Resume Padding: Why it Won't Help You

Ok, we’ve all been there: we’ve all thought about how to fill our resumes with a series of “impressive” activities and experiences. In our highly competitive high schools and colleges, the pressure to be over-involved and over-committed is tremendous. Every new project, student group, or extracurricular activity becomes a siren song for the perennial overachiever.  Resist that urge to add yet another student group to your ever-growing list! It won’t help you in the end, and here’s why:

1.     Your resume can only be one page long.

That’s right, you have to fit all of your activities onto one page—and don’t forget that some of your resume will be taken up with the essentials of contact information, education information, and the like. You will have to cut down your activities to the ones that are most important to you, so many of your resume-fillers will be weeded out anyways. A very full resume is not necessarily a strong one and too much clutter will actually hurt you—employers will be looking at a lot of resumes and you want yours to be easily read and accessible.

2.     Employers want to see your passions and commitment.

Having just a few extracurricular activities that you have really committed to will make your resume stronger. This shows that you are passionate about what you do and that you can handle long-term responsibilities. Being involved in something for more than one year and holding a leadership position is more impressive than a list of activities in which you were only somewhat involved. Spreading yourself too thin will show, trust me.

3.     If you can’t talk about it at length in an interview, it’s not worth having on your resume.

Your interview is (among other things) your chance to talk about your experiences; namely, the activities listed on your resume. If you have been involved with something for a while or in a leadership capacity, chances are you will have plenty of good stories and experiences to share. On the other hand, if an employer asks you about an activity you weren’t really involved in, you may not be able to show off your strengths and skills as effectively.