Should your resume hide your race? Try this time-honored advice: Just be yourself

Q: An African-American friend is about to send a resume to a company. She's a student and asks your advice: Is it OK to include the fact that she is an active member of certain African-American groups at her college? She thinks she may be excluded from an interview if she includes this. What should you tell her to do?

Nick's reply: We all know that discrimination is illegal, but let's be real. It does happen. The last thing you want to do is give your friend advice that's going to hurt her chances of getting a job in a tight market.

I've got a simple approach to people and companies that I suspect are bigoted: I want to know now, not later. Suppose your friend omits her affiliations and gets an interview. What then? If she finds out they're bigoted but it's later in the process, she has invested time and effort to get a job at a company that isn't going to give her a fair shake.

Your friend can just submit her resume and take legal action if she detects discrimination. That's her prerogative, and it will require a lawyer, because I'm not about to offer legal advice. The other solution is to avoid wasting time with bigots. I don't advocate one solution over the other because it's a personal choice, but the friend must choose. If she takes the legal road, the rest of this discussion doesn't matter. Otherwise ...

If she wants to find a good job at a good company, she should be herself before, during and after the interview process. Let the outcome reveal the intentions of the employer -- then deal with it.

You've got to live with the people who hire you, so you might as well find out now whether they're worth living with. The application and interview process should include candid discussions with enough managers and employees that your friend is confident that she's got a good picture of the company's culture. Please recognize that much of this can be done before applying for a job, but it requires using a network of contacts to make such inquiries in advance. It's a worthwhile investment of time.

As for listing her affiliations, I would do it if they're relevant to the work, but I would leave them off if they're not. For example, if she's applying for an engineering job and belongs to an African-American engineers' association, I'd include it. New grads naturally assume that their memberships should be on their resumes because it reveals extracurricular activities. While that may be important on college applications, it isn't likely to buy you much when applying for a job.

But this begs another question: What if listing her African-American group affiliations might help her at some companies because they are trying to meet equal opportunity hiring requirements? I'm pragmatic about that, too: Do what will help you get in front of the employer.

Those are my observations. Now I'll give you my advice: Tell your friend not to pursue jobs mainly via resumes. The best way to get in the door is through personal contacts. Your friend should invest her time developing contacts at target companies through her friends, associates, and members of any groups she belongs to. In other words, leverage those memberships rather than worry about them.

Copyright 2009. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate

Nick Corcodilos is author of "Ask The Headhunter: Reinventing the Interview to Win the Job" and the host of www.asktheheadhunter.com. He can be reached by e-mail at seattle@asktheheadhunter.com or at North Bridge Group, P.O. Box 600, Lebanon, NJ 08833. Sorry, no personal replies.