Posts Tagged ‘lies’

5 Common Resume Lies & Exaggerations

Wednesday, September 20th, 2017

The temptation to stretch the truth on a resume can be powerful, especially considering the modern, competitive job market we currently endure, where the slightest advantage can mean the difference between a successful career and a life mired in mediocrity.

Before you act on this temptation and give your credentials a fictitious boost, think twice. Beyond the serious ethical implications, consider a few other issues.

First, most employers keep resumes on file once candidates are hired. And if your exaggerations are discovered—even years down the road—you may be terminated on the spot (recall the embarrassing firing of CEO Scott Thompson from Yahoo! a few years ago).

Second, experienced hiring managers have usually been in the candidate-selection business for a long time, and they’ve seen many more resumes than you have. They tend to spot exaggerations right away, and if this is your first foray into the job market, some of your adjustments may be more obvious than you realize.

Here are the most common lies and alterations that managers tend to see on resumes, especially those submitted by less experienced applicants:

1. GPA Misstatements

Inexperienced candidates are more inclined to stretch the truth than workers with longer track records, and as it happens, many of these newbies are recent graduates, so their GPAs hold more weight than those of their mid-career counterparts. If you’ve graduated within the past two years, feel free to include your GPA in your resume. After two years, take this detail out. In the meantime, don’t round-up or “accidentally” misstate your GPA by a few tenths of a point. This detail is very easy for employers to verify.

2. Revenue Raised

You worked on a project, and the project helped your company make money. You wrote a grant application, won over a new client, participated in a successful product roll-out, or coached a sales team until their numbers improved. That’s great! And when you describe this accomplishment, you’ll want to quantify it by using dollar amounts, timelines, and sales figures. As you do so, keep these numbers honest and accurate. Your reviewers probably won’t be able to verify these claims, but don’t be tempted to overstate them or you may call your entire candidacy into question.

3. Head Counts

How many people worked right beside you on the project described above? Was this a single-handed effort or were you part of a 27-member team? How many direct reports did you manage in your last position? How many clients did you handle at once? Don’t add (or subtract) so much as one imaginary person. Keep your record and your conscience clean.

4. Skill Level

Sometimes, we are tempted to claim greater knowledge and experience in a subject than we possess. For example, while we may only have a passing familiarity with software like Adobe Photoshop, we may put on our resume that we are skilled at using it, thereby implying frequent use and in-depth knowledge. Or we’ve read some articles or books but have no formal training in a subject. Or we took high school Spanish and that makes us fluent. Always be sure to indicate the exact level of expertise you possess, when in doubt.

5. Timelines & Job Titles

Did you finish this project in three months or four years? Were you promoted from the entry level within one year or five years? Did you leave your last job in 2014 or 2010? When you held that job, were you the Assistant Branch Manager or the Assistant TO the Branch Manager? Keep in mind that dates of employment and job titles can be verified with a single phone call.

So the best policy is always to keep your certifications and accomplishments honest. An accurate resume will hold far more value for both your employers and yourself. The more information you share, and the more accurate it is, the easier it will be for both parties to find a potential match.

Good luck!

4 Common Resume Lies & Exaggerations | via LiveCareer.

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When Should You Lie on Your Resume?

Wednesday, June 21st, 2017

Probably everyone you’ve ever met has told you that you shouldn’t lie on your resume. But what if you can’t seem to get a job with the skills you have? You may really want to be honest, but want to be employed even more. What should you do?

When it comes to resumes, and many other things, you can’t look at every statement as black and white. You never want to outright lie on your resume, of course, but you do want to paint the best picture of yourself possible. This sometimes means leaving out certain information or finding the right angle for your experience. Here’s some rough advice on what you can do and what you should never do to enhance your resume:

Don’t Include Your Entire Work History

Whether you have a short or long work history, you don’t necessarily want to include all of it. If you’re applying for a marketing position and you’ve worked as an intern and an associate in separate firms, but also as a cashier at a grocery store, don’t pad your resume with the irrelevant job. Doing so wastes space that you can use to explain the good work you did at the actually relevant jobs.

Conversely, you may want to leave off jobs (and other information) that make you look overqualified. You don’t need an MFA to work in telesales or Vice President position to get a job as a programmer. Part of putting your best foot forward on your resume involves leaving out the stuff that makes you look wrong for the position, no matter how impressive.

Temporarily Lie About Skills You Can Learn

Do you know Excel? Probably not very well if you haven’t touched it since 2004, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include it on your resume. If you can spend a night learning what you need to know before you need to know it, you can claim proficiency in a skill you don’t really have.

Keep in mind this means taking a sizable risk and you shouldn’t take it often. You don’t want to claim to know JavaScript when you’ve never even learned the basics. That said, you can claim to know HTML and CSS if you’ve learned a little bit but not a lot. When you “lie” about a skill, you have to know you can acquire that skill quickly if needed by your employer. Don’t apply for jobs that require certain primary abilities you don’t have. You wouldn’t want to try and get a job as a front-end developer with limited knowledge of HTML and CSS, for example. You might, however, promote that same limited knowledge to find work as a blogger (or any job where those skills help but aren’t required). Although it’s always better to just tell the truth, if you need to embellish your skill set you can safely, under these constraints.

Don’t Embellish Your Position, Explain It

You never want to lie about your position. While your work might imply a more robust job title, if a prospective employer calls your previous employer to ask about a position that doesn’t exist, you’ll just seem like a liar. That said, you shouldn’t discount the work you did beyond the call of duty. For example: Let’s say you were an intern last semester. You worked really hard and you think, “Hmm, I worked almost as hard as my manager, I’ll just say that I had his title instead.” Sometimes a hiring manager catches this fib and sometimes they don’t. If you were a hardworking intern, illustrate that with the bullet points below your title, not by lying about your position at the company.

You can still call yourself by your correct title and explain only the great, relevant work you did. You don’t have to include remedial tasks that made up most of your job if it doesn’t apply to the job you’re trying to get. Instead, you can leave out more of the irrelevant tasks and focus on the ones that make you look like an intelligent, hardworking prospect.

All of that said, if you have a great relationship with the company you’ve left (or plan to leave) and want to use a more impressive title, talk to your boss or manager about using one. They may allow you to use a more impressive-sounding title on your resume and play along when called as a reference if they like you. Perhaps they’ll even award you that honorary title as a parting gift. If your boss or manager approves, it’s not really a lie.

Spin Relevant Experience When You Have None

The trick doesn’t involve lying, but rather digging deep to find relevant experience you didn’t really know you had. If you really want a job as a graphic designer but work as a receptionist, you can spin a lot of your experience to make it relevant. Perhaps you’ve created fliers, mailers, in-office posters, and so on. I worked as a customer service representative awhile back and found ways to make company videos, design posters, and even write code. If you want a different job, find ways to do the kind of work you want to do at your current job so you can claim it as experience on your resume. You still have to do the work assigned to you, but if you add a few other helpful tasks here and there your company should appreciate you for it.

When you can’t do something at a company, do it on your own time. Nobody can stop you from designing, writing, or whatever else after you clock out. When you have no relevant experience, you can always make some yourself. That might not get you an interview all by itself, but you can also try to meet someone from the company to give yourself a better chance. A simple email asking if you can take someone out to lunch to ask them for career advice can go a long way.

In the end, you want to lie as little as possible but find ways to make what you have look as attractive as possible. That means embellishing your skill set a little, including the right jobs, and focusing on relevant experience—even if it didn’t make up the majority of your work. If you just don’t have a lot of work experience at all, seek out internships to get some. Just don’t outright lie on your resume. That might get you an interview, but it probably won’t get you a job.

Good luck!

When Should You Lie on Your Resume? | Dave Yourgrau via Lifehacker.

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Resume Fraud: How Lying On Your Resume Will Get You In Trouble

Wednesday, September 16th, 2015

Today’s job market is competitive. Those who are in need of work undoubtedly know how difficult it can be to compete for the top jobs. This competitive environment has led some unscrupulous job seekers to embellish or exaggerate their experience in order to improve their chances of obtaining jobs.

So what are some of the most common lies from professionals and what are the consequences for the employee who has embellished on his or her resume if he or she gets caught?

What Constitutes a Lie
A lie doesn’t necessarily have to be an outright false statement. Omissions can be just as dishonest as an out-and-out lie. It’s suggested that the education section of the resume is where embellishments are most frequent. This often comes in the form of an individual claiming that he or she has completed an educational program that he or she may have only started. Embellished titles, exaggerated job duties, altered dates of employment and even false references are also common. Job seekers have also provided fictitious information during the recruitment process, such as reasons for leaving previous positions. Though it may be tempting to assume that only a small amount of the population would be guilty of this sort of unscrupulous behavior, some studies have suggested that up to 50% of the population has at least a small amount of misleading or inflated content in their resumes.

Lies to Cover Lies
As almost everyone learns at some point, lies can get out of hand quickly. You have to create more lies to cover the initial lie. Just think of how one lie on a resume can balloon in the workplace as coworkers ask questions about your background and you have to perpetuate the false information.

Inability to Complete Job Duties
If someone were to make a false statement on his or her resume regarding his or her job duties or skills in past positions, there is a chance he or she would have difficulty in meeting the expectations set out in the new position. As suspicions arise from the inability to complete job duties, employers have been known to seek out more information and dig deeper into their employees’ job histories. Even if this information was not discovered in the initial employment references, this doesn’t mean that employers won’t seek out more information at a later date, especially if an employer feels that its employee is not meeting expectations.

Goodbye Job
Once an employee has been found to have lied on his or her resume, the employer has the right to terminate the employment contract. The employee/employer relationship is one that’s built upon trust. Finding out that the job was granted based on fictitious information causes this trust to be breached. It may seem like a little white lie when someone covers up the reason he or she left a previous job, or says he or she graduated from college even though he or she left a semester shy of graduating. From an employer’s point of view, however, this lie is seen as a serious character flaw. If an employee lied about something small, what else is he or she willing to lie about?

Damage to Your Reputation
You can pretty much kiss your employment references goodbye if you’re found to have provided false information on your resume. Even if your employer doesn’t terminate the employment relationship for the fraudulent information, you’ll still have to suffer the embarrassment of having your employer know you lied. Additionally, our digital-age lives make it easier and easier for us to network with other professionals in similar industries. In fields that are small or specialized, word can travel pretty quickly. If someone lost a job due to dishonesty, there’s a good chance the word will get out. Some recruiters have even been known to flag candidates who have been found to have fraudulent information on their resumes. A simple lie could have career-long consequences.

Possible Legal Action
Generally speaking, employees who have lied on their resumes have no legal recourse against their former employers. This can also impact a former employee’s ability to seek legal recourse for an employer’s actions which may have been legitimately illegal. This is known as the “after-acquired evidence” theory. If the employment relationship was found to be based upon fraudulent information to start with, illegal acts which occurred during the employment relationship may not be actionable by law. It’s sad to think that employees could lose what limited rights they do have in employment relationships as a result of unethical decisions made during recruitment.

The Bottom Line
Given the relative ease of digging up the truth, and the unpleasant potential outcomes of lying to a new employer, it’s hard to believe that anyone would risk putting false information in a resume. However, we’ve all heard the phrase “desperate times call for desperate measures.” It’s true that tough economic times make some people resort to risky behavior. However, this creates an unfair advantage over honest, legitimate candidates who aren’t lying on their resumes. For those who are considering providing false information to a potential employer, consider how much an employer might appreciate the honest approach. There are honest ways to deal with absences from the workplace, incomplete degrees or even dismissals from previous jobs that won’t hurt your chances of getting a new job.

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