by Todd Pheifer

Created on: July 25, 2008   Last Updated: November 13, 2008

Best foot forward...

Writing a resume can be a challenge for any job seeker, even when their prior experience has been positive. The goal of the resume is to get the job seeker an opportunity to interview for a job. This requires them to "look good on paper", which is difficult in and of itself. Many people look good on paper, which makes the resume a challenging process. The goal is to "stand out" without seeming too strange to be considered.

Avoiding land mines

For the person who has only had bad previous experience, the task of writing a resume can be particularly challenging. How do you truthfully document your past while at the same time put yourself in a position where your resume is not full of "red flags"? Here are a few thoughts on how to write a resume when you only have bad previous experience.

Focus on the positive things

Even with bad previous experiences, people often have some things that they can salvage on a resume. Most often people still performed job duties, which means that they can document their experience. Job duties do not have to be "good" or "bad" by themselves. They can be fairly generic because they are what the person did in their vocational setting. Therefore, the person should focus on what they did, rather than how they did it, or who affected their situation.

Spare us the details

It is a bad thing to lie on a resume. That may seem like a presumptive moral judgment, but the truth is that lying can lead to a person getting caught. If they get caught, they will get fired and they will have to start all over again. However, there is nothing wrong with leaving some of the details off of a resume. Again, the job seeker should stick to the facts. If they performed a job but left a company because of a very negative experience with a supervisor, they do not have to volunteer that information. The reality is that hiring managers cannot really ask a lot of details regarding prior employment situations. Sometimes they can piece together a sense that things have not gone well in the past through certain interview questions, but they must still stick mostly to asking questions about the future job. If a job seeker is asked about a prior experience, they should stick to facts and not dwell on negativity. Even if a prior situation was not their fault, hiring managers do not necessarily like to hear a lot of blame or negativity about prior situations. It is best to answer questions, and move on.

You can still get a good job

Writing a resume when there has been a negative work history can be a challenge. Sometimes the best thing a person can do is just state the facts and hope that the next opportunity will not include a lot of probing questions about the past.

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