There is no Reason to Lie on Your Resume or LinkedIn profile…ever!

Unfortunately, faking an education or experience is more common than you might think.  With the economy the way it is, companies are downsizing and thus, more people are looking for jobs.  As a result, people are feeling pressure to ‘fabricate’ aspects of their resumes in order to stand out from the crowd.  We have seen resumes with fabricated educations, expansions of employment dates to remove gaps of unemployment or, even, to hide job experiences with a sour ending, just to avoid the reference check.   

Further, it is not just low-level candidates or young people forging their resumes; of course, everyone wants their resumes to look sharper and cleaner.  The line is crossed, however, when someone actually acts on the desire to appear as a better candidate.  I, once, had a 250k candidate that was getting a job offer for a consulting firm.  This person had the perfect experience and background the company desired: the only issue was the fact that the college degree was a fake.  When we ran two different background verifications and could not confirm education - the candidate was confronted about this.  The crazy thing is, the candidate used excuses like, “The systems have changed at my school…I have the documents in a family safe…in Montana.”  Worse was next: the candidate faked having a life threatening disease…..to bow out of the process.  The worst part is that the company actually would have hired this candidate without the degree because of the outstanding experience and tenure the candidate had in these types of roles.  Of course, they withdrew their offer based on falsifying the application.  This was 2 years ago; the sad part is that this candidate is currently the SVP for another public company with that bogus degree actually listed on the website.  (=lesson not learned)

We all want to be the best candidate for our dream job, so we think of ways to improve the information and spin our experiences to make us appear ‘perfect,’ but reality is no one is perfect.  All of that is ok, but with background verifications improving, we are finding that more and more companies are cracking down on potential and current employees.  Here is an example of a chef fired from the Food Network Channel for embellishing about some of his ‘clients’ on his resume.

One would think that you are supposed to be on your best behavior while job searching or at least that is what my mother taught me.  Before you consider this, you must ask yourself….” what does lying tell an employer about who you are as a person and about your work ethic?”  The real question is how will you be when your back is up against the wall for the company; would you fold again and cheat?

By Shannon Russo, CEO at Kinetix