Ethics and Résumé Design

By Derek G. Ross | Member

This column features ethics scenarios and issues that may affect technical communicators in the many aspects of their jobs. If you have a possible solution to a scenario, your own case, or feedback in general, please contact Derek G. Ross at dgr0003@auburn.edu.

Twitter, they say, could be the next big thing in résumés. Doug Meigs, for CNN, writes that “Twesumes,” 140-character job ads, are “being touted as the best way for media-savvy types to snag a dream job.” Even if you are not tweeting your accomplishments, your online presence could be what gets you in the door for your next job. According to numerous online news sources, Web presences and personal profiles are now more highly valued in the job search process than traditional paper-based or electronic résumés. Vivian Giang, for example, with the Business Insider, writes, “many employers think that who you are online is more revealing of your character than a résumé.”

Rachel Silverman and Lauren Weber, writing for The Wall Street Journal, note that recruiters are turning to social networking because they are “fed up with traditional recruiting sites and floods of irrelevant résumés.” Modern job hunters often send out numerous generic résumés without modifying any aspect for the job to which they are applying. Their mindset, we might infer, is that there are lots of people applying for jobs, and the more résumés floating around, the higher their chances of getting hired. On the human resources side of the job search process, however, generic résumés mean that hiring committees are tasked with sorting through literally hundreds of résumés (in some cases) that offer little or no job-specific information. Meanwhile, as Jen Doll of the Atlantic Wire writes, an online presence offers specific and unique insights into an applicant’s life, which should provide some insight into the sort of work for which the applicant is qualified—a potential news anchor’s tweets should differ, for example, from a potential comedian’s. Of course, as Meigs notes in his examination of twesumes, “social media […] has [also] made it much easier for unqualified wannabes to jam up the job search.”

The Problem with Social Networking

Despite potential benefits, social networking could be the reason why you don’t get a job. Constructing a branded social identity takes a lot of work, points out Doll, and your personal life may be something you don’t want prospective employers to see (Joyce). So how much is too much? Most of us have long given up on expectations of any real sort of privacy in an online environment, even with all of the filters that many networking sites, such as Facebook, provide. In her article on the Twitter résumé, for example, Katherine Bindley shares the story of one woman whose tweets landed her a job. The successful job hunter, however, also noted that she found out that the company that hired her had spent time investigating her online interactions to see how she matched up with the company’s needs before she even knew about the position.

This sort of rapid, unconsented information exchange is powerful, and perhaps just a bit scary. As Bindley notes, “As effective as social media can be for landing a job, it can also ruin your chances just as easily.” If Bindley’s case tells us anything, it is that opportunities may be passing by because of an off-handed, poorly #hashtagged, ill-timed joke. Or that picture of you waving a beer bottle in the air. But traditional résumés have their own problems as well, which takes us back to the beginning of our discussion. If social networking opens the door to information overload, then traditional résumés have to be designed to give your potential employer what they need, and that means clean, professional, well-edited design and content filled with job-specific information.

Designing the Traditional Résumé

Not all job hunters know how to construct a professional résumé. I’ve worked with a local community writing center and career center to help coach résumé writing and design, taught numerous technical writing classes where I’ve worked with hundreds of students on their job application materials, and am conducting research on résumé design. If I’ve learned anything, it is that people don’t always understand the value of a résumé at all, much less a well-designed one. Some that do, however, turn to outside sources for help. Local résumé help in many cities abounds, and online résumé writing centers are prolific, to say the least. At the time of this writing, a Google search for “résumé writing services” offered 43,200,000 results (11,700,000 if you include the quotation marks). A Bing search with the same terms offered 44,700,000 (2,650,000 with quotes). That’s a lot of potential options for outsourcing your résumé design. But is having someone else put together your job application package ethical? Does outsourcing that all-important experiential snapshot create an ethical conundrum?

In some cases, we may have to answer “yes.” Résumé design is a writing skill, akin, perhaps, to the ability to craft an acceptable essay, a readable white paper, or a fundable grant. It’s an ethics conundrum because life circumstances tell us that having someone write an essay for class for you is cheating, and presenting someone else’s work as your own—in almost any field—is plagiarism. But life experiences also tell us that paying someone (or a group of someones) to write workplace documents is not only acceptable, it’s expected. After all, many of us are professional writers—this is what we do! The résumé is confusing and conflicted. You can’t hire a company to write one for you if you’re in a class that uses résumé writing as an assignment. You might, depending on your teacher, be allowed to use a template. But outside of the classroom we can hire professionals to take care of this résumé business for us, and then present that writing as our own—all in a perfectly legal, much duplicated transaction.

So what’s the problem? The following brief scenario following Merle and his job-search process helps us get to the ethical issue at hand.

A Brief Ethics Scenario

Merle has been looking for work for over six months. He is fairly typical of the modern, tech-savvy American job-hunter—he posts regularly to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and keeps his friends and followers filled in on everything from his ongoing job search to his favorite television shows. He doesn’t really filter his online postings, and doesn’t spell-check his posts, but, then again, neither do most of his friends. Professionally, Merle has a few years’ worth of experience in office-management and low-level administration, and knows that if he can just get in the door for an interview somewhere—anywhere!—he’ll likely get the job. No matter where he applies, however, he’s never called in for an interview. He’s beginning to think that his résumé is what is holding him back. So he sends what he has to a résumé-design professional who organizes all of his information, edits his information down to a single page, removes all of his spelling and grammatical errors, and sends him back a gorgeous, scannable, professional-quality résumé. All of the information on the document is his, but Merle knows that he’s not capable of that level of design and editing himself.

Merle submits his résumé to a large, local health care company looking for an administrative coordinator, and not six weeks later gets an interview. His résumé is one of the best they receive, and the company is excited to meet him. The company does not, it is worth noting, examine Merle’s Web persona. They need someone who can communicate with clients via telephone and in person, maintain records and office files, compile reports, compose and maintain office correspondence, and schedule appointments, and Merle’s résumé shows that he not only has experience, but an eye for detail. In his interview, Merle is asked about his experiences and work history, and, sure enough, he gets the job.

Four months go by. Merle completes all of his required training, and should be well on his way to settled in. Unfortunately, however, he’s having trouble at the office. Most of his work involves writing (more than he expected), with some small amounts of programmatic design. Even though he has experience in office communication, he just can’t seem to catch all of the small details! This new, larger company seems more focused on professionalism, and more detail oriented, than the small business where he previously worked. Eventually, The Boss has a pointed conversation with Merle about his inability to design and write at a professional level. “When we hired you,” says The Boss, “we thought we were hiring someone who had an eye for detail. Did you lie in your interview or on your résumé?”

How is Merle to answer? Superficially, no, he didn’t lie. He never said,“I am a professional designer,” though, as many of us might, he offered all of the appropriate assurances during the interview when asked if he could handle workplace-level writing. After all, he did have prior office experience. His résumé, however, could be seen as a physical act of deception. Did Merle need to disclose that he’d had a professional design his résumé for him? Is he in the right if he answers that, no, he never lied?

What about the online component we discussed earlier? Could an investigation of Merle’s online presence have kept him from getting hired in the first place? If his résumé looked good, and he interviewed well, would that have been an ethically viable approach to making sure that the company hired the right person? In the here-and-now, should you be allowed to have a different online persona than your professional persona? Should your online presence count for more than your physical presence in an interview? More than a traditional résumé?

As always, all Intercom ethics cases—even the short one presented in this essay—are fictitious and are intended to provide opportunities to highlight and discuss ethical issues in technical communication. Any resemblance to real people or organizations is coincidental. But what do you think? Please send your responses to derek.ross@auburn.edu. Responses will be printed in an upcoming issue of Intercom as space permits.

Further Reading

Bindley, Katherine. 2013. Twitter résumé: How your social media profiles could land (or cost) you your next job. Huffington Post. Retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/21/twitter-résumé_n_2732885.html.

Doll, Jen. 2013. Will the ‘Twitter résumé’ ruin Twitter? The Atlantic Wire. Retrieved from www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2013/04/twitter-résumé/64082/.

Giang, Vivian. 2013. Now there’s a way to apply for jobs directly through Twitter. Business Insider, Careers. Retrieved from www.businessinsider.com/job-seekers-can-use-twitter-résumés-2013-4.

Joyce, Susan P. 2012. Social proof: Twitter and your résumé. Job Search News. Retrieved from www.job-hunt.org/job-search-news/2012/05/14/social-proof-twitter-résumé/.

Meigs, Doug. 2013. Can you land a job with 140 characters? CNN. Retrieved from http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/22/business/twitter-résumé-cv-job.

Silverman, Rachel Emma, and Lauren Weber. 2013. The new résumé: It’s 140 characters. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323820304578412741852687994-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwOTEwNDkyWj.html.