The resume of someone who worked for me many years ago came across my desk the other day. One of my clients was considering him for a field-level position, and they wanted my opinion.
Boy, was I surprised to learn what an amazing employee he had been.
Woven throughout the guts of his perfectly written, perfectly formatted resume were clients he barely knew, staffs he never supervised and budgets he never managed. Of course my client was impressed. It was a made-for-employer docudrama, a compelling story based on actual events. But it was fiction.
This wasn’t the first time a company sent me a known candidate’s resume to review, rather than just ask for a referral. And it won’t be the last. In the aftermath of RadioShack CEO David J. Edmondson’s resignation -- he claimed two college degrees but had none -- companies realize that more prospective employees are stepping over the line from semantic embellishment of their resumes to manipulative, bald-faced lying about their past.
There’s plenty to back up employers skepticism:
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation figures that half a million people in the
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Inc. Magazine reported on a study last month that found almost 43 percent of resumes included at least one “major misrepresentation.”
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The New York Times quotes an executive at a pre-employment screening company who said they found 56 percent of resumes “falsehoods of some kind.”
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The Society of Human Resource Management found in 2003 that 44 percent of 2.6 million people they asked said they had intentionally fibbed about their work experiences on their resumes.
At a time when corporate
In the meantime, it’s only fair that any potential employer circulate a recruit’s resume around to people who can validate its contents. They might even consider looking that recruit in the eye and asking point blank, “Is everything in your resume absolutely true?”
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Technorati Tags: Resumes, Jobs, Recruiting, Headhunting
