I never fudged my CV. That’s not saying that I had extensive experience in whatever the employer was looking for, but mainly because I did not know how to.
In fact, I didn’t even know how to write a CV and had to ask a smart friend, who dictated it to me, and I remember it had words such as ‘hardworking’, ‘obedient’ and ‘quick learner’.
At that time I didn’t realise it, but now when I think over it, it seems like I was applying for the position of a slave.
The covering letter was even more cloying and cringe-worthy and had words such as ‘Respected Sir’ and ‘Please Give Me a Chance’. It ended with the breathless words, “I eagerly await your response,” which seemed like Romeo pining for his Juliet. Fresh out of college, where I never really learned anything useful, and out in a world teeming with job applicants, I was ready to praise my future employer to extreme lengths and thought the only way to get a job was to butter my way up. I was reminded of my job search in the early days after reading a report in yesterday’s Gulf News about job seekers fudging their CVs. The report said that a manager of an IT company was puzzled to see that in the sheaf of applications, 30 applicants had worked earlier for the same firm.
It was also found that a man sitting in a one-room office in New Delhi was pretending to be the HR manager of an IT firm and was verifying the experience of fake job applicants, for a price.
I was not smart enough at that time to find such a con man, but I thought if I used big words in my CV, it would impress my future boss. So on top of the paper I typed ‘Curriculum Vitae’, letting him know that I knew what was the full form of CV.
However, I didn’t know what it meant, so I looked it up and thought it was too ancient and wrote ‘Bio-Data’ instead. After that, I filled in inane stuff, since I had zilch experience, such as my interesting hobby of stamp-collection and to show that I was well read, I listed the names of the latest James Hadley Chase best-sellers and used some trite expressions from his crime fiction books to describe myself.
Needless to say, I did not get the job. I finally got a foothold in my profession only after a friend, whose uncle knew a crime reporter in the local newspaper, introduced me to him.
I still hadn’t learned my lesson that CVs were useless for landing a job and when we migrated to Canada, I would sit in the local library and send off dozens of letters to strangers. But this time, I was a little smarter and had copied the job application from a template in Microsoft Word.
It was now called a resume (pronounced with a short “eh” at the end) and I had to tell my future boss what my objectives were if I worked for him. My main objective was to make money, but I was told you are not supposed to say that as it sounds greedy and that employers like people who work for free or for a slave’s wage.
Things don’t seem to have changed much over the years and I was reading an article in Linkedin, a social network website for professionals, that job applicants are still using trite words such as “driven”, “motivated”, “creative” and “responsible” to describe themselves. But they are helpless as the applicant tracking system is programmed with these buzzwords.
What job applicants should really know in these tough times is that man in that one-room office.