Lie on your résumé? One job-seeker’s moment of truth

2012-9-10
From：MSN Careers

Getting asked by a reporter about where I went to school made me remember the day I had to choose whether to lie on my reacutesumeacute.
When I gotmy first job in Silicon Valley, it was through serendipity on my part and desperation on the part of my first employer. I really didn’t have much of a reacutesumeacute: four years in the Air Force building a scram system for a nuclear reactor and a startup in Ann Arbor, Mich., but not much else.
It was at mysecond startupin Silicon Valley that my life and career took an interesting turn. A recruiter found me while I was working in product marketing and wanted to introduce me to a hot startup making something called a workstation. quotThis is a technology-driven company, and your background sounds great. Why don’t you send me a reacutesumeacute and I’ll pass it on.quot A few days later, I got a call back from the recruiter. quotSteve, you left off your education. Where did you go to school?quot
quotI never finished college,quot I said.
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. quotSteve, the VP of sales and marketing previously ran their engineering department. He was a professor of computer science at Harvard, and his last job was running the Advanced Systems Division atXerox PARC. Most of the sales force were previously design engineers. I can’t present a candidate without a college degree. Why don’t you make something up?quot
I still remember that exact instant of the conversation. In that moment, I realized I had a choice. But I had no idea how profound, important and lasting it would be. It would have been really easy to lie, and the recruiter was telling me to do so. quotNo one checks education anyway,quot he said. This was long before the days of the Internet.
Making the choice about my reacutesumeacute
I told him I’d think about it. And I did for a long time. After a few days, I sent him my updated reacutesumeacute, and he passed it on toConvergent Technologies. Soon after, I was asked to interview with the company. I can barely recall the other people I met, but I’ll never forget the interview with Ben Wegbreit, the vice president of sales and marketing.
Wegbreit held up my reacutesumeacute and said, quotYou know you’re here interviewing because I’ve never seen a reacutesumeacute like this. You don’t have any college listed and there’s no education section. You put ‘Mensa’ here,quot he said, pointing to the section where education normally goes. quotWhy?quot I looked back at him and said, quotI thought Mensa might get your attention.quot
Wegbreit just stared at me for an uncomfortable amount of time. Then he abruptly said, quotTell me what you did in your previous companies.quot I thought this was going to be a storytelling interview like the others. But instead, the minute I said, quotMy first startup usedCATVcoax to implement a local-area network for process control systems.quot (35 years ago, pre-Ethernet and TCP/IP, that was pretty cutting-edge.) Wegbreit said, quotWhy don’t you go to the whiteboard and draw the system diagram for me?quot
Do what? Draw it? I dug deep and spent 30 minutes diagramming, trying to remember everything. With Wegbreit peppering me with questions, I could barely keep up. And there were a bunch of empty spaces where I couldn’t remember some of the detail.
When I was done explaining it I headed for the chair, but Wegbreit stopped me. quotAs long as you’re at the whiteboard, why don’t we go through the other two companies you were at.quot I couldn’t believe it. I was already mentally exhausted, but we spent another half-hour with me drawing diagrams and Wegbreit asking questions.
Finally I sat down. Wegbreit looked at me for a long while, not saying a word. Then he stood up and opened the door, signaling me to leave. He shook my hand and said, quotThanks for coming in.quot What? That’s it? Did I get the job or not?
That evening, I got a call from the recruiter. quotBen loved you. … Congratulations.quot
Epilogue
Three and a half years later, Convergent became a public company and I was a VP of marketing working for Wegbreit. Wegbreit ended up as my mentor at Convergent — and for the rest of my career — my peer atArdentand my partner and co-founder at Epiphany. I would never use Mensa onmy reacutesumeacuteagain, and my education section would always be empty.
But every time I read about an executive who got caught in a reacutesumeacute scandal, I remember the moment I had to choose.

Copyright：MSN Careers