Caveat emptor — let the buyer beware — and if it sounds too
good to be true it probably is, are two sayings potential employers should bear
in mind when vetting hires, researchers warn.
The tightening
job market has more people either outright lying on resumes or
writing their resumes in ways that polish the apple to stellar levels, they
say.
“People create fraudulent resumes all the time,” said Randy
Miller, a vice president with Career Adventures in Shreveport. He’s been doing
human resources work since 1990 and has been in his capacity with Career
Adventures 14 years. “It has been an issue, though we’ve probably seen more of
it in the last five years.”
“We tell them not to do that because once they get employed
or even before they are employed, everyone does background checks,” Miller
said, noting that he tells clients to look at all their job history “to make
sure their dates line up, that they actually worked where they say they worked.
Put your real experience on there. They’ll learn if you’re lying.”
Karen Baronet is a professional placement specialist with
Jean Simpson Personnel Services, which has operated locally more than 40 years.
“When we have done education verification we have found
there have been cases of people claiming to have a degree from a certain
college or have a certain GPA and find out that it’s not,” she said. “We've had
people embellish on their resume and discovered that. We've had people list a
longer length of time as employed with a company than they actually were.”
Trend
investigator Jeff Crilley noted research on a blog with the
compelling name Earsucker, performed research and validated claims that four of
every five resumes contain errors, intentional or otherwise.
“It caught my eye,” Crilley said. “Can these numbers be
right? Four out of five resumes are inaccurate? That’s a big number.
“For some, it’s a case of little seemingly innocent lies, a
fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to the job search. For others, it becomes a
borderline criminal attempt to defraud.”
