About a million years ago, I was a younger buck with an itch for sales. I got hired at the Times Square store as a floor rep. I had this grandiose design in my head that I'd just sell my you-know-what off and rise to the top. You needed to be bilingual to work there, and I had just moved to the city from a yeehaw nowhere-town, so I just claimed to be, got the job, and started hustling. I moved watches. Like you would…
Great story. I have a friend that my wife met in language school. This girl was from New York and she had an insanely good CV, best uni education from Yale, investment bank and hedge fund experience. But do you know what, she kept getting fired on the corporate gigs she took here. The trouble was, she thought lying a little is okay. Which it clearly isn't in my Northern European country. Schmoozing while a great part…
I'll surely heed that lesson should I ever find myself with EU compadres. That makes me wonder how it happened. How America became the lie-on-your-resume place, and how those European countries became the tell-no-lies-you-heathen countries. I wonder how long it's been that way.
I mainly stick to typical resume bs now. At my age, I don't generally have to do that bs-ing, and thankfully, I don't really have to do that much job searching. Still, I've always thought it was okay to exaggerate small things. Sat through a Hadoop workshop? Yeah, you know Hadoop. I once spent a year and a half or so in a cube next to someone who was a Powershell wizard. He'd always try and enchant me with his tricks and wizardry. I took some notes and maintained a mild interest in it. I put Powershell on my resume. As long as I don't claim too much expertise, seems counterproductive to just sniff out liars during the hiring process.
Whenever I get too old to attract good work, I'll probably just retire.