Highlight your successes — there's no need to be bashful on your CV, writes Jim Bright.
Jenny from Balmain feels self-conscious about listing achievements on her CV. She writes: "I hate seeing all those exaggerations and inflated language but I have been told I ought to include it on my CV if I want to stand a chance. What should I do?"
There are three assumptions behind Jenny's dilemma. The first is that making positive statements about your achievements will necessarily involveexaggeration. This kind of thinking is the result of a very strong cultural pressure evident in Australia that we must never be "up ourselves".
Consequently, it has become the norm to express quite false modesty about our achievements. We have to mentally recalibrate phrases such as "pretty average", as in: "Are you any good at selling?" "Yeah I'd say I was pretty average." This actually means: "I am quite good at selling." Or even: "I'm great at selling."
Most of us are encouraged to adopt a self-limiting view of our abilities for public consumption and if practised long enough it can become a habit that changes our private perceptions of our own capacities. Somewhere between the limited boundaries of our self-view and the much further boundaries of our true capacity lies what I call the modesty barrier.
This is the point at which a person who is encouraged to take a more positive self-view begins to feel uncomfortable with the claims they are making about themselves. The modesty barrier is well within a person's true potential in nearly all cases. This means that when you begin to feel uncomfortable about the positive claims you are making about yourself, you are most likely to be still well within the realms of truth and hence not exaggerating - it just feels as though you are.
So assumption one is incorrect: saying positive things about yourself does not necessarily entail exaggeration.
The second assumption is that employers do not like to see positive statements that are self-promoting. Imagine you were an employer who interviews two candidates. The first speaks about her achievements readily.
The second says she is simply "pretty average". You employ the first candidate, only to discover from a friend in the know that the second candidate had far more impressive achievements but doesn't like to talk about them. You picked the wrong candidate.
In this scenario you can even argue that not putting your achievements out there harms the employer.
Another way of looking at the situation is like selling a product. If you wanted to buy a toaster but the sales assistant said the toaster was simply "OK" you'd be put off.
If you do not believe in the product, why should anyone else? So the second premise is also false. Employers do not want lies but do like to know what people have achieved and have no problem with candidates being proud of their achievements.
Jenny is assuming that "inflated language" is a turn-off for employers and she has more of a point here. Mindlessly littering your CV with superlatives such as "brilliant" or "outstanding" can reduce their impact and can even be counterproductive at times.
The key is to make the claims authentic by supporting them with verifiable evidence. For instance "Excellent salesperson. Met or exceeded targets consistently for past 15 months and received four outstanding sales awards in the process."
This statement has superlatives but each part of the statement can be verified — and, we will assume, is true.
Our research found CVs that included achievement statements as well as duty statements were more likely to be shortlisted. So, Jenny, get working on those achievements and include them as verifiable claims to be proud of.
Jim Bright is a professor of career education and development at ACU and a partner at Bright and Associates, a career management consultancy. Email, marked clearly "FOR PUBLICATION", to brightside@jimbright.com. Follow him on Twitter @TheFactoryPod.