‘Stretching the Truth’ on Resumes

Genre and Sub Genre: Verbal Folklore: Horror Stories

Language: English

Country where Item is from: United States of America

Informant Data: Ziqin Yuan is a government major in the class of 2018 at Dartmouth. She is from New Jersey, where her mom is a scientific researcher and her dad is a computer programmer. Ziqin participated in formal recruiting during her sophomore summer. She is planning to potentially work in education or the corporate/law world after college. Ziqin is a member of Kappa Delta sorority and is a student coordinator for OPAL.

Social/ Cultural Context: Ziqin was interviewed by Bridget, one-on-one, in a classroom at Dartmouth. Ziqin has gone through the process of formal corporate recruitng at Dartmouth once, and when interviewed was still in the midst of interviewing for winter positions. Resumes are vital to the recruitment process, and it is a big faux-pas to lie on resumes, and this can often lead to offers being rescinded or a candidate failing to advance in the interview process.

Item: During recruitment, every participant is required to construct a personal resume listing their achievement in order to be evaluated by firms. Generally, a resume paired with a cover letter is submitted for review by the “resume drop” deadline, and a week afterwards, candidates are notified which firms they received interviews from based on this submission. Resumes are based on an honor system, and often in interviews the interviewer will ask questions about the resume in order to ensure that it is all true. Ziqin had taken a computer science class that focused on a code called “python” so she listed “python” under her skills on her resume, but she could not recall all of the specifics of the code. Unfortunately, her interviewer asked her multiple questions about the code, and even though it was a phone interview and she was trying to research answers, she gave an incorrect response regarding the code. This would appear as a red flag to the interviewer because she was not able to back up the skills she claimed to have on her resume. Ziqin has shared this story with many friends in order to warn them about the consequences that come from lying on resume. Stories such as this have been passed between students undergoing the recruitment process in order to warn future students and keep them from making similar mistakes.

Associated file: 

Transcript of Associated File:

Do you have any anecdotes about your experience, or any horror stories? I had this awful interview… he like asked me questions such as, he really grilled me on my resume, so like I guess it was just like a personal story that really scared me. I put that I knew python on my resume ‘cause I took CS1, and he asked me about my favorite object, and I didn’t know what that was. So I was like googling, because it was a phone interview and I ended up saying was a “four loop,” which I asked Emma [CS major] about and apparently four loops aren’t objects. And I also described it wrong.

Informant’s Comments: Informant was able to laugh about this incident now, but definitely remembered this particular interview as being really unpleasant.

Collector’s Comments: Informant’s perspective is really fresh on corporate recruiting because she has done most of it, and is even still going through it.

Collector’s Name: Bridget Dougherty

Tags/Keywords: Horror Stories, Verbal Lore, Resume

 

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