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Tool 44 · Develop yourself
How does a sceptical reader read this?
A guided 18 to 22 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. This exercise does not write your CV. It never invents a number. It tests what you claim against what you did.
What would have happened if you had not been there?
If the honest answer is that it would have gone much the same, that is activity. Say so rather than dress it up.
One inflated line costs you the whole page. The reader will not tell you which line it was.
What you'll look at
- 01One role
- 02What you did
- 03Scale
- 04What changed
A note from Mark
I have read a lot of CVs. The failure is almost never a lack of experience. It is that the page describes a role rather than a person. Those are two hundred words that could have been written by anybody who held that job title.
The line I always test is ownership. Delivered, led, supported and was part of the team are four different claims. People slide between them without noticing. It matters because a reader who catches one inflated claim quietly discounts everything else. You never find out that is what happened.
Read my full view ↓
The other half of the problem is modesty, and it is more common than exaggeration. People leave out the most distinctive thing they have done because it is obvious to them. If you turned round a failing branch, that is the headline, not a bullet in the middle of the third job.
And I would resist the urge to make everything sound corporate. If you ran a kitchen, say you ran a kitchen. The people worth working for can tell the difference between somebody who did something and somebody who has learned the vocabulary.
What you'll get
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
Claim against evidence
02
Activity against achievement
03
What was yours
04
The missing material
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02The story your CV currently tells
- 03The story the evidence supports
- 04What was actually yours
- 05Activity and achievement
- 06Where it overstates
- 07Where it undersells you
- 08What a sceptical reader would ask first
- 09What is missing
- 10The rival reading
- 11What deserves protecting
- 12The credible alternative
- 13What this exercise cannot decide
- 14What remains unresolved
- 15Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
At the end, the conversation asks how Work and purpose feels for you right now, in your own words. It also asks what, if anything, would feel different. Nothing changes on your tree unless you say it changes.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- How you described it
- What would feel different
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
The story the page currently tells.
02 · Test it
Give one line to somebody outside your field. Ask what they think you did.
See more ↓
What I would do
- 01
Take one role and describe it in tasks before you describe it in outcomes.
- 02
Say plainly whether you led it, contributed to it or were in the room.
- 03
Put a number on scale wherever you honestly can, and leave it out where you cannot.
- 04
Find the achievement hiding inside each piece of activity.
- 05
Read it as somebody who does not want to be impressed.
Test it
- 01
Did you lead it, contribute to it or were you in the room?
- 02
What would have happened if you had not been there?
- 03
What is the first question a sceptic would ask?
The alternative
The expected conclusion is that the CV needs strengthening. Two alternatives are frequently truer. The document may be overclaiming in a way that is costing interviews rather than winning them, because a reader who senses inflation in one line discounts the whole page. Or the writing may be fine and the problem is that the CV is honestly describing a job the user no longer wants, in which case no amount of rewriting will help and the work belongs elsewhere. Sometimes the finding is simply that the evidence is much stronger than the page and the user has been modest to the point of self harm.
Think about this
- What one line on your CV actually claims.
- What you personally did that week.
- How many people, how much money, over how long.
- What would have happened if you had not been there.
- What you left off because it felt too ordinary.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Put this into practice
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READ · BOOK
Working Identity
Herminia Ibarra
Read this if you have been reflecting on the same possible change for two years and have never once tried a small version of it.
Read more ↗
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Recommended by the TAIU community
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Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
What kind of work fits me now
If the CV honestly describes work you no longer want
Further thinking
Impression Management and Faking in the Employment Interview
Julia Levashina and Michael Campion
Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs
Lauren Rivera
Belief in the Unstructured Interview: The Persistence of an Illusion
Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes and Nathanial Peterson
See the thinking ↓
Article
Impression Management and Faking in the Employment Interview
Julia Levashina and Michael Campion
Research on how routinely candidates inflate, and how experienced readers detect it. It explains why a vague claim costs you more credibility than a modest one.
Book
Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs
Lauren Rivera
Rivera sat inside hiring committees. What she found about how people actually read a CV is uncomfortable and extremely useful if you are writing one.
Article
Belief in the Unstructured Interview: The Persistence of an Illusion
Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes and Nathanial Peterson
Interviewers form confident impressions from very little. That cuts both ways, and it is why the evidence on your CV has to do the work your presence cannot.
Book
Working Identity
Herminia Ibarra
Ibarra followed people through major career and identity change and found that almost none of them thought their way to an answer first. They acted first, in small reversible experiments, and their sense of who they were caught up afterwards. It is the strongest available argument against sitting still until you feel certain.