Woman, lie, for fuck's sake

Selling yourself in a job application became the topic when I helped a female family member apply for a new job. I was annoyed by how cautiously she described something she could actually do. In August 2012, that prompted a very blunt call to have more faith in yourself.

I spoke mainly to women in the video and used a provocative title. At the same time, I said outright that of course you shouldn’t lie. My irritation was about playing down your abilities, but I also pushed the point with some very categorical statements.

I helped with an application and recognised a pattern

People I knew sometimes asked me for help with an application or something else. When I felt like helping, I gave them a little push. This time it was a girl in the family, and it made me think of similar situations I had been in before.

I knew it sounded like a tired cliché, but I felt that several women found it hard to believe in themselves and actually understated what they could do. That was my generalisation based on my own experiences, not a study of women and men.

I started with the boundary: if you can only play Für Elise with one finger, don’t write that you’re an expert concert pianist. That won’t bloody do. You need to be able to stand behind something that is an actual skill.

But if you can do something, then bloody well write it. Be proud of it. The fact that someone is better than you doesn’t mean you can’t do it at all.

Selling yourself in a job application without hiding your skills

My recurring example was languages. Perhaps you had spent six months in France and learned to speak very good French. Then I thought you should say so rather than focus on the one conversation where you couldn’t remember a word.

In the video, I asked: can you make yourself understood? If the answer was yes, I thought you could say you spoke French. You didn’t have to be perfect at every part of the language to mention the skill.

I also distinguished between speaking and writing. If your spelling or written expression wasn’t perfect, you shouldn’t claim it was. I wanted the real skills brought out, without a single weakness making you hide everything else.

But I went further and said you should write that you were fluent when you spoke the language reasonably well. That was my provocative wording at the time. I used the word very broadly, while also having said you shouldn’t invent a skill.

I thought men and women could hear the words differently

I said many men were better at selling themselves than many women, and linked that to men often holding management positions. That was my provocative explanation in the video. I also mentioned that, of course, there were women in management.

I made fun of men’s confidence: we only had to have practically heard of a foreign language and we bloody well spoke it fluently. It was an exaggeration I used to describe the difference as I saw it.

If a woman very cautiously said she perhaps knew a few words of French, I imagined another woman might understand it as modesty about a real ability. A man, on the other hand, might take it completely literally and think she couldn’t speak it at all.

So I thought you should consider who was sitting on the other side of the table. My advice was to look at your audience and understand what the other person needed. I also said that to some extent you had to tell the other person what they wanted to hear.

I would rather see courage than restraint

If French turned out to be important in the job, I suggested taking an intensive language course and working on improving. I talked about a long weekend and went overboard with the timeframe. It was my optimistic spoken encouragement, not a precise plan for how quickly someone can learn a language.

I thought many things could be improved, and that you shouldn’t wait to apply until you were a world champion at everything. In the video, I even said you could often improve in a few days or talk your way out of a situation a little. That was part of my very blunt way of driving the message home.

I said it was better to discover afterwards that you had pushed a little harder than to sit at home without the job that might have been one of the best things in your life. I was more concerned with getting people to act than with qualifying every example.

What I wanted to get away from was hiding your light under a bushel. If you understate everything you can do and make yourself appear less experienced, you also give the employer very little reason to choose you. Also read Skab din egen succes about believing in your opportunities and finding your own path.

So my final encouragement was as blunt as the rest: go for it, for fuck’s sake. Believe in yourself and go after the job. That was my push to the woman who could do more than she was willing to write in her application.