Employers Know More Than You Think
Embellishing your resime is one thing; lying is another.
Most bosses are pretty forgiving if you come clean about a minor brush with the law or a supervisor so nutty he sent you running for the door. Yet resume tinkering is practically an epidemic. Superheated competition for jobs, especially those with big paychecks, tempts many to pump air into their resumes. A gig as an administrative assistant expands into a management title. A mail-order MBA is passed off as the real deal. Most bosses are pretty forgiving if you come clean about a minor brush with the law or a supervisor so nutty he sent you running for the door.
An annual employer survey turned up “inconsistencies” in the work histories of nearly half of job-seekers last year, with 20% of applicants providing false or misleading information about their educational credentials. Discrepancies in verifying past employment were up 13% over 2005 and up 7% involving education. Job hunters should be forgiven for feeling like they are criminals before they even get to the interview. But increasingly, employers are looking to protect their reputations and deflect any liability if they unwittingly hire a crook or a fraudster. So job offers routinely come with a big string attached — passing a background screen.
