The Line

On Friday I had an internship interview with a company. I'm still not quite sure what to think of it. I'm not sure I've ever been in an interview before where they used the word "crap."

The interview was actually going really quite well. I wasn't very nervous and I had good answers to their questions. In fact, I was really impressing them with my experience. Unfortunately, I was a little too impressive. I was interviewed by a man and a woman. The man, Travis, leaned forward half way through the interview and said, "Your resume is crap. It doesn't reflect at all the great things you've done." Well I admit I was a bit affronted by this. In fact, I've always gotten really great comments about my resume and my first thought was, "It was good enough to get me this interview, wasn't it?"

Travis then proceeded to tell me to make certain changes to my resume. For example, he wanted me to change the job title of my last position. Um, that was my official job title. He wanted me to change it so it sounded better. There were also a number of other changes he wanted me to make that really felt unethical to me. He and the woman insisted it wasn't wrong, it was giving a clearer picture. But it was giving a clearer picture through half-truths. I was clearly reluctant to make the changes to my resume that they wanted me to make, and they weren't very happy with that. (I don't think they wanted to show the executives that they were recommending a former secretary for a job. That just didn't sound glamorous enough.)

Shortly after that, Travis took a call on his cell phone and left the room. Yeah, that's when you know you're not going to get a fly-back. But at the beginning of the interview they talked about how this was going to be frank and honest, so at the end, I asked the woman for a frank assessment of how I did. She said I had great presence, I was a little bit wordy in my answers, but the real problem was the resume. (Can I just ask now why they interviewed me if my resume was so bad?? I know several people who didn't get an interview who would have loved one!)

So here's the problem. Truth is very important to me. I am a seeker of truth. Am I carrying it too far? Lying outright about your previous job title really seems to cross the line for me. But how close can you get to it? Is the grey area around the line wrong? I'm losing an internship over it. I honestly don't think most issues in life have clear lines. Most things just aren't black and white. And really, I think that sometimes it is exploring the grey area that you find truth. But your resume, to me, should be pretty spotless. It shouldn't be an area of greys. What's the line for a resume?