Honesty Above All

Reviewing resumes recently, a trend I see is candidates putting their volunteer experience as direct work experience.

Specifically, for candidates applying to programming roles, they list work done on an open source project as a job. Even worse, these candidates would also have a volunteer experience section!

While I encourage open source project work. I cannot accept a candidate’s whose resume lists open source work as work experience. Why??

The candidate is being dishonest as volunteer experience is not work experience.

This dishonesty leads me to question everything else about the candidate’s resume.

If the candidate lists that lie on one of the most important part of their resume, I have to ask: what else are they lying about???

Team Member Expectation: Honesty

One of the core tenets I expect from all team members is honesty. There is too much work for the team that I cannot examine every single action each team member takes, every single day, to validate if the team member is honest.

Thinking of my younger self, I understand why I would pass volunteer experience off as work experience. Starting off is hard. There’s competition and you want to stand out.

Standing Out

Honesty stands out more than any work experience and that starts with the resume you write.