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I finally got a job by lying about my typing speed, and 3 years later nobody has checked
Everyone says you should never stretch the truth on a resume, and I get why. But here is what actually happened to me. I was working nights at a parts counter in Gary, Indiana making $12.50 an hour, and I applied to maybe 40 office jobs over 8 months with zero calls back. Then a guy I know said the screening software just filters out anything under 45 words per minute, so I put 55 wpm on my resume even though I was probably closer to 30 at the time. I got two interviews in a week, and I spent the next 6 days doing typing drills online every night after work. I hit 50 wpm by the second interview and got the job at $19 an hour with benefits. I am not saying go make up a degree you do not have. But a number on a skills line is not a diploma, and half the time the person reading it never tests it anyway. Has anyone else done something like this and had it backfire, or did it just quietly stop mattering once you got good at the actual work?
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zara_hill4614d ago
Ha, my buddy did almost the exact same thing but with Excel. He put "advanced" on his resume when he barely knew how to bold a cell, and the job he landed had him building pivot tables on day two. He panicked, watched like four hours of YouTube tutorials every night that first week, and by month three he was the guy the whole office went to for help. Nobody ever asked him to prove anything, they just cared that the reports came out right. The funny part is he's now genuinely great at it, so the lie turned into the truth. That said, I do know a girl who claimed she could drive a forklift and that one blew up on her within an hour, so it really depends on whether the skill is something you can actually pick up fast. A typing number is easy to fix with practice, a license or a degree is not, and that's the line that matters.
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