Using Spinning but not Lying to Create a Resume for Success
An untruth on your resume is no longer as easy to get away with as it once was. Our society today is all about background checks and internet records. If you are making something up, sooner or later they are going to get around to finding it out. And a discovery they make, they will share with friends in the entire industry. If you look, you will find that there is a grand tradition in any profession of lying for a good job and getting caught, even at the highest levels - the CEO's of Radio Shack, Bausch & Lomb and Lotus software, for example. They claimed imaginary qualifications and achievements. The idea is simple - do not create a resume with utter falsifications. But if you want to spin the truth a bit, well, that is a different matter altogether.
It happens when there are uncomfortable truths about your past that are really not that important. Sometimes, the complete truth is actually not advised. Maybe at one point you quit work a year to better take care of your very young children; maybe you skipped from job to job ten to the year at one point. How do you fudge in situations like these? To begin with, for a problem with chronology, a good way to fudge is to just create a resume that is functional - and not laid out year by painful year. You'll then have no holes in your resume to patch up.
What happens when they come out and ask you questions about things, honest answers to which would not really be discreet. For instance, you could have departed from your previous job rather in a hurry to leave behind an unpleasant boss or maybe a workplace romance that didn't turn out well. If you bare your soul about the real reason you had to leave the job behind, it will make you look unprofessional. Spinning and fudging a little bit would only make you discreet, not untruthful. You can say that the team play at a previous workplace was not what you had hoped for, but you don't have to go into specifics. It's important to use whatever office parlance is in vogue at the time. The phrase 'culture and personality match' just happens to go over well these days.
Sometimes, what you would be tempted to think of as a negative could actually work to your advantage if you try to not hide it. For instance, if you had to take five years off to raise your infant children well enough that they could take care of themselves in kindergarten, this is a way to drop out of work that is actually approved of these days. Raising children is a lesson in extreme patience, and these are skills that your employer could possibly use. Unless the sabbatical you took was to lie about at home and watch TV, you could actually spin it to make it sound really good, as it undoubtedly is. Traveling the world, taking care of a sick parent, raising your children, all are considered valid reasons to need to drop out of work for. Just make sure that you don't call it "stayed back at home". Stress the skills you learned while you did so - raising young children to be strapping and strong.