I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a hard time with dates and times since the pandemic arrived. Time loses meaning when patterns are disrupted and events are cancelled.
Resumes seem to sometimes fall prey to wibbly wobbly timey wimey-ness, though I don’t think we can chalk it up to weird pandemic relativity. Some people just seem to have a really hard time remembering how long they’ve been doing stuff.
Depending where one is in one’s career, or in an effort to stand out against candidates who are generally similar, one might want to pad things out a little. Those farther along might shave things down a little.
Little fibs or even total whoppers can slip by initially in the hiring process. Recruiters aren’t professionals at all roles, and keyword filtering is a poor defence against resume relativity.
This is how a friend of mine once ended up with a resume on his desk from a prospect who’d claimed to have been programming in Java longer than Java had actually existed. (It was not James Gosling’s resume.) I’ve also heard of a resume that claimed experience in C, C+, and C++. (Only two of those actually exist…)
Reading this tweet, though, got me thinking a lot more seriously about the stories resumes tell, how they reflect time spent, and how they’re interpreted, for better or worse.
What other ways do dates on resumes not always truly reflect what people know or have to offer, even without massaging? What does it say about a company when nonsensical requirements show up on their job postings?
Certainly, for some professions, education itself matters. As does source, quality and recency. I want my doctor to have an MD, not from a diploma mill, and not from an era when bleeding, balancing humours, and hysteria were all in a day’s work.
But I know plenty of good software developers whose degrees aren’t in computer science, nor from University of Waterloo or MIT. A wander around Communitech and chatting with people – back when one did such things – would also reveal all kinds of people doing all kinds of things with all kinds of education.
Why do so many systems design engineers become entrepreneurs? What’s the best education to prepare you for doing tech support, when you have to have great technical comprehension and communication skills? People who are doing jobs for which there isn’t yet a specific degree – what did they study?
For those who get a specific degree and use it in a relevant field, how long does the degree remain directly relevant to your work as you gain experience and move up the corporate ladder? What education do people need who don’t plan to follow a standard corporate path?
Is there a point at which your learning and experience post-graduation exceed and eclipse that of your formal education?
Does an engineering degree teach you how to run a business, hire well, lead teams or handle finances? How about an English degree? And if there is a point at which your formal education isn’t the most relevant value you bring to your work, what does that say about stigma toward those who don’t have the right degree, or any?
At what point do we decide that a person has been working for too long? Ageism is a very real thing in tech, but why? In tech it’s common to change jobs every couple/few years, so why would a hiring manager care that someone is likely to retire 15 years from now? Neither the hiring manager nor the hire are likely to still be at that company by then.
Why would there be an assumption that someone who has been constantly learning, developing and adapting for 20 or 30 years would be suddenly incapable of learning new things? Perhaps it’s more a case of cultural “fit” issues at work.
The idea of people making major life choices in their teens – like educational path – strikes me as odd. Go dig up your Grade 12 school photo and take a good look at the person who was in charge of making the biggest decisions of your life. (She really used a lot of hair spray…)
Think about it. A high school student typically has, at most, a handful of years of part-time work experience, commonly in service sector jobs. What do they know about commutes, benefits, stock options or office politics? But they get to set the course for your career ship for decades.
Of course, then there are those who didn’t have the opportunity to make those decisions. For whom higher education wasn’t an option, or who didn’t know at that age what they might like to do. Or those who chose to leave the corporate world in favour of their families. What does it mean that their course differs, and is often more meandering?
Typically, it means they’re worth less and less desirable. That’s how they get treated, anyway.
I have a friend who went to school after her kids were grown and she’d gotten divorced, and with the social work degree she earned started a new career working in hospice services. In that role, I’d only care about her education and job experience to a point, but I’d put a whole lot of stock in her life experience to make her good at her work. (No shade to new grads).
Getting back to companies. While you expect some resume fudging in the hiring process, it seems worse when it’s the job posting that suffers from wonky relativity.
It makes those hiring seem incompetent. For technical roles, it may be a red flag that a non-technical manager may be hiring for – and going to be overseeing – technical work.
I mean, sure, it could just be a typo and they aren’t actually trying to hire someone who was doing SEO before the invention of ARPANET. But then, who approved a posting with a glaring error?
Or there could be reasons for the requirements that you aren’t privy to and never will be, often to do with internal politics.
A wonky or erroneous-looking job posting may be because those hiring already very much have someone (or a type) in mind they do want in the role, or someone they really don’t want, and are stacking the deck accordingly.
The hiring process has massive unknowns all around, though thanks to near-limitless access to information, it’s harder than it used to be to get away with wonky resume relativity.
But there’s only so much candidates can know about a company, its staff, its culture and beyond before working there. There’s only so much those hiring can know about candidates before hiring them. It’s all more of a trust exercise than a scientific method.
M-Theory is an opinion column by Melanie Baker. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Communitech. Melle can be reached on Twitter at @melle or by email at me@melle.ca.
