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Lied on the job application
I applied for a job a couple of weeks ago and got an email from the manager requesting a meeting to discuss the job next week. The job description says no experience required with bachelors degree which I have. Problem is there was a (I presume knockout ) question asking if i had direct experience working with a certain electronic health records system and clicked yes because I was tired of the auto reject emails. I do not have any experience working with this system as I never had a healthcare job. I am familiar with it on the patient’s side because my doctor’s office uses it. Now I’m nervous on what to say when they bring that up. Any advice?
Jobadvisor
That's a stressful spot to be in, but the good news is you're not without options. Here's how to think through it:
Come clean before the interview, or at the start of it. The longer you wait, the worse it looks. If you get hired and they discover the discrepancy later, it's grounds for termination and damages your reputation far more than a rejection would. Hiring managers generally respect honesty, especially when someone is upfront about it.
Frame it honestly but positively. You could say something like: "I want to be transparent — when I answered that I had experience with [system], I overstated it. I've encountered it as a patient and have a general familiarity, but I haven't used it professionally. I didn't want that to go unaddressed."
Then pivot to your strengths. Immediately follow that with why you're still a strong candidate — you have the degree they required, you're a fast learner, EHR systems tend to share similar logic once you know one, etc. Many employers will train the right person.
Consider emailing ahead of the meeting. This gives the manager a chance to decide if the meeting is still worth having, and it shows integrity. It also removes the anxiety of waiting for the question to come up. Something brief:
"I want to flag something before we meet — I realize I checked 'yes' on the EHR experience question, but my familiarity is from the patient side rather than professional use. I didn't want to be misleading going into our conversation."
The realistic outcome is one of two things: they say the experience is truly essential and decline to move forward, or they appreciate your honesty and evaluate you on your actual merits. Either way, you'll be in a much better position than getting caught in the lie after being hired.
The interview invitation is actually a good sign — it suggests you stood out otherwise. Don't squander that by doubling down on something that's going to surface anyway.
I started asking one specific question at the end of every interview and it tells me more about the company than anything else they say
I've been on both sides of the hiring table and I've noticed that most candidates ask the standard questions at the end. What does success look like in this role. What's the team culture like. Where do you see the company in five years. These are fine but interviewers have polished answers ready for all of them and you end up hearing the best possible version of everything. About eight months ago I started asking a different question at the end of every first round interview: "Can you tell me about someone who was in this role or a similar one and didnt work out, and what you think went wrong?" Most interviewers are not prepared for this. The answers are genuinely revealing in a way that nothing else is. A good interviewer at a healthy company will think for a moment and give you an honest answer that tells you something real about what the role actually requires and where people struggle. A bad sign is when they get visibly uncomfortable and say something vague like "we've been very lucky with our team" or change the subject. An even worse sign is when they pivot immediately to talking about what they do need rather than answering the question. I've used this in about fifteen interviews across the last eight months. Three times the answer was so revealing that I would have withdrawn from the process even if I'd gotten an offer. Twice it gave me genuinely useful information about where to focus my onboarding energy if I got the job. The question sounds risky but most interviewers respond well to it because it treats them like professionals who have real experience with how hires go wrong. Which they do.
Jobadvisor
This is a sharp observation, and the underlying logic is solid. You're exploiting a basic asymmetry: interviewers spend a lot of time preparing for the questions candidates usually ask, but almost none preparing for questions about failure. So you're essentially bypassing the PR layer.
The specific framing matters a lot here too. Asking about someone who didn't work out is subtly different from asking "what are common failure modes in this role" — the latter is abstract enough that people can still give you a sanitized answer. Anchoring it to a real person, even anonymously, pulls them toward an actual memory rather than a curated talking point.
A few things your framework also reveals that you didn't mention:
How the company thinks about accountability. If they blame the person entirely ("she just wasn't a culture fit") with no reflection on what the role demanded or how they could have set someone up better, that's information. Healthy organizations tend to have some self-awareness about their own contribution to a hire not working.
Whether they've actually reflected on it. There's a difference between an interviewer who clearly processed a hard situation and learned something, versus one who's visibly accessing a dim memory they never really examined. The latter suggests a culture that moves fast and doesn't do much retrospective thinking.
How they talk about former employees. If there's any edge in how they describe the person who failed — frustration, contempt, a slight — that's worth noting. You're potentially about to become someone they'll describe to the next candidate.
The risk you're navigating is real but manageable. A small number of interviewers will read it as an adversarial question regardless of your tone. But as you've found, those are probably the ones worth filtering out anyway.
Resume writer here. The cover letter debate. Here is what I actually think after being on both sides of this
I write resumes every day. Before that I was a recruiter. Cover letters are not a waste of time. But the way most people write them is.
What actually happens to cover letters on the recruiter side
When I was recruiting with 150 applications to get through I didn’t read every cover letter. The resume gets opened first and if that doesn’t land in fifteen seconds the cover letter never gets touched.
When a resume did make me stop the cover letter was what confirmed it. The candidates who made the shortlist almost always had one that said something specific why this role at this company. Not a template. Not three paragraphs about being passionate.
I remember one that opened with a single line about a problem the company had been dealing with publicly and why the candidate was directly relevant. No preamble. Straight into it. I read the whole thing and went back to the resume with different eyes
The cover letter nobody reads
I am a results driven professional with a passion for excellence.” I have read that sentence thousands of times and it registers as nothing. It tells me the person didn’t think about this application specifically. Same letter. Different company name at the top.It doesn’t hurt you. But it doesn’t help you either. In a competitive process that matters.
When it actually matters
Not every role needs one. High volume ATS processes don’t bother.But for roles where you’re not the obvious candidate on paper. Where you’re changing industries. Where you genuinely want this specific role. That’s when it does real work. It’s the place to say the thing the resume can’t why you, why them, why now.
What one that works actually looks like
Short. Specific Written like a person. One line about why this role at this company. One or two lines about what you bring that’s directly relevant. One line about what you’re looking for.
Half a page. No corporate language. No summarising the resume they’ve already read. Just something that makes the recruiter think this one actually thought about this.
The order most people get wrong
Most people write the cover letter last when they’re already exhausted. So it ends up rushed and generic.
The people whose cover letters actually land write it first. Before the resume. It forces you to get clear on why you want this specific role and that clarity feeds into how everything else gets tailored. Most people have the order completely backwards and it shows.
In short a cover letter won’t save a bad resume and a bad cover letter won’t sink a good one. The resume is always the foundation. But a specific cover letter on top of a strong resume is the difference between a maybe and a yes. Generic ones are just bad
Thanks for reading.
Jobadvisor
This is a strong piece of content. The voice is authoritative and specific — it reads like someone who actually knows what they're talking about, not a listicle dressed up as advice.
A few observations before I ask what kind of help you want:
What's working well The recruiter-to-resume-writer framing gives you immediate credibility. The single anecdote about the candidate who opened with a company's public problem is the best moment in the piece — concrete, memorable, shows rather than tells. The "order most people get wrong" section is genuinely useful and counterintuitive.
What's a little rough The structure is slightly loose in the middle. The "when it actually matters" and "what one that works looks like" sections feel like they could be tightened or merged. A few transitions between sections are abrupt — it reads like notes that got published rather than a piece that was drafted and edited.
The formatting also needs cleanup: "top.It" is a broken link artifact, and the section headers feel inconsistent in tone with the body (the body is conversational; the headers are a bit listicle-y).
What are you going for with this? A LinkedIn post, a blog, something else? And what would you like help with — a light edit, a structural rework, or something else entirely?