“Verifying Information on Your Resume is Accurately Represented”

I am going to share some advice I gave to two friends I knew would be looking for new jobs soon.   Be prepared when applying for a job online or uploading a resume to a job board to spend some time correcting what amount to translation errors.  Whether you’re actively applying for jobs online or more passively uploading your resume on jobs boards, you will find some employers and job boards that have computer programs which extract information from resumes to either re-create those resumes in a preferred format or create profiles on applicants.  When the program is finished with this process, which generally takes less than a minute, you may be given the opportunity to review the results or more onto the next step. 

Always take that opportunity to verify the results are accurate before moving onto the next step.  The programs can take information that would be perfectly comprehensible to a human being and produce gibberish you will need to correct.  I have seen programs take my resume and reasonably represent some of my jobs and create other jobs I never had with titles I never held at organizations that do not exist.  I have also seen programs create additional fictional jobs with employers for whom I really worked.  In other words, if I had held two different jobs with an employer, the program might also list a third job.  I’ve seen programs take a title from one of my former jobs and turn it into the name of a fictional employer.  Sometimes, I could explain what the program had done by misinterpreting information from a job I really had or jumbling together information from multiple real jobs into a single fictional job.  Recently, I found a program had accurately rendered my two degrees but also made up three other college programs I was supposedly currently in.  It even made up a university name that does not exist, “Illinois University.”  If I had let these misrepresentations go through unchecked, I would have come across like an imbecile or a liar or someone with a shaky grasp of English or some combination thereof.