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I understand the extreme pressure to beef up your resume in order to compete in the open job market. People massage the details of their work history in order to make themselves look more attractive to hiring managers. This is normal. What I didn’t understand until today is there are people out there flat-out lying on their resumes in order to get jobs.
The jobs-focused website TopResume polled over 620 hiring managers and asked them to rank the 14 most egregious lies on a resume. What they found is 89% of hiring managers ranked the same lie as #1, and that lie wasn’t even criminal history.
This means that hiring managers would rather you lie about criminal history than commit this one lie they say looms above all. And while I agree that this lie’s a big one, I can’t imagine it’s worse than lying about criminal history *in some instances*.
What’s interesting is this lie is easily disproven by a simple background check, the same type of background check that hiring managers often perform when evaluating new applicants. It’s hard to see why anyone would lie about this on a resume when it’s so easily disproven but here we are. In fact, a local primary candidate in my part of Florida was found guilty of this lie recently and it made the national news.
So, what’s the #1 lie? Education history. Hiring managers also say it’s one of the most common types of lies they encounter, people lying about their degrees. CNBC reports:
It’s one of the most common lies that applicants tell, says TopResume career advice expert Amanda Augustine. Many candidates don’t want to be disqualified from a search when a job listing asks for candidates with degrees.
be honest and upfront about your level of schooling, she says. “So many people assume that others have flawless resumes so they want to fib,” says Augustine. “Ask yourself what skills you have to offer and focus on that.”
If your degree is still in progress or you’re taking a semester hiatus, be clear about that on your resume and note the expected graduation date. Trust can be hard to regain if hiring managers discover you’ve misrepresented yourself. (via CNBC)
For what it’s worth, 97% of hiring managers said they’d reconsider any hire if someone was found lying about anything, so is one type of lie really worse than any other when all roads lead to your lying ass getting bounced from the application process?
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The moral of the story here is obvious: don’t lie on your resume. If you’re concerned about one aspect of your resume then beef up the portions you’re confident in. There’s nothing more annoying than having a new hire who doesn’t know their ass from their elbow and is trying to fake-it-til-they-make-it on a new job and has to learn everything from scratch. That’s an intern.