Embarrassing tales of people brought down by making false claims on their resumes are generally reserved for the rich and famous, who often have substantial real credentials but who curiously concoct war-hero backgrounds or educational status.
Consider the late Larry Lawrence, the former ambassador to Switzerland whose widow had his body removed from Arlington National Cemetery when it came to light he fabricated a World War II record. As bizarre as cases like this sound, spinning resume yarns is about as rare as a March snowstorm in Chicago, said Edward Andler, author of “The Complete Reference Checking Handbook: Smart, Fast, Legal Ways to Check Out Job Applicants” (AMACOM, $29.95).
Recruiters, said Andler, estimate that a third of job applicants misrepresent their backgrounds. Andler, president of Certified Reference Checking Co. in St. Louis, blamed what he called a general decline in honesty, as well as people who have the perception that they must inflate their records to keep up with all the dishonest others.
Further, talk to a few hiring managers and you’ll get as many different answers as to what constitutes a resume lie versus simply making your record look good.
“It sounds high that a third of resumes are exaggerated, but just read a portion of a resume to (people) from the candidate’s old firm, and many times they’ll correct it,” Andler said.
Carol Bernick believes the estimate. As president of Alberto-Culver USA, the Melrose Park consumer products company, Bernick has had occasion to acquire companies whose employees formerly worked for her, so she has seen resumes describing what they did at Alberto. Employees “don’t generally lie about the companies they’ve worked for or their tenure, but I find they didn’t do what they said they did. I just laugh at some of them because I know whose idea some of these things were. In one case, it was my own idea that someone (else) . . . took credit for,” Bernick said.
Though it can be humbling, Andler recommended showing resume language to people before you use them as references.
“Some people start out thinking the resume has to sound good, so they need to beef it up a little. Then they beef it up a little more, and so on. People convince themselves it’s OK to spruce it up a bit,” said Robin Ryan, a Seattle-based career coach and author of “Winning Resumes” (John Wiley & Sons, $10.95). Often, people embellish needlessly, she said, because if they would keep better track of their accomplishments, it wouldn’t be necessary.
Many experts view resumes as marketing pieces that should showcase instead of reciting a list of titles, but they warn that actual lies will get you fired.
Legal requirements on this issue aren’t always clear. For years, employers avoided wrongful-firing cases by writing policies forbidding lying on resumes, then digging back into resumes for inaccuracies to get cases tossed out of court. Recent Supreme Court rulings have changed that, said Michael Karpeles, partner in charge of the employment law group at Goldberg, Kohn, Bell, Black, Rosenbloom & Moritz, Ltd.
Resumes, and even many signed employment applications, aren’t legal documents in the strictest sense, Karpeles said. What applicants should be wary of, however, is the “materiality” of their claims, he said. If an employer advertised for a specific set of skills and your resume indicated expertise in those very skills, the company could make a successful case against you, he said.
Barbara Provus, a Chicago executive recruiter, said she discovers discrepancies in about 1 in 200 top executive files, which have already been screened in other ways. Once, a large Chicago company was preparing to offer a marketing senior vice president post paying more than $200,000 a year to a candidate Provus had recommended. When she uncovered he was making about $50,000 less than what he claimed to the potential employer, she told the company, which agreed in the end to hire him anyway after he said he was figuring other perks into his salary. Three months later he told the company his wife wouldn’t relocate and tried to get the firm to move the position back to his hometown, which the company refused to do, and found itself looking again for a replacement.
“In the gray areas, I usually advise the client to drop this person and move on,” Provus said. “You have to wonder what else they’re not telling you.”
