Preserve their actual dates, outcomes and the applicant’s contribution. Explain the relevance rather than rewriting the results to appear more successful.
Avoid overstating the personal role
Distinguish the applicant’s work from team decisions and identify who can verify it. Share only appropriate evidence through the agreed process. Confidentiality may affect handling, but it does not justify unsupported assertions.
Overstatement rarely arrives as a lie; it arrives as a verb. Led becomes the word used for participated, and a single substitution then has to be defended through an interview. The document that keeps this honest is the project record as the employer holds it — task assignments, model or code ownership, review sign-offs — because it was written when nobody was preparing an application.
Compare the draft narrative against it line by line, and adjust the narrative rather than the record. Where the employer’s system shows shared ownership, write shared. The requirement it serves is straightforward: the evidence must support the specialized knowledge actually claimed, and an inflated verb weakens every accurate sentence around it.
Hypothetical example: a benefits administration developer’s draft claims ownership of a rejected eligibility-rules engine, while the ticket history shows two contributors plus a third who wrote the test harness; naming all three costs nothing and survives questioning.