By
Andrea Kay, Gannett News Service
When you list only the most relevant and recent jobs in your
25-year work history on your resume, are you lying? What about
changing your job title from Level IV Coordinator to something
that better explains what you did? Is that fibbing?
If you see the resume for what it is, no. A resume is a marketing
tool with relevant information that supports your objective,
positions you as someone with particular skills and experience
and helps the reader understand your potential. It's not a
complete history of your work and life.
But these days too many people cross the line between persuasive
marketing and downright lying.
An online survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource
Management determined that more than 60 percent of the 373
human resource professionals who responded found inaccuracies
on resumes. Nearly half the respondents to a Korn/Ferry online
survey said 44.7 percent of their 300 respondents said they
believed resume fraud among executives is increasing.
What do they lie about? About 71 percent of the resumes misrepresent
the number of years they've worked on a job, said Jeff Christian,
the chairman of the search firm Christian & Timbers in
an interview on "Talk of the Nation."
Next, they exaggerate accomplishments such as taking credit
for something they didn't do or misrepresent the size of an
organization they managed, he said.
Most often people fabricate reasons for leaving a previous
job, according to the Korn/Ferry survey. (When I heard this
I wondered why such information is even on the resume. It
shouldn't be. Neither should there be anything about salary,
which they also say is another area in which people don't
tell the truth.)
Last year an employee screening firm in London reported that
its research suggests lying on resumes is growing around the
world, with the number of people who falsify information jumping
15 percent between 2001 and 2002, according to the Institute
of Management & Administration.
Although lying has gone on before, why so much now?
"Most lying is pragmatic," offered Professor Leonard
Saxe of Brandeis University, a guest on the program. The more
situational pressure someone is under, the more apt they are
to lie, he said. Sometimes people believe that everybody else
is cheating. In the case of resumes, people may think that everybody
else is inflating their background. So to be competitive, they
have to do it as well.
But even when the job market has been different, countless
people - from executives to sales representatives - have told
me they worry about not having a bachelor's degree, being
in a job too short of a time and not having enough experience
and how that will look on their resume.
"I think employers share part of the responsibility
for the problem," added Saxe, with requirements that
are not directly related to the work. They also "see
some blemish in a person's record and won't look any further.
They put the pressure on people to create things, to shave
what they've done."
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It's not just resumes that get embellished. A filmmaker trying
to raise money for his project wrote in his proposal that
his film had secured an actress who had starred opposite Sigourney
Weaver. As it turned out, this actor had six lines in the
entire movie.
Whether stretching the truth or lying, it makes someone wonder
what else you're not being up front about. Worse yet, if you've
lied to get the job and an employer finds out, you risk losing
the job you worked so hard to get.
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