Can you be totally honest on a resume and expect a call from a employer?

"Overqualified", means they wanted someone younger they could get away with paying a lot less. Believe me your not missing anything with those employers. 100% agree with what you said, I was laid off November 7th (this month), landed a new job right before Thanksgiving. So far my fastest job search ever. 100% honest on the resume no inflation of skills in the interview. Very happy with the result.

Actually one that said I was overqualified is a life long friend/class mate and he really felt bad for telling me. I laughed and told him no worries at least you're honest with me. He said he couldn't pay what I was expecting (even though that was never brought up). I told him I was looking for a good job and didn't expect a ton of money. He looked at me kinda shocked and said he never realized that. Told him guess you should have set up a interview with me then...lol

IMHO if you overinflate your resume and get hired based off of that what happens when the rubber meets the road, and you aren't living up to that resume? Lol

SFC (Join to see) - When you hear that comment what you should do is try to specialize in an area where your experience means more pay instead of a bypass. I did that within IT with Big Data and Data Warehousing and I am always in demand. One of my PM's when I was working for IBM was a TX ARNG Major. This guy was just short of a genius when it came to managing people and projects. One of the things he did was to form a LLC and become a Construction site PM and he would hire and manage the sub-contractors. He would openly market his Veteran Status and rank (sometimes). And Construction companies would hire him because they got a tax break for dealing with Veteran owned Companies (especially on Federal and some State projects). Pretty smart and he retired in his very early-60's.

SPC Erich Guenther -
Who said anything about lying? Lying is wrong regardless but most of the time it takes years for the truth to work its way out unless the person is a complete fool.

SMSgt Thor Merich - Agree there

MSG Brad Sand - Depends on the job. Lying is a big problem on informataion technology interviews. Some of you guys that have deployed to Asia know that some of the cultures over there consider lying OK as a tool to get ahead or achieve an objective or to hide something. Past interviews with Asian Indians and Asian Pakistani's over the phone heard the applicant using GOOGLE to answer interview questions, seen duplicate resumes submitted right down to the exact same punctuation with different names on the top of the resume. This is NOT me being a bigot, the H1b Pakistani's and Indians know full well this is going on in their community and it is a big problem (to be fair not all of them do it and some of my best friends are Indian....and we joke about it sometimes). We hired someone at Verizon that a employee vouched for because on his resume he attended the "MIT of India". His first project was to write a telephone number validation program using REGEX (Regular Expression logic) what should have been one or two lines of code after he was done, came out to be 30 lines of code and took 2-3 min to execute via a online client facing form in Peoplesoft (an eternity). He released it into production and thought he was a genius. We had to fire him after a second incident where he shut down most of the online application with one of his code releases. So I disagree with you it takes years to find out. In IT it only takes 1-2 weeks if you watch/supervise the new hire closely.

SPC Erich Guenther - Excellent point. I have worked with some cultures in which lying in perfectly acceptable. I can see that it could be a huge problem in some fields. Especially the IT field where many new hires come from overseas.