When looking for the candidate who has the required qualifications and skills to occupy a particular position, managers and recruiters get to read dozens or even hundreds of resumes. So, sometimes the desire to identify and select those candidates that meet a particular professional profile may make them lose sight of an essential quality – honesty. Recent studies and surveys reveal the fact that some people recognize that when they are looking for a job, they put in their resumes things that do not correspond to reality or, even more, they assume things that are not true during interviews with a potential employer.
We might wonder why candidates are likely to do this, but the answers are easy to guess. It is obvious that everyone who is looking for a job will do everything possible to sell the best image of all, in order to obtain a fast growth on the professional scale and higher incomes. If the employing organization is not familiar with recruitment, lacks the resources to raise attention to the candidates selection, it has not a specialized HR department or it doesn’t turn to specialized services in this respect, the risk to hire unqualified people grows, which can aggravate the smooth running of the business.
Details Regarding Education and Previous Jobs – What’s True and What’s Not?
Frequently, the desire to hide the lack of academic degrees may tempt candidates to add to their resumes degrees that they don’t have or universities that they’ve never got to finish. If for example, a candidate says he completed a master’s degree at a university from a small town, about which you have not heard before, a simple Google search could clarify whether that higher education institution exists or not. Later, during an initial discussion with the candidate, you might ask him about the college he says he finished, adding that you couldn’t find on the Internet details about that educational unit.
If some candidates get to mention universities that don’t exist in their resumes or to argue that they graduated colleges that they never went to in real life, others fill their professional profile with the names of companies about which you can’t find any reference nor on the internet or from other sources. Another widespread practice is changing periods spent by a candidate at a former job. Thus, people who just completed an internship at a well-known company or who have spent a few months there, get to leave the impression that they had an important position within that organization and for a longer period, thinking that it won’t fit well to have spent less than a year at a job.
Difficult-to-Prove Experience, a Professional Background that Doesn’t Correspond to Reality
In fact, presenting accurate data in the resume weights more than an experience that can’t be proved or proves to be untrue, modified in the candidate’s favor. Thus, many candidates come to replace the title of previous positions, naming jobs that leave the impression they had much more responsibilities than in real life and that they have a more skills and experience. Among the less real details from resumes, we can find the listing of some technical expertise or language skills that correspond to advanced users and that prove to be not so advanced as described.
Some candidates even get to claim that they had a much higher salary at the previous job, to give to understand that they are more advanced and deserve to occupy more than an entry-level position. There are also cases in which on the list of contacts that might provide references about the candidates you can find people who have no ties to their work activity, friends or close ones, but these details can be revealed by a careful background check. Last but not least, another thing that candidates hide during interviews or on resumes is the real reason for leaving previous jobs, so few people will admit that they were fired in the past.
So, do not forget that a candidate’s sincerity is an important element for the recruitment process and a candidate with less experience, but who can prove that they can learn and everything they wrote in their resume is true should be more appreciated than those who were caught distorting reality.
BIA HR TEAM