Include the Early Parts of Your Career On Your Resume

In that same search, I found that most candidates in that highly-technical industry with marketing titles who had never had a field sales position were poor salespeople. I started skipping candidates if they hadn’t held a sales or sales management position at some time during their careers. Once again, a person whose resume made it look like he had magically graduated from college and immediately become a Director of Marketing overseeing an $85-million product line ten years ago hurt himself.

In another search for a Business Unit General Manager, the client wanted someone with a broad background. The ideal career started with an engineering position, and included technical marketing experience and product development experience as well as senior management experience, hopefully as a general manager. Many people, especially those from big companies, have careers that include stops in many departments. Those who didn’t include these stops – viewed as the ideal steps by many companies to a general management career – weren’t as likely to get a call from me.

1) Some people have been told that a resume cannot be more than two pages long (a fallacy – a resume can be four or five pages long if page 1 is interesting enough to make someone want to read page 2, and page 2 makes her want to read page 3, and since resumes are read on a computer screen for the most part, no one really knows what page they’re reading).

2) Some people are trying to cover up job hopping or parts of their careers that they’d rather not publicize.

3) But the largest majority of people who leave off their early experience do so because they are trying to hide their age. This is not a great idea – anyone can find your age on the internet in a few clicks if they really want to – but it makes the employer wonder if you think your age is an issue (see If You Name Something As an Issue, It Just Became One, and I’m Too Old for more on this subject). One study revealed that those who hide their age by leaving off college graduation dates or by leaving off the early parts of their careers were believed to be ten years older than they really were, so covering up seems to fail.