CheckMate

Here’s another in a continuing theme of things to avoid, this time from Troy Bettinger, a recruiter out here in Colorado.

Troy writes a blog called NotJobs where, as the title would suggest, he takes this approach:

“I can’t tell you the best way to get a job - because there is no one best way. After 16 years of recruiting, I CAN share things I’ve seen candidates do to guarantee they didn’t get the job.”

Troy’s post yesterday called NotJobs: a bright future in sales describes a guy who was in the top five for a sales position and blew himself right out of the water with a wiseguy e-mail he sent. Bad move.

Trust me, this rule works the other way around as well - as recruiters, we are always conscious of how we respond to candidates, even if they act up like this guy did. Which means that, tempting (and funny) as it might be, you won’t catch us sending a response like the one a commenter suggested there.

No matter what, you have to stay cool and behave.

I’m not suggesting anybody who reads this blog would lie on a resume, but I think we all know that the temptation is there, and it probably goes on a lot more than we realize.

Even if you can somehow get past the moral and ethical issues, the thought of the high price you can pay if you get caught should keep you from doing it. Jim Stroud has a really good reminder of that today with a post about some very high profile people who got caught lying and just what it cost them personally, not to mention the others that were affected as well.

So, if you might be starting to have one of those Jon Lovitz “Yeah, that’s the ticket…” moments, a look at Six people who were caught lying on their resumes should cure you real quick.

If you had any doubts about what you’re up against as a job candidate (and us as recruiters, too), check out this little fact today from Harry Joiner at Marketing Headhunter.com in a post called Thoughts on Personal Branding:

“Monster contains 44 million resumes. CareerBuilder has 17 million. HotJobs has 5 million. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg…. ”

Harry goes on to provide some good ways for candidates to rise above that noise level, and his 97 Job Search Tips is also full of great ideas - guaranteed there’s something there that will be very useful to you.