talents) could be done around Barb's shifting schedule and the salary exceeded her wish list amount by $10 an hour.

Add this to your to-do list: listen for fireworks and pick up messages!

______

*from Haruki Murakami's short story, "Chance Traveler," translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel

(c) copyright Jane Allen 2005. All rights reserved.