I Was Underemployed for Years: Here’s the Lie That Finally Got Me Hired

Many of us struggle with the gap between our hard-earned education and the job that just doesn't pay enough to boost our bank accounts. For the first several years of my post-college life, I too was overeducated and underpaid. I would put gas in my tank $2 at a time, and I collected debts from the dead. That's not a metaphor — I worked in estate collections.

I had a degree in French literature and English writing and wanted college-level work. But in exchange for absorbing the family's phone-rage abuse, I made $15 an hour and found myself surrounded by people who couldn't spell "balance." I was broken, intellectually numb, and full of shame for where my life had landed.

I didn't know it yet, but one bold resume tweak — a little fiction stitched into fact — would crack the door open, and I would bulldoze my way through. Here's why you could do the same.

I graduated college without practical, real-world experience. The wrong doors opened — first, at the debt collection agency where I did "estate" recovery. Eventually, I got so good at asking relatives to pay their dead family's debt that a local law firm hired me for paralegal work where I made even less.

To put it simply, I was broke. One day, I had only $2 for lunch. The office manager stopped me at the door and pressed me to chip in for the boss's Christmas gift. Her eyes raged at my stinginess as I embarrassedly forked over one of the only two dollars I had before settling on a bag of Ruffles potato chips for lunch.

Then, several months in, I got fired. I crawled back on my belly to the death collections agency. It was humiliating, but it was survival. I asked the CMO of the company about any marketing assistance I could do to boost my resume.

He gently, yet condescendingly, batted me away, saying I was very well-suited to my current job. So, I resorted to more creative means to get myself to where I wanted.

My then-boyfriend was a serial entrepreneur and admitted snob. He ran several businesses, had an Italian road bicycle worth more than my car, and was even more horrified by my collections job than I was.

Casually, he tossed marketing tasks my way: Mailchimp email campaigns, blog articles, PPC Facebook campaigns, and social content.

Unpaid, I claimed a job title: Social Media Specialist. Suddenly, I had marketing skills in a college-required job, and my resume had never looked prettier.

This begs the question: If you tell a job lie and don't know it's a lie, is it really a job lie? In my social media specialist job, I sent one email campaign. I ran one PPC campaign. I wrote three blog articles. I crafted one website's homepage.

I didn't know what a KPI was. Or a conversion. And I didn't know what A/B test meant, let alone how to run one. But I listed a slew of digital marketing skills on my resume with all the confidence of a 2015 Spanish minor listing "fluent Spanish" on their resume. It wasn't a lie; it was all-American optimism.

I sent my resume into the world, where it quickly landed me two job offers, including one at Target HQ, after a recruiter saw the resume and sent me in for an interview.

I went from a made-up marketer to measurable impact. I landed a job in marketing at Target HQ, working on their paid social media team. I learned pivot tables, creative sourcing, optimization rates, and more. I picked up business lingo, built decks, and made endless metrics tables. Then, after a contract renewal, I jumped ship and went to work as a media buyer at a local tech start-up.

As a result, I was no longer putting gas in my tank $2 at a time. I got caught up on my student loans and paid off old credit card bills and even older medical debt — including a doctor bill I had been paying off $10 a month for six years. My credit score improved, and I built a nest egg. Two years after my resume "tweak," I bought a house.

My marketing roles also continued to evolve. I moved on to a market research company that was acquired by a larger firm until a little over two years ago, I was let go. It was then that I discovered that writing, editing, and content strategy was where I really shone.

Within two months, I had a large freelance client roster. While solopreneurship hadn't been my goal, I wrote essays about job prospecting in the age of AI and got a few small gigs within a week — and then a couple of larger ones. Then, I got a long-term offer for 12 months.

A month after getting laid off, I hung a digital shingle and created my own LLC. Within the first three months, I billed roughly $40,000.

The lesson I learned? Spite is an excellent driver of industry and success. Like everyone, my life has been punctuated by people who didn't believe in me. Conventional wisdom says to drown out the noise. But me? I crank it up higher. Here are five ways you can level up your career, too.

Every day that I go to work, and every time I write, I set the spite dial on high.

I think of all the people throughout my career who have told me I cannot write: the garnishment-laywer boss, debt collection CMO, and woman at the unemployment office who said I would never find work, then suggested remedial (GED) writing classes.

If you've ever received comments like these, they can easily crush your confidence. But you can use them as fuel — and prove everyone wrong.

I started strong in my freelance career, but during one two-week lull, I panicked and reached out to an old boss of a boss, Amos. I inquired about freelance work and offered him a free article.

After reading the submission, he told me "no" for any work for his company because "the writing actually needed to be good."

It was brutal, but a day later, the owner of a content marketing agency found me on LinkedIn after I shared the rejected writing sample. Two years later, I'm one of her lead writers.

Amos had questioned my so-called experience, but rejection doesn't mean it's the end. Instead, find those who will value your work where others don't. Whether that's more networking, more submissions, or just more belief in your skillset, it's possible to find the right fit and take your career to the next level.

Everyone is one rejection away from their dream confrontation. Maybe it's several rejections like me, but every rejection leads to something better.

If you're trapped in underemployment or are unemployed, be bold and confrontational.

Want to be a freelance writer? Don't wait. No portfolio? Write one. Do mock press releases. Write product descriptions. Pay a writing coach. If you lack relevant experience, do free work (even small tasks) for anyone you know who has a business.

Like most people, I will never have a Harvard degree or Big Tech work experience. I will always be up against people with sexier titles, fancier pedigrees, and stronger networks. If you can't out-resume them, stop trying.

Find your own winning success metric, one that only you possess. Mine is drinking coffee and writing freaky good things with above-average-human assurance. For me, that sells, and the only opinions that matter about my writing are from people who can write and are paid to do so — because bad opinions are worse than no opinions at all.

While it's natural to seek external validation, relying on what everyone else thinks will never make you satisfied. Rather than basing your success on the opinions of others, measure your success by your own standards and by the people who truly value your craft.

My resume "lie," perhaps, was not a lie. I said I was a Social Media Specialist and defined the job terms — backed by the business owner.

Friends creating jobs for friends happens every day; I just did it in a more hard-scrabble way, with a lot of self-learning, diligence, and a lingering fear of poverty. The possibility of once again having to debt-collect was always a real, palpable threat. I was always one misstep away from digging for spare change to pay for gas.

So, make yourself undeniable. I was a Social Media Specialist. Or Strategist. Or Analyst. Or any other two-dozen related titles I could have claimed.

Today, I'm primarily a tech, B2B, and pop finance writer. My work includes short-term projects, long-term clients, agency work, and freelance news story assignments.

I have six to seven clients, and on any given day, I do two to five hours of writing, one to two hours of editing, and a few hours of other tasks like client research, billing, or upskilling.

It takes time to learn how to write content that businesses want. But I did it. Now, businesses pay me to write about what I want. They aren't hiring any word generator; they are hiring me.

The lie wasn't a lie; it was a prophecy. I told the world I was a writer-marketer. Then, I became one.

If you're stuck, broke, or trying to find ways to move beyond living paycheck to paycheck, hear me: This isn't your forever. You don't need permission — you need an undeniable story.

You need a strategy — a "lie" or a prophecy about who you really are — and then the audacity to send it out into the world.