Smart people with 'dumb' resumes

A business owner complains that she has wasted hundreds of hours of time and thousands of dollars in resources to interview people who were overqualified for the job she was offering. The opening was just above entry level and she has found that people with too much experience just don't last, costing her the time of training them and the expense of putting them on the payroll -- only to have them quit when something better comes along. So she prefers to interview only those with the experience pertinent to the job.

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Her biggest complaint is that some people got themselves into the interviewing process by leaving information off their resumes. They have omitted years of employment and have cleverly disguised their backgrounds to give the impression they have had far less job experience than they really do.

OK, in the interest of honesty and full disclosure, no one has really made that complaint to me -- but they could. The latest recommended tactic for older, more experienced workers, according to job search advisers, is to "dumb down" your resume -- let the person reading it think that you are far less qualified and experienced than you actually are.

One adviser tells older workers to leave off the first 10 years of their experience on the premise that no one really cares what you did that long ago anyway. Never put the year you graduated from college, advises another. Doing so will allow someone to do the math and figure out just how long you've been in the workforce.

But all of this raises the question of whether leaving off important information from your resume has the same ethical effect as puffing things up when you don't have all that much experience -- or claiming a title when all you had was the job duties but not the job. In fact, we had rather extensive discussion of those issues in this space a few months back.

Many people were in favor of no hedging at all. Even if you did all the job duties and had all the responsibilities of a system administrator for four years, some said, you can't claim on your resume that you were actually system administrator. And they made some very good points to back that up.

But then why isn't the opposite true? If you leave information off your resume with the intent of slipping yourself into an interview you wouldn't otherwise get, isn't that the same as getting an interview with false claims? Is deception by omission any less culpable than deception by commission?

Now, having been in the job market during the terms of eight presidents -- go ahead, do the math -- I can attest to the fact that nothing will squeeze you out of the interview pool faster than a three-page resume. And there comes a point, no matter what they tell you, when all your data just won't fit on one page.

Once when between jobs, I was having no luck in getting even an interview, much less a job offer. A former colleague, also looking for work, suggested I try Company X, and told me that he had just had a three-hour interview there. Sadly, I had applied there and had gotten a postcard telling me I didn't meet their qualifications. In fact, my experience was pretty much the same as my former colleague's -- there was just more of it. His advice? "You'd better dumb down your resume."

I think he has a lot of company. In fact, I often see advice to leave information out as a ploy to at least get interviewed. Yet I never hear anyone raise a fuss, the way they would if someone suggested that people routinely include job experience they didn't have. Why is that?

I think the argument in favor of omission would be that you're not claiming to be something you're not, that you're only including what's relevant to this job, or that the resume is "only a summary" and that you leave lots of stuff out; why not this?

But if you're a strict truth-teller, the omission is a clear attempt to deceive, which is what truth-telling is designed to avoid. You are holding yourself out as someone less experienced than you really are. And why would you do that? Primarily because you know that it's important to the person making the decision on whom to interview. How does this differ from including "experience" or a title you didn't really have?

As we can see from my mythical business owner in the opening paragraph, sometimes the extent of experience does make a difference. Employers often don't want to hire someone who has too much experience or expects too high a salary. Although that person may take the job out of desperation, many business owners or managers know the person will be gone at the first available opportunity, leaving the company holding the bag for the expense of putting a person on the payroll. This doesn't even count the disruption and expense of now having to fill the opening again.

I realize that age discrimination is illegal. However, I'm talking about situations where those doing the hiring are more concerned with someone with too much job experience, expecting too high a salary. The age issue does remain, I admit, and that is another ethical problem.

So I guess my question is whether "dumbing down" is an allowable job-seeking tactic or whether it's out-and-out deception that should be condemned right up there with claiming to be something you're not.

Any ideas? Don't all raise your hands at once. Write to me at ethics_matters@infoworld.com or share your thoughts with other readers in our Ethics Matters forum at www.infoworld.com/forums/ethics .