Resume lies are common – bosses don’t care

CareerBuilder.com Survey Shows Almost Half of Employers Have Caught a Lie on a Resume.

A survey conducted by CareerBuilder.com found more than half of all employers have uncovered lies in submitted resumes. This news probably doesn’t come as a surprise to world weary readers. What might come as more of a shock is 36 percent of bosses who caught lies said they still considered the person anyway and six percent went as far as hiring known resume cheats.

According to CareerBuilder the most common lies are:

• Embellished responsibilities – 38 percent
• Skill set – 18 percent
• Dates of employment – 12 percent
• Academic degree – 10 percent
• Companies worked for – 7 percent
• Job title – 5 percent

Dumb bosses aside, lying in job interviews is unwise at the best of times. In fact, it is one of the five sure fire ways of sinking a job interview. Even if you’re not caught out initially, a resume lie may come back to haunt you later. In some cases with disastrous consequences – there are plenty of high profile example’s of people who’s careers have come to a slamming halt because they couldn’t resist boosting their qualifications on a CV or telling similar porkies.

One extreme case here in New Zealand was the chief of the government immigration department Mary Anne Thompson who lied about her Phd amongst other things (See: Immigration head’s PhD claim disputed by LSE and Police investigate former Immigration head’s CV).

To get around gaps or holes in your formal CV, the Careerbuilder story recommends using a covering letter to tell your full story rather than making up qualifications or other resume details. That’s good advice.

Some patently obvious resume and CV lies have come across my desk over the years. My policy is to instantly reject the person, regardless of any other considerations. Dishonest employees are more trouble than they are worth so it’s clearly better to not hire them in the first place than to turn a blind eye then deal with things later.

It’s more complicated when a lie is discovered long after the person has been employed, particularly if the person appears in every other respect to be a great employee. Apart from anything else, employment law considerations make any retrospective action difficult. On the other hand, if the person is a bad employee, uncovered blatant resume lies are powerful ammunition for any subsequent disciplinary action.

Dumb management
Employers who oversell their vacancies don’t help this situation. Bosses who exaggerate the benefits and positives associated with a job in advertisements and interviews are hardly on the moral high ground when candidates do the same. If you want honesty and trust in employment, you must lead by example.

Dumber management
For the moment we’ll leave aside the thought that dishonesty may be a prerequisition for some positions: hiring resume cheats is plain dumb on three levels. First, liars are rarely adornments to your company, department or team. They can wreck carefully nurtured external relationships with a few stupid words and land you in trouble or worse. Trust is more important than ever in modern business, it can’t be purchased, it needs to be carefully guarded.

Second, if someone can lie to you about their qualifications or experience, they’re not necessary going to be telling you the truth when they report back to you on performance or tell you they have to take a day off work because their kids are sick. A culture of dishonesty is destructive in any industry, in knowledge work it can be fatal.

Third, when high profile CV cheats are caught (as in the Mary Anne Thompson case linked to earlier, it doesn’t give you or your company a good look.

As an employer you need to have confidence in your knowledge workers. Hiring people who you know are untrustworthy simply isn’t wise. if you are a boss this is something you should care about.

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