(resume-duties-careful-interview)
I am amazed each time I hear or read a candidate’s remarks that either puff up their job credentials, or inadvertently minimize them. One of the biggest fau pauxs a candidate for professional level position (for example) can unwittingly make is to describe themselves as being a one person office, where they did “everything” for the past four years.
Inevitably, they go on to describe how what amounts to half of their day was taken up with receiving in coming calls, giving general information, and maintaining records. Then end up bragging that they are capable of doing it “all.”
When I hear or read those sorts of statements from a candidate, what it means to me is the person doesn’t really have four years of professional experience, only two. (Say what?) The reason is that person has spent half of their work day performing clerical duties, rather than perfecting their professional level work skills and increasing their competency with more exposure to complex tasks.
Let me assure you that I will try to avoid any attempt make an HR expert out of you, but I think some common definitions would help our understanding and communication about these subjects. For this purpose I offer the following:
Duties and Responsibilities – The work assigned to a position and the matters for which the employee is held accountable.
Position – A group of assigned duties to be performed by a single employee.
Employee – A person employed to perform the work of a position.
Level – A term used to describe how the difficulty and complexity of one position is compared with the difficulty and complexity of another position.
Types of Work – This refers to broad categories of work used to group similar jobs. They typically consist of Craft, Labor, Trades; Clerical; Technical; Safety; Professional; Supervisory; and Management categories.
By way of further explanation, we all work above or below our job levels or undertake a different type of work at some point in time, but the vast majority of what you do or anyone else does should be the type and level of work for which you are held accountable and for which you receive your compensation.
There is a rule of thumb in compensation analysis which says that a position’s pay should be set at the highest level of work regularly performed. That is why the occasional higher and lower level work is not figured into a position’s salary.
What an employer wants to know when they read your resume or ask an interview question is exactly what duties were you held accountable for in your current or previous job. Also I note that, this is often (or should be) the principal subject of your employee evaluation prepared by your supervisor.
So, you can see that concentrating on the description of those primary duties and your success in performing them, is the best approach in writing a resume and responding at an oral interview.
Puffing up your level of work or span of control can talk you right out of a job with a savvy interviewer. This often happens when people hold a ubiquitous title, for example Administrative Assistant or Assistant to _________, and similar nomenclature.
Every job has its own assignment. There are occasions where a person performs duties that are not assigned to them, or for which they are not held accountable, but if later they claim a resulting expertise from that exposure… that can get them in trouble.
Another disturbing situation is what I imagine people’s first thought to be, “…its only a resume, you are almost expected to lie on a resume.” Not true Kemo Sabe. A resume is taken by most employers on the face of it as the truth. In the case of Riverside County to be hired you have to sign a statement that all the information you supplied in connection with obtaining this job was truthful. If your resume misstated your qualifying education or experience and it was discovered later you would be subject to termination.
To determine the actual type and level of the position you are claiming qualifying experience from, an HR Recruiter or interviewer may go over the written information presented and ask a series of questions, if there is any doubt to the accuracy.
Current/prior salary is an indication of the value of the position to the organization you worked for. If your salary is $25,000 per year don’t expect to sell yourself on your resume as a top corporate manager who instituted a multimillion dollar cost reduction program. (Pretty extreme, but you get the point.)
Likewise, if you were a clerical worker in an engineering firm (no matter for how many years), don’t claim to be able to perform the same work as the technicians (unless you actually went to college and took the appropriate coursework to be able to make a career change). It is not unexpected that some clerical positions perform administrative support activities in a technical field, but this does not account for the knowledge and skill required to execute the essential duties of the technician’s position.
I want to be gentle about this point, but people can really fool themselves regarding the type of work they perform. And I might add, this is all to often at the expense of not communicating their true employment value.
To continue with the example above, it is fine to say that you assemble and send out bid packages for new company work, and that is a task usually assigned to an Engineering Technician. But, the question is did you perform the engineering calculations using higher mathematics to be able to construct the bid?
That is why engineering technicians receive the salary they do, because having the ability to perform engineering calculations is an essential function of the job (and not collating and mailing bid packages).
At this point another definition of terms might be helpful for you to mentally file away. If you are later able to pull it out in context and paraphrase it you are going to impress the heck out of the HR person or knowledgeable interviewer.
Essential (Duties) Tasks – Are those tasks for which satisfactory performance of the task is important or crucial to the overall acceptable performance on the job, and the task is an essential function of the job. As a test you can ask, “Does the position exist to perform this function?”
Well, I have only touched on a couple of major errors job candidates can make, but it is probably enough to absorb for now; particularly with all the definitions I threw at you. Enjoy your long weekend (if your employer gives you one like we get). This is my 9/80 work schedule Friday off, so I get four days including Columbus Day.