DAILY NEWS
Tell the Truth on Resumes
By Lore Croghan
February 27, 2006
Liar, liar, pants on fire. Almost half the job-seekers in a new study lied on their resumes - a staggering statistic, considering how likely they are to get caught.
"People are saying, "Everybody's doing this - I should, too,'" said Michael Worthington, co-founder of workplace expert ResumeDoctor.com, which did the survey. "But something you put on your résumé could haunt you years later."
Look what happened last week to RadioShack CEO David Edmondson - make that former CEO.
He lost his job because he lied on his résumé - more than a decade ago - about bible-college degrees he didn't actually get. A big punishment, but a common mistake.
"He didn't do anything different from what I see every day," Worthington said.
Worthington's résumé-writing service, based in South Burlington, Vt., spent six months checking the accuracy of more than 1,000 résumés chosen from the company's database. It found "significant inaccuracies' in 42.7% of them.
For diversity's sake, the résumés came from all over the country, and a wide range of industries including banking, telecom, manufacturing and the service professions. Job descriptions ran the gamut from entry-level to executive positions.
There's no telling whether men or women did more of the lying. ResumeDoctor.com didn't analyze the results according to gender.
Job-seekers up and down the employment ladder lied to try to land work - "from people who have been out of school for one year to the executive level," Worthington said.
He blames their behavior on fierce competition for jobs in a tight employment market - and the mistaken notion that these are little white lies that do no harm. That couldn't be more wrong.
Companies are cracking down - and doing more résumé checking than ever before. Increasingly, they're also scrutinizing criminal records, credit reports - even driving records.
Publicly traded companies in particular are under pressure to check up on people - because of the Sarbanes-Oxley law on reporting requirements.
"It's a lot easier not to hire someone than to hire and regret it a week later," said Richard Seldon, president of Sterling Testing Systems, which does pre-employment screening.
The most frequent fibs are about dates of employment, job titles and education.
The ResumeDoctor.com study found:
People say they stayed at jobs longer than they really did. Some are trying to match the requirements in a job posting, when they don't have enough years of experience.
Others lie to cover up long periods of joblessness - and there's no need to do so. In today's economy, there's no shame in losing your job.
"Twenty years ago there was a stigma about being laid off, now it's the norm," Worthington said.
People inflate their job titles, in hopes of qualifying for a higher position - and higher pay - than they currently have.
If you took on tasks that higher-ups were supposed to do, you can say so on your résumé. But don't pretend you had the job title to match the extra responsibilities.
People say they earned degrees when they were a couple semesters short.
Or sometimes they say they graduated from a school they never attended at all. Like George O'Leary. Remember him? He was Notre Dame's football coach - for all of five days. Then the lies on his résumé caught up with him.
He had said he had a master's degree in education from "NYU-Stony Brook University" - a campus that doesn't exist.
There's a broader implication to all this lying - and it's a bad one. "I see a society that's not valuing the truth,' Worthington said.
And the career consequences can be dire. If you get caught lying, you won't get the job you apply for - and you might make yourself an untouchable in your industry.
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