Albert “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap rocked the corporate world when the New York Times revealed in July that the deposed head of Sunbeam had wiped two bad job experiences off his resume and out of his best-selling autobiography, “Mean Business.”
While headhunting firms and corporate recruiters are now scrambling to beef up their job candidate scrutiny, job hunters are wondering: If someone as high-profile as Dunlap could lie on his resume, can I get away with a few falsehoods, too?
After extensive interviews with some of the country’s top executive recruiters, corporate human resources directors, background investigators and employment attorneys, the answer is a conditional “yes.” If you’re caught, you won’t make headlines like Chainsaw Al, but you will almost certainly be fired, or not hired in the first place. And you won’t be alone.
Joel Goldberg, the president of Aurico Reports Inc., an Arlington Heights firm that specializes in pre-employment background screening, said, “We’ve been in business since 1994, and 35 percent of the job applications we see are falsified. People stretch dates of employment, lie about their incomes and exaggerate the duties they performed. We investigated one man, for example, whose resume said he had experience as a `medical facilities coordinator.’ He didn’t indicate that he did the job while he was in prison.”
Cathleen Faerber, principal of the Wellesley Group Inc. in Lake Zurich, a retained executive search firm, says what Dunlap did to his resume–erase two jobs from which he’d been fired by extending the dates of the jobs he actually held over those two years–is the most common resume falsehood. Job hunters also stretch dates to fill in the gaps when they didn’t work at all.
Should you too omit that mean employer who fired you, or paper over the six months you spent between jobs? Probably not, because interview pros like Faerber say they will find out anyway. “I can always spot when someone’s trying to hide a gap in employment,” she said, “because they can’t remember what month they started a job or when they left.”
When he’s suspicious about someone’s job history, Phil Davis, vice president for human resources for Daleen Technologies Inc., in Boca Raton, Fla., takes them out for dinner and asks the same questions from different angles. “After a while, their stories don’t hold together,” he said.
In one case, a candidate filled in a job gap with pure fiction. “When we checked out his duties at one company, we learned he’d never worked there at all. The candidate told me he put the company on his resume because they’d made him a job offer–then rescinded it. The guy was highly skilled, and if he’d been honest, we would have hired him,” Davis said.
Dale Winston, CEO of Battalia Winston, a leading New York executive recruiting firm, says that in this day of corporate downsizings and dot-com failures, there’s no stigma to being out of work for a few months. As for being fired, “I never met a really good executive who wasn’t fired once in his or her career,” she said.
Besides, even that mean employer probably won’t tell anyone why you left. Dick Schnadig of Vedder, Price, Kaufman & Kammholz, a top Chicago employment attorney, said, “One of the biggest impediments today is what we call the neutral reference. Because companies are afraid of getting sued, prior employers refuse to disclose anything about a person beyond his job title and the dates he worked there.”
If asked, most prior employers will also verify salaries, so be careful about claiming to have earned more than you were paid.
Winston notes that Dunlap’s resume lies were uncovered when a reporter searched through old media databases and found press releases linking him to the companies he’d erased.
“If you’re worried about something in your past, do your own computer search first and see what you turn up,” she said.
Computers also figure into the second most common resume lie: where you went to college and what grades you earned there.
Investigator Goldberg said, “Online services will sell you a blank diploma from almost anywhere. We had one young woman who carefully forged her name onto a college diploma, then awarded herself a degree in a major that the institution she chose doesn’t even offer.”
Fake diplomas and falsified degrees are easily uncovered. Once you give a potential employer your Social Security number and sign a release, your real college information is just a phone call away.
“My worst case,” said Winston, “was a man who claimed to have a PhD and all sorts of patents. It turned out he was a junior and he’d gotten by for years using his father’s credentials.”
Recruiters are less likely to learn that you earned a 2.0 instead of that 3.5 grade-point average you claim–unless there’s a question about your abilities. Faerber says she pulled the transcript of an engineer she was interviewing and learned that he’d lied about his GPA and had gotten bad grades in all his structural engineering courses. Obviously, she didn’t recommend him for the job.
If you can hide that C in calculus, can you hide all your credit card debt? It depends on when you accumulated it.
Employers routinely run credit checks on new hires, but the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act allows them to look back only seven years. Nothing you did before 1994, even if you declared personal bankruptcy, can be discovered.
Again, Winston suggests you check your own credit history first, and clear up anything embarrassing, before applying for a job.
Employers are also forbidden from checking into your medical history, even if you were hospitalized for mental illness or drug or alcohol addiction. They are not allowed to see whether you’ve collected unemployment checks and, in some states, can’t look into whether you’ve received worker’s compensation benefits.
But civil matters are fair game and an employer willing to spend the money can delve into the records of any lawsuits you’ve been party to, or read what your ex-spouse said about you during your divorce trial.
Trying to hide a conviction for a crime puts you into more dangerous territory. Every job application has the question, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony or misdemeanor?” Whether you can get away with a lie here depends on where and when you committed such an act.
As with credit reports, many states limit the number of years–usually somewhere between seven and 18–that an employer can go back into an applicant’s criminal history.
The danger in lying about a conviction years ago in another state isn’t the crime, but the lie that hides it. Every job application has another line, where you swear that everything you’ve submitted is true. If an employer finds out that you lied about a conviction–even for a brawl outside a college bar 20 years ago–you will be fired immediately.
Because they’re part of the public record, crimes tend to haunt you. One major Chicago company, for example, was recently alerted to an employee’s incarceration for a sex crime when a newspaper in a nearby state published the names of known sex offenders. Another employee was fired when a colleague squealed, and reported that he’d been in jail on a rape charge.
Of course, you can be dismissed for any lie or omission, no matter how innocent it may appear.
An employer who wants to fire you, says Davis, may pick over every line on your application and resume, looking for something untruthful or misleading. Or your employer may be acquired or merged into an organization that demands a higher level of scrutiny.
Davis, who previously worked for a major bank, said, “When we took over a mortgage company in Louisiana, we did routine background checks on all 640 employees. What we turned up about some of them was pretty scary.”
The most frightening scenario, however, can come later in your career, when you’re up for a major promotion, ready for a partnership or seeking a job with more fiscal responsibility. At that point, your employer may hire a firm to do a thorough background check, and that job you omitted or advanced degree you fabricated will certainly be uncovered. You’ll lose the promotion, and your old job as well.
“The bottom line is, I wouldn’t recommend anyone applying for a job be anything but candid,” said Scott Moritz, a principal with the New York Litigation Services practice of BDO Seidman.
“The amount of information we can gather on an individual today is staggering and disturbing. If you did anything you’re not proud of, your resume will eventually be put under a microscope and someone will find it. It’s better to be honest upfront, even if it means not getting a job you want.”Civil matters
