You’ve spent many hours constructing the perfect resume. The formatting is perfect, the grammar is on point, and there are no spelling mistakes. Combined with your excellent cover letter, it’s sure to land you that interview. But before you hit send, don’t forget to fact-check.
While your intent may not be to commit deception, not paying enough attention to all the facts and figures may end up putting you in an extremely awkward position during the interview. Use these tips below to double-check your resume and make sure you’re not misleading anyone.
Verify Your Numbers
It’s important to include as much quantifiable data as possible on your resume in order to prove your worth. Things such as the amount of money you saved the department or the reduction of errors in the production process. While many employers don’t have a way to check whether you’re accurate down to the penny or second, you shouldn’t inflate them to where they may be unbelievable. If you’re going to include quantifiable data, make sure it’s a realistic ballpark guess.
Don’t Pad Your Experience
While job titles may seem important to you, they’re not to most hiring managers. Hiring managers are experienced enough to know that a project manager at one organization may be the equivalent of a project coordinator at another. They’ll verify your skill set and job duties in the interview. Therefore, you should never overinflate your experience to try and impress an employer. If you were a data entry clerk, don’t report your previous title as an executive admin. Instead, be truthful about describing what you did on the job, especially in the places where you went above and beyond your duties.
Plan for Reference Checks
Many potential employers will conduct reference checks, so everything on your resume should be verifiable. Make sure you spell the names of previous places of employment correctly and include the correct dates that you worked there. If you don’t remember the exact dates, it’s completely acceptable to only include the month. Don’t ever lie about education credentials or job certifications. This is all information that is easily checked by employers and will disqualify you from the job if it doesn’t match up.
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