Job Descriptions in a Resume Do Not Determine if an Employee Is Entitled to Overtime Pay

Employers will often argue that a Court need not examine what an individual’s actual job duties or how they spend their time to determine if they were misclassified as not entitled to overtime pay. Instead, they often point to job descriptions on an employee’s resume as evidence that “managerial” or “executive” tasks were the primary duties of the position. However, courts repeatedly hold that an employee’s description of her general job responsibilities in a resume are not particularly relevant to the manner in which she actually spent her time on a day-to-day basis. See, e.g., Ale v. TVA, 269 F.3d 680, 689 n.2 (6th Cir. 2001) (“resumes may not provide the most accurate picture of an employee’s job because resumes are typically designed to enhance the employee’s duties and responsibilities in order to obtain a job”); Morrison v. Ocean State Jobbers, Inc., 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 40010, at *45 n.10 (D. Conn. Mar. 22, 2013) (“It is unsurprising that an employee would choose to emphasize in a resume managerial tasks, such as hiring or training new employees, over non-managerial tasks, such as cleaning the bathrooms or bringing in carriages, even where the managerial tasks took up significantly less of the employee’s time.”); Boring v. World Gym – Bishop, Inc., 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21061 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 17, 2009) (when courts consider exemption issues, the “appropriate inquiry…is into [plaintiffs’] actual job duties and not into what [they] list[] on [their] resume.”); Wolfslayer v. IKON Office Solutions, Inc., 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1106, at *29 (E.D. Pa. Jan. 26, 2005) (“statements [on resumes] must be taken with a grain of salt.”).
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