What if you get caught?
Lying on your resume may leave you out of
luck if you later want to sue your employer for wrongful
termination or discrimination.
What happens if someone is hired and then
found to have padded his/her resume? It seems that 68% of
larger firms (100 or more employees) and 50% of smaller
firms (less than 100 employees) have policies to address the
situation. Most often the policy is to terminate the
employment (79%). Disciplining the employee (7%) and an
undetermined action depending upon what was padded (5%) are
distant second and third choice actions.
In these times of tight budgets, most employers
are cutting back on background investigations. Many
employers have replaced systematic background checks with
spot-checks that only check a fraction of the information
on your resume/employment application. And then they act
so amazed when someone slips something past
them.
Always remember how to smoothly back out should
things go awry. Chances are that if a prospective
employer smells a rat, he’ll simply stop calling. But if
he should call and confront you with questions you’d
rather not discuss, immediately inform him that you’d
like to provide him with an answer but unfortunately
you’ve just accepted a position with another company.
Just back out as gracefully as possible. There are too
many less careful firms out there to have to deal with
difficult questions.
The employer can use a legal tactic called the
"after-acquired evidence" theory to argue that negative
information the employer discovered after the employee
was hired should limit the employee's ability
to make claims against the employer. Conduct by an
employee that has been held sufficiently serious to be
admitted as after-acquired evidence has
included:
-
failing to list a previous employer on a
résumé
-
failing to admit being terminated for
cheating on time-cards
-
failing to reveal a prior conviction for a
felony
-
lying about education and experience on a
job application, and
-
fabricating a college degree during an
interview.
If
you did lie on your job application or resume, however,
you may not be completely out of luck. Your employer can
use the misinformation as a defense only if it was truly
related to your job duties or performance. The employer
must be able to show that you would have been fired -- or
not hired in the first place -- if he or she had known
the truth. Proving this type of second-guessing may not
be easy.
-
Your potential employers will probably call
your previous employers. It may be just to get
information for transferring your insurance policy or
because the two bosses feel like schmoozing. Once the
schmoozing is done, you'll get busted.
-
Even though you're changing jobs, you're
probably not changing industries. Companies in the
same industry often attend the same conferences and
conventions, workshops and fund raisers. Employers
often belong to the same professional associations,
or have networks that reach out to various other
companies. One offhand mention that you were the
errand boy, not the Director of Distribution, and
you'll be cleaning out your desk.
-
If you lied about your school or degree,
your company may check your school's alumni list. Or
someone at your new company will really be alum, and
they're going to bust you.
-
If you get really creative and invent
previous experience or employers, modern day
information retrieval networks, web browsers or the
Lexis/Nexis system make discrediting and humiliating
you quick, easy, and cost effective.
-
Lie about the languages you speak, or
exaggerate your proficiency and you will be asked to
utter a few words in that tongue. Sometimes
interviewers will conduct part or all of an interview
in the language you claim to know, especially if it
is directly related to the position. Your monkey-like
gibberish will accompany you out the
door.
People who don't have knowledge or experience
will give vague answers. They won't be able to provide
technical examples or detail. That's when most HR
Managers will politely cut short the interview and
dismisses the candidate.
IT professionals who submit resumes
electronically to the city of Orlando, Fla., still fill
out an application on-site, says John Matelski, assistant
director of technology management for the city. "I don't
care if all the information is in the resume," Matelski
says. During the interview, he compares the resume with
the application and asks questions to see if the
candidate's oral explanation of his credentials matches
the written version.
How They Spot a
Fake
Many resumes are carefully written to conceal
that the individual does not have work experience in the
United States or is not authorized to work in the
U.S A number of people fashion their resumes so
that internships, school projects and volunteer [work are
presented as] actual work experience.
Other flags are gaps in employment history,
inflated salary histories and overstated
experience.
And although "we rarely see someone [falsify]
certification, we do see premature postings of that
certification," says Adam Shandrow, senior technical
recruiter at Manpower Technical in Cypress,
Calif.
Ironically, even though electronic resumes may
be easier to rig, some recruiters prefer them because
they are easier to process and track. Electronic resumes
also distinguish the players from the
wanna-bes.
"It's highly improbable that we would hire from
a resume sent by fax or regular mail," Wonder says. "A
fax tells us the candidate doesn't have the technical
skills for the job. Mailed resumes are the last
candidates to get jobs."
Savvy job-seekers load their resumes with keywords designed to
get them through the computerized screening process. The
phrases SAP R/3, Java or Windows NT usually trigger a response.
Yet recruiters and hiring managers sometimes end up
interviewing a person with no hands-on knowledge of high-demand
applications
Tuning Your
Resume
Outright fraud can be caught in the hiring cycle in a number of
ways - background checks, testing programs and the interview
process will often uncover representation of outright fraud.
What is a lot harder to catch is resume "Tuning".
What is tuning? Tuning happens
when different job opportunities are possible at the same
time, but the job posting needs different skill sets. The
job seeker then changes their resume to reflect a closer
match with the job description. One "tunes" the resume to
reflect the desired skill set or a closer match to the
desired skill set.
Tuning can also be described as
"reaching". This is where a person takes on the persona of
someone one level higher. Since the individual is familiar
with the responsibilities and lingo of people one level
higher in the organization, it is common practice for the
resume to reach and represent a skill set one notch higher.
The Jeffrey Papows case study below outlines one such
published story.
"Shading" is another synonym for
"Tuning". The truth for many people is the color gray versus
black or white. One example of Shading is when "six months"
of experience turns into "almost a year" of experience.
Computer Industry Tuning
Situations:
-
One scripting language experience is turned into another -
Perl turns into Java
-
script/VB Script, since "scripting" is all the same -
NOT
-
SAP skills turning into Peoplesoft or Baan skills and vice
versa
-
Sybase skills turning into Microsoft SQL
-
5 out of 6 skills are real, but one skill is padding
-
The opening is for a senior level - a person with six
months actual experience talks their way through the
interview process as a person with 2 years experience, but
can't deliver the results
-
New technology buzzword trap - the interviewer needs
competence in the skill to find out the candidate's
competency. If the knowledge is something cutting edge, the
chance that one would get found out is limited. For example
- XML experience is still not common, so tests might not be
out yet that cover that space and it is guaranteed that
engineering management will not have the hands-on XML
experience!
-
C++ turns into Java - a person is hired at $125/hr as a
Java programmer. Well it turns out that the person is
actually a good C++ programmer, but puffed up the resume to
appear like there were Java skills and got through the
interview process without being detected, since the
candidate had read a book on Java programming.
Now this person is trying to get
the job done, but isn't delivering at the speed expected for
the wage being paid. In this instance, if the resume had
been time stamped and stored in a central repository, it
would have been obvious that there was no Java expertise,
but strong C++ expertise. The hiring company could then have
decided to provide the overt training for the individual,
but not at the $125/hr fee, but at say a more reasonable $80
per hour fee.
Now that you’ve had a chance to
go through this once., take another hard look at your resume
and see what places you can tune up. Double check to make
sure once you’ve gone through it that it flows and
everything makes sense. Then once you think you’re
ready send it off and go for it.
If you're eager to write a great
resume, and cover letter to help you ace the job interview and
get the job click
here!
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