There's a growing trend that might make its way across your desk the next time you're hiring a new employee. I call it "creative hindsight in resume writing.
Lying on a resume, inflating one's experience and credentials, is nothing new. It has probably been around for as long as resumes have existed. Recently, most everyone has heard of the college athletic coach who was fired because he claimed to have graduated college when in reality he had no diploma. In Minnesota, a popular publisher of a local newspaper resigned to take a job with a larger, more prestigious paper in another part of the country, only to have that job offer rescinded when it was discovered she, too, claimed to have a degree she didn't earn.
As hiring professionals, we have probably all seen resumes with slightly inflated job responsibilities or titles, pumped up to make the job seeker look better and more successful than he or she really is.
However, that's not the trend I'm talking about. This new trend involves just the opposite paring down one's resume, either to disguise one's age by fudging on graduation dates to appear younger, or eliminating jobs altogether when, for one reason or another, the jobs don't look good on paper. Perhaps the job was kept for less than a year and the candidate didn't want to appear jumpy. Perhaps the candidate was fired or otherwise unsuccessful at the job and wanted to look more capable.
Apparently, it's a more common practice than you'd imagine.
I was reading an online discussion among hiring professionals recently, when one fellow reader posted this question to the other members of the discussion:
Have you ever discovered that a job candidate deliberately eliminated, left off or "forgot a job on his or her resume and then massaged the start and end dates of other jobs to cover up the time gap, making it look like the job in question never existed?
What they answered might surprise you.
One person related an incident in which she discovered the applicant's "creative resume, when she remembered the candidate had previously applied at for the same job a year or two earlier while she was working at the very job she had eliminated from her resume. The hirer remembered talking to the candidate and checking her references at that time.
When she confronted the candidate with the facts, the candidate replied: "The recruiter I was working with told me to do it.
Several other posters reported similar problems with recruiters deliberately eliminating jobs from their clients' resumes.
There was also the story about one job candidate who submitted three radically different versions of his resume to the same company for three different jobs that happened to be open at the same time. Unluckily for this "creative candidate, the same person was doing the hiring for all three positions, and despite the deluge of resumes, happened to recognize the "creative candidate's name.
However, several other members of this discussion group took the opposite view, asserting that a resume is not a legal document that you swear is true, nor is it a life history. It's a sales piece designed to land a job. One recruiter reported (anonymously, of course) that 95 percent of the resumes that come into his office are either heavily or mildly false.
What's the solution? Background checks and careful checking of references, sure. But given the widespread falsifying of resumes, testing for job fit, intelligence and character is more important now than ever before. Relying on resumes and interviews just isn't enough anymore.
