Comment Re:Be honest, tell the truth (Score 1) 698
Who said anything about exaggerating skills? The origional post was simply about listing a 5 week job that went bad.
Listing jobs such as that can also be viewed as misleading depending on the perception of the interviewer. Suppose the 5 week job was at JPL or Fermilabs where the first 4 weeks of the job were spent waiting on security clearances and a valid system logins (I waited 4 weeks once for a SecureID token). You would have done absolutely nothing during the 5 weeks but surf web pages. Noone wants to be bothered with an insignificant job nor do they care about every job you may have (someone interviewing for a technical position probably doesn't care that you sell quilts for your mother on ebay or that you build race cars on the weekends...YES, some of us CAN do more than one thing!!!).
On the other hand, if you work at a job for 5 weeks and it's very significant to what you'll be doing (say you hit the ground running from day one...or day 3 even), talk about the job. As long as the interviewer understands that you didn't "ditch", it shouldn't matter...UNLESS that interviewer is some head-hunter that's screening you for the REAL interview. I have found that it's best to tell those people whatever needs to be said to get past them to the real interview.
If you're interviewing with a lame head-hunter first, be sure to get as much information about the position as the moron has. There's nothing worse than showing up to an interview for what you think is a Solaris admin position and it turning out to be a coder position for a new streaming video codec.
One thing I do on my resume is show my misc. experience under my "consulting company" that I ran in '98-'99 when I had a lot of short contracts or jobs. Under that I put all experience that may not show up under long term jobs. Interviewers don't want to read through pages of jobs where I wired up Joe's 11 workstation network or installed a T1 router at joe's computers one day and again at ed's game shop another day. It's much neater to just throw those odd jobs under one job and provide references if requested.
Listing jobs such as that can also be viewed as misleading depending on the perception of the interviewer. Suppose the 5 week job was at JPL or Fermilabs where the first 4 weeks of the job were spent waiting on security clearances and a valid system logins (I waited 4 weeks once for a SecureID token). You would have done absolutely nothing during the 5 weeks but surf web pages. Noone wants to be bothered with an insignificant job nor do they care about every job you may have (someone interviewing for a technical position probably doesn't care that you sell quilts for your mother on ebay or that you build race cars on the weekends...YES, some of us CAN do more than one thing!!!).
On the other hand, if you work at a job for 5 weeks and it's very significant to what you'll be doing (say you hit the ground running from day one...or day 3 even), talk about the job. As long as the interviewer understands that you didn't "ditch", it shouldn't matter...UNLESS that interviewer is some head-hunter that's screening you for the REAL interview. I have found that it's best to tell those people whatever needs to be said to get past them to the real interview.
If you're interviewing with a lame head-hunter first, be sure to get as much information about the position as the moron has. There's nothing worse than showing up to an interview for what you think is a Solaris admin position and it turning out to be a coder position for a new streaming video codec.
One thing I do on my resume is show my misc. experience under my "consulting company" that I ran in '98-'99 when I had a lot of short contracts or jobs. Under that I put all experience that may not show up under long term jobs. Interviewers don't want to read through pages of jobs where I wired up Joe's 11 workstation network or installed a T1 router at joe's computers one day and again at ed's game shop another day. It's much neater to just throw those odd jobs under one job and provide references if requested.
