Part 1
Benjamin Tawiah, London
If the producers of Catch Me If You Can, a Hollywood blockbuster, had auditioned some of us for the lead role, they would have found a more fantastic actor to play the Abegnale character than Leonardo Decaprio. The dodgy character conned victims as a lawyer, ‘flew’ planes as a pilot and operated on patients as a doctor. But at no point in the story did he play a woman; at least, he was sincere enough to have maintained his sex, even though he had enormous capacity to have transmogrified himself into a female pig, to continue his deception game. Most of us have CV’s that would thrill film fanatics better than Quantum of Solace, James Bond’s recent work. Otherwise, why on earth would a bald gentleman of Ghanaian descent call himself, well herself Abena Agyemang, when he still wears his moustache and shaves his beard everyday? It happened in Germany.
Is there anybody who has not embellished their CV with a little harmless lie to land an equally harmless job? If I worked in a law firm for a month during summer break, and I extend the period of employment on my CV to a year, to make the experience appear worthwhile and compelling, is it as unchristian as saying that I earned a degree in a university, whereas I didn’t really finish the programme? Is it really bad if I quote the duties and responsibilities of my line manager on my CV, as if to say that I was performing those duties? I know his job and I saw him do it all the time, and I felt I could do it better. So what is the crime there? Is it improper to state on my CV that I owned a school in my home country, so that my employers would feel comfortable trusting me with a job as an attendant on a children’s playground somewhere in north-west England, where everybody thinks Africa is one big village and every head of state is called Mugabe? Exactly what is wrong with saying on my CV that I taught Social Studies at a village school in Tweapease, when all I did, in fact, was to get a reference from the head teacher to say that I was an excellent teacher. That ‘teaching experience’ could be useful in getting a good job somewhere in London, provided you could get a teaching certificate to support the claim. And if you get a teaching job and manage to follow a course outline and text book instructions, to impress your students, has anybody lost anything in the process? These are serious dilemmas in the job hunting process: To fake or not to fake: That is the CV.
The same week that Lee McQueen, a cheat who lied on his CV, was crowned The Apprentice on British Television, a programme that seeks to drill the best brains in modern Britain for a 100,000 pound a year job with Millionaire Sir Alan Sugar, an old friend confronted me with a problem. Her pastor had admonished that immigrants who are working with other people’s documents are risking their place in heaven, because liars will have no place in the kingdom of God. He had also said that tithes from such people, however handsome, will not please the God of Abraham. My old friend, a married woman with two children in cosmopolitan London, wanted to know if she is displeasing God, being a tongue-speaking born again Christian. I was quick to refer her to the Lee McQueen theory, that cheats may miss heaven but if they are able to cheat successfully, they could earn themselves a cool 100,000 pounds while on earth. Well, that was a very unchristian answer to have come from a beer quaffing freethinker. I wanted to quote her a line from Moliere’s Tartuffe: Sins sinned in secret are no sins at all, the public scandal is what makes something sinful, but that would have been a rather mundane explanation to something in the realms of the spirit. Instead, I allayed her fears by lying to her that I am also in the same situation. As if her sins had instantly been forgiven by God, on account of that discovery, she asked: “Really?” Then I said, “Not exactly.” She frowned at that and submitted: “You haven’t stopped these your old school tricks, innit, to mean isn’t it”. Then I quoted her Romans 3: 23: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of our ‘employers.” It is by sheer grace, never by our deeds.
Let’s face it: it is only a dishonest person who would lie on their CV. Anybody who would make a claim on their CV that they earned a degree after undergoing a two year programme at university, when all they did was to fast-track their graduation, and so finished their programme in four months with no qualification, is as wicked as the adulterer who cuckolded his neighbour and had the temerity to send him a video footage of the sexual extravaganza. The winner of the Apprentice show, McQueen, was said to have done something like that. He apologized for it and managed to sail through to beat competition favorite Clare Young, to clinch the 100, 000 pounds reward. Performance prevailed over morality on that occasion. Employers, methinks, do not go looking for morally upright or sincere people; they want those who can do the job. The chap proved to be an inspirational team-leader and a brilliant salesman. Who cares about a piece of paper called a CV; it is just for the records. It is the owner of that CV that matters.
When the lie was exposed in the contest, I thought the fitness fanatic was going to be expelled, but it didn’t prove to be very damaging. Indeed, his employer, Sir Alan Sugar, had confessed that he has also at a point lied on his CV, and that it is not really unusual. The employer may have been impressed with the different strands of accomplishments that had made the man Lee McQueen. This is a 30 year old chap who had bought a house at the age of 18, and worked hard to pay his mortgage and household bills. He had lived on beans on toast at an age where his compatriots were watching video games in their family homes and fighting over voluptuous girls in night clubs. That is the sort of man any serious employer would be interested in.
Of course, CVs matter, and good CVs (I believe they call it Resume in America) matter, too. It is the CV that will get you the interview in the first place. The interview will get you the dream job. So, which of them need working on: the CV or the interview? I wish I could task my friend and brother, Kwabena Yeboah, the human resources manager of Shell Ghana, to continue the discussion after setting up this almost fictional hypothesis. But the expert is busy writing his second book in 2 years, so I would dignify the question with yet another question: who determines what a good CV is? I attended a job fair in Birmingham (one of those fairs that showcase employers who have no vacancies for anybody), where a young girl of 18 gave me a rather rude awakening from a ‘professional slumber’ that had almost developed into a coma. Those jobs fairs also provide CV clinics, where any jobseeker could walk in and check the health of their CVs, even if they have never visited a dentist in their entire life. I joined a long queue, expecting to speak to a grey-haired professional, or at least, a responsible-looking person with some experience in life. Instead, I sat before an 18 year old beautiful English girl who was wearing a pink-dyed hair and displaying what looked like an artificially enhanced bosom that forced every onlooker to really look on, because her blouse had been cut very low. She had a piercing in her tongue and looked so unprofessional with her intimidating mascara resting on her bulging, flirtatious eyes. The little girl looked intently at me, as if to say I was a twit, and asked: “how often do you get responses to your job applications, with this kind of CV”? “A few times”, I said. “Then those employers did you a great favour; maybe they just wanted to see the face behind such a bad work”, she submitted. She took a red pen and crossed out things I had written when she was still wearing pampers. In the end, a girl 16 years my junior, taught me how to do a CV. I must hasten to add that as I left the girl’s presence, my honour (if any) greatly abused, it looked as if Reverend John Tawiah had wasted his money sponsoring an ill-begotten son through three degrees.
That is not to say that I have had any good jobs since then. The little girl did her part; I should prove her right to my employers at job interviews. It is a bit like salvation in Christianity: the pastor preaches the word of salvation; you apply the word to get saved. I would say for the umpteenth time that our forefathers would be sad to see how some of us are still going hungry in the midst of plenty. Not a day passes by that we don’t have a seminar or two on how to speak at job interviews. If you feel too important to join thickheads at a seminar, you can simply type into any internet search engine: how to win at job interviews and you are sure to get a tsunami of information on do’s and don’ts. But employers still moan about the quality of the human resource we have today. For those of us in the writing trade, our editors spend time correcting our copy after we had dumped them on the desk, but we are happy to flaunt our byline when the print comes out the next day, tasking our readers to gloss over our mistakes.
You see, being fed up with a promising situation is not such a bad thing. For, that was the mood of my flat mate in Milton Keynes, UK, when he angrily packed his belongings and made for Kotoka International airport, after a five year sojourn abroad. White-Collar employment in the West promises better remuneration, but it takes as long as it took Peter to accept that he was Jesus’ disciple during the crucifixion, to get a decent one. The last time I spoke to Botwe, a banker, about jobs in Ghana, he was emphatic: “Charlie, times have changed. Forget the CV, these days, ‘who you know’ does not work in Ghana; you have to prove yourself at series of interviews for one job. It is difficult than all the interviews I did in the UK.” Well, he must be fine; he heads a branch, while I still errrr...
Indeed, times have changed. After my post-university national service, when I had very little photocopying experience, I had a four page CV. Now I have one and a half pages. Who has time to read a booklet for a CV? Employers want you to tell them your skills and your strengths in very appealing language. Recently, I attended an interview for a research job in West London, where I was asked to mention my weaknesses. I remembered a lesson KSM had given on radio on how to answer such questions. Then as if mimicry was not only KSM’s business, I said: “I am so meticulous and dedicated to work that sometimes, I come across to my team mates as a presumptuous individual, but I usually rely on my excellent team-building skills to quell any tensions.” The interviewer laughed and said: “give us a proper weakness”. Then I moved: “Because I am always eager to give off my best, I tend to be unnecessarily sacrificial.” I came home thinking I had nailed the British. I was looking through a sales magazine, fishing for the latest set of furniture for my living room when a letter came through. “We are sorry …. …
Benjamin Tawiah: The author is a freelance journalist; he lives in London.
Email: [email protected], [email protected]