Representative George Santos teaches us how NOT to write a resume. First lesson: don’t lie through your teeth!

George Santos's Resume: Don't Try This at Home!

By Joanie Donnelly, Dan Hahn, M.S., and Suzie Sherman

Truth in advertising! We can help you tell your real career story

Representative George Santos (R) of New York shows us exactly how NOT to write a resume. Hint: start by not, you know, lying through your teeth.

Every now and then, employers have to deal with unscrupulous job candidates who make false claims on their resumes. But you know we’re in a truly Trumpian post-fact hellscape when you find out George Santos got the go-ahead from his party after he submitted this “resume” chock-full of bald faced lies and absurdities.

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It’s been well-documented that Representative George Santos (R-New York) lied about many aspects of his personal history, even before the New York Times broke the story of his fake resume last week. Among these lies, Santos falsely claimed:

He graduated from Horace Mann Preparatory High School in 2008 (he didn’t.)
He started an animal welfare charity and “saved” 2,500 pets (whatever that means. And he didn’t.)
His mother immigrated to Brazil from Belgium (she was actually born in Brazil), and, perhaps most egregiously,
His maternal grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who fled the Holocaust (they absolutely were not and did not.)

As career professionals, we care deeply about helping you tell your authentic story and take pride in the accomplishments you’ve made during your career. It should go without saying that it is unethical, and sometimes highly illegal, to make false claims about your education, employment history, and skills. Just don’t.

The kicker for us in the career coaching biz is that this resume, on top of the outright fabrications, is actually terrible! His brazen claims (“2X revenue growth from 300M to 600M”) at Goldman Sachs (where he NEVER worked) are only matched by how utterly unsubstantiated and lacking in context they are (what source of revenue? How was it measured? What was his role in claiming this accomplishment?)

Let’s show you how bad George Santos’s resume really is:

His Summary and Skills sections are vague to the point of meaningless. If he’s a “Business Development Professional,” what does “currency and coin counting” have to do with it? Generic terms like “Sales” and “Real Estate” don’t actually describe any specific skill sets, software competencies, or licensing requirements.

And what three languages are you fluent in, George? We’d like to know.

The guy literally never worked at Goldman Sachs. And we’d like just a smidge more detail about how he doubled a $300 million revenue in just a few months’ time…again, at a job he never held.

He never worked at Citi, never attended Baruch College, and never attended NYU.

Some politicians these days seem unbothered by facts. When you present yourself as a candidate: be honest. Sure, you can brag a little. But represent your skills accurately, and back them up with tangible accomplishments. Do not be a George Santos. Or a Joey Tribbiani, for that matter.