You Can Juice Your Resume

You may be shocked to hear me say this, or maybe not, depending on how well you know me.

I tell people to lie on their resumes all the time.

Now, how many lies, and the depth of your lies, you are willing to tell is completely up to you. But yes, I tell people to lie on their resumes.

I'm not defending it. I'm not saying it's right. I understand how it sounds, too.

But let me explain.

In the mid-90's, Major League Baseball was going through a tough period of time. The game was losing its luster with new fans. The game had just suffered a lockout, which pushed players even further away. The NBA and NFL were winning over the new audiences. The game was a mess.

Then all of a sudden, the game had a resurgence like no other. The year was 1998 and the most exciting thing in baseball happened at a rate it hadn't happened at for decades.

The home run.

After all, they say chicks dig the long ball, right? (If you played baseball, you said this; trust me)

A few guys by the name of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire combined to hit 136 home runs that summer and break records. It was awesome. At the end of the season, ESPN and other networks were broadcasting random St. Louis Cardinals games just to see if McGwire was going to hit another home run and break the record. Baseball was back, and fans were in love with the product they were seeing on the field.

Then, three years later, Barry Bonds turned on the heat again and broke the single-season home run record. We saw a resurgence of baseball like no other. The game was fun, the game had heroes, and everyone wanted to buy a ticket to see if they could see these Titans up close and live.

Then, a few years later, we learned it was essentially all false.

These guys, and many, many others, were on HGH. Human growth hormone. Steroids. Illegal substances. They were juicing in order to recover, get stronger, and hit more home runs.

Everything we knew about the game was sort of a lie, even though the average fan didn't give a shit. Major League Baseball had to intervene; players got called to Congress to testify, players were suspended, records were scrubbed. It was a mess.

Still, to this day, I don't care that it happened, because it was awesome. It was an incredible summer, and if you ask any baseball fan where they were when McGwire hit 70, they will tell you exactly where they were.

Here was the problem, though. Yes, steroids were illegal, but the bigger issue is that if you wanted to compete with these guys, you had to take steroids. If you weren't willing to juice, you were going to struggle to keep up no matter what level of baseball you were in. If the titans of the sport were doing it, it caused everyone to have to try to do it to keep up. There were a lot of players who didn't make it during this time because they weren't willing to take steroids, which makes total sense. But if you were willing, chances are you might have made it to the pros and made an impact.

Ok, ok, let me center us back here on Earth. I'm not telling people to outright lie on their resume. I’m not saying to tell everyone you went to Harvard if you went to ITT Technical Institute. I'm not saying to tell people you were 10x Presidents Club if you weren't. I'm not saying to say you were a VP if you were a Manager. That's not what I'm saying, but what I am saying is, like steroids in baseball, you might want to be willing to stretch the truth in some areas, vaguely, to keep up with other people applying to jobs.

The job market is a mess, and if you play it straight, you will get hired, eventually. If you are willing to bend the rules, it certainly may help you get hired faster.

You’re playing a game right now that doesn’t have equal rules, just like the 1998 baseball season. It doesn’t make it right, but you should know the rules of the games you’re playing.

So what does that actually mean?

It means I don't think your resume needs to be a sworn deposition. If you managed the work but didn't technically have the title, I think there are ways to describe the scope without underselling yourself. If you were responsible for $20 million in revenue but only directly owned $12 million, I don't think you need to write the weakest version of the truth just because it feels safer. If you led a project, influenced the outcome, built the strategy, or were the person actually doing the work, then tell the strongest version of that story you can defend. There is a difference between fabricating something that never happened and packaging what did happen in a way that gives you a chance to compete.

The reality is that everyone else is doing some version of this already.

They are polishing titles. They are rounding numbers. They are taking shared wins and making them sound a little more individual. They are using words like "led," "owned," and "drove" even when there were 15 other people in the room helping make it happen. You can hate that this is how the game works, but pretending the game doesn't exist doesn't suddenly make it fair. You don't have to become a fraud, but you also don't need to be the only person showing up to the home run derby with a wooden bat while everyone else is juicing.

Your resume is not supposed to be a confession. It's marketing.

My rule is pretty simple: don't put anything on your resume that would make you panic if someone asked you a follow-up question about it. If you can explain it, defend it, and connect it back to something you actually did, you're probably in the right neighborhood. Your resume is not supposed to be a confession. It's marketing. Its job is to get you into the room. Once you're there, you still have to prove you can hit the ball.