Amid fierce competition for every single job, where do you draw the line between embellishing and lying on your resume?

John O’Connor, Career Pro of NC, Inc.

A November 2008 review by the Wall Street Journal examined the careers and resumes of 358 senior-level executives and directors at 53 publicly traded companies. The result: At least seven top executives at America’s largest companies invented academic degrees they didn’t have.

“Inflated academic credentials in the nation’s executive suites may be more common than generally thought,” wrote the author Keith J. Winstein in the November 2008 issue of The Wall Street Journal. But is it really a problem? And amid the heavy competition for a jobs, where‘s the line between putting your best foot forward and outright lying?

In times when competition for a single job is high, it’s easy to entertain the thought of embellishing a resume. But it’s still true: Regardless of the job-market climate and regardless of the level of the candidate’s experience, personal integrity matters, and it counts on a resume.

Resumes do not have to provide every conceivable fact to the potential employer. You can leave out dates, certain past employment and material details. The truth is you can lie. Yes, you can. But you do it at your own peril. Attorneys who represent employers find this is as good a reason as any to prove you wrong in court.

Courts are holding that material misrepresentations on an employment application and resume constitute just cause to:

• terminate an employment contract
• reduce or deny benefits, including disability benefits

If you are an excellent résumé writer, you will counsel someone who may feel desperate enough to lie to not do so. Each and every certified professional résumé writer and career coach I know encourages clients to tell us the truth so we can coach and create proper documents and search strategies for them. In fact, it’s hard to coach someone on a lie anyway. Most career professionals and the clients they serve agree that a résumé needs to be a marketing tool, a persuasive document that does not need (even in the case of federal résumés) to dump information on the reader just to be truthful.

It wears well to use credible, reliable facts and achievements to build the case for our career-transition clients. That’s what we do, in the most inventive ways. Clients pay us for that keen and uniquely individualized perspective. But it’s not what we do that gets clients into trouble. They get into trouble by permitting themselves to lie to us and ultimately to potential employers.

People lie to their professional resume writers — and if they then populate these lies on LinkedIn and other professional, bio-driven sites, they are creating even more problems and fuel for attorneys. Falsification has had a nice run on the Internet. Many people use the same techniques as an identity thief. The Internet provides a fountain of information, resources, databases to hack into, mock degrees and everything else for someone who wants to do this wrong right.

How big a problem is resume fraud?

It has been reported that 90 percent of the personnel directors surveyed by the SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) reported finding resume untruths ranging from past salaries to personal identification.

Further, it costs companies and organizations billions of dollars to hire new candidates every year. These candidate costs can often average $5,000 or more to find, hire and properly onboard a new employee. Looking at the big picture, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimates that occupational fraud and abuse costs organizations more than $600 billion annually, or roughly 6 percent of gross revenues.

Educational backgrounds seem to be the most fertile ground for fraud. It gets easy to make false scholastic claims; changing areas of concentration; and adding majors, minors and degrees never obtained. Usually fraud comes through in changes in employment dates, salary manipulation, job titles and duties, and omitting negative records that may come up on background checks.

Although it’s not their job, career coaches and outplacement specialists continue to advocate honesty in their practices, to teach and even educate clients how they can creatively and imaginatively promote, but not falsify, their backgrounds to earn new positions, promotions and job assignments.

Recruiters look for incongruities and evidence that demonstrate the candidate does not have the background to match her qualifications. But even with strong recruiters, background checks and previous employer verifications, many clients squeak through. Time becomes a factor, and companies sometimes figure out that they can prove resume fraud later if they need to so it’s to their advantage perhaps not to invest company time and money until they must.

Let’s turn the tables a bit: Have you done a background check, employment verification and criminal records history on every babysitter who has ever worked for you? Wouldn’t you like to know who will be watching your kids? Should you do this? Are your kids worth it? But the answer is probably no, isn’t it? It’s human nature to take the easy way out of situations, and unfortunately it’s people who handle hiring.

So there you have it - tell the truth, whether it be on your resume, your job application, or who broke the window with the baseball. Very few people have a blemish-free past or the perfect credentials for the perfect job.

It is far better to know how to face the blemishes of your career head-on than simply to cover them up with lies. Good resume writers and career coaches can help job seekers gain perspective on imperfections and imaginatively present your past, thus eliminating the need to lie. Tell the truth in securing new work opportunities. You will face enough challenges and worries once you have the job. Don’t take short cuts to get there; take the higher road.

Nothing has changed. Job Seekers still feel the only strategy to get noticed is to send their resume to all the job postings that narrowly match their industry experience and discipline.

What happens next? You wait and never get any response.

I’m not surprised. It went to “The Resume Black Hole!” 

Hiring managers and human resource reps receive hundreds of resumes on average in response to a single job posting. In many instances, they prefer to interview ten or less candidates.

Countless hiring managers and human resource professionals are overworked and not trained in best recruiting practices. They can either screen every resume and find the best of the best, or screen just enough resumes to get the minimum required to interview. Typically they choose the latter because screening resumes takes a lot of time and recruiting is not their only task. In addition, they feel most candidates are not qualified and probably did not comprehend the position description.

In the end, the majority of companies don’t even notify you that you were not selected. This can lead to much frustration, especially when you do not know who to contact for a status update. That is why I call it, “The Resume Black Hole.”

Your Job Should Be Your Calling

In May of 2008 I attended a career conference sponsored by The Ladders and Kennedy Information as well as Career Directors International. A lot of well-known folks inside Career Management Alliance and around the globe attended. As the conference blogger and photographer I also represented one of my key vendors. This experience put me back in touch with the kind of thought leaders that drive the career industry. Again in October I attended the Career Directors International Conference in Seattle with multiple and too many to mention thought leaders. 

One of the talks in May by Richard Leider focused on people who suffer from what he calls the “inner kill” and that kind of nails a lot of what I work on with my clients. He calls it the art of dying without knowing it. How many people die by a million small cuts? I mean people work so hard and then find out they are not fulfilled. If you want to be an achiever your job usually must mean more or should mean more than a paycheck. Richard Leider, Susan Whitcomb, Liz Sumner and Laura DeCarlo and really a lot of conference participants spoke about practices to help clients revitalize, renew and capture your work-life balance or as I like to put it your work-life mission. You can view this in a secular or non-secular way. But you should not pretend that it does not matter. It does.

Unfortunately most people only realize problems when they become a crisis. Or recessions and downturns in the economy show how people respond to setbacks and layoffs.

To prevent job or career crisis management I recommend that you ask yourself these questions first:

1. Am I completely fulfilled in my work-life? Remember your worklife does not have to be only what you do to make money. It can absolutely be a combination of work, family/home, volunteer and anything that adds to your worklife.
2. What am I doing to challenge myself to stay focused, happy and productive at work?
3. If work ended tomorrow what would I do short-term and long-term?

One way that I advocate you look at your career is to focus on your career third person, like you are a business.

From a work point of view consider this:

Would it surprise you to find that your company has been sold, your division cut or that your new boss decided that despite your obvious, multi-year contributions that you were expendable? How would you handle a career transition now? What if the ‘what if’ happened and you faced unemployment in the next 12 months? How would facts like these affect your attitude and your economy? In the 12 years of coaching clients and developing outplacement and job search strategies, few lessons learned come to mind quicker than most people at all levels of careers, entry-level to executive, run the business of their career this way – crisis management.

To run your career properly treat it like a business, anticipate change, embrace change and remember that you have made a rather serious business investment. Whether you own your own business or not you need to know that transforming change takes place daily. On a small scale the sand shifts underneath you as a business leader, business owner or person who works for an organization or company. Will you be ready for small changes? Will you be prepared to accept total responsibility for your business and career? Will you take ownership and not make excuses for challenges during your career? Will you embrace the new digital economy and challenge yourself to think differently? “Unfortunately I want to get out of management for a number of reasons,” a recent Fortune 100 human resources manager and client exclaimed to me. “Maybe it’s me but all I seem to do is babysit, deal with personnel issues and try to get people to understand the new realities of today. I wish people at every level would think about their job from the owner’s point of view.”

You own the business of your career. Now what do you do?

ResumeSpider offers Career Seekers an alternative approach to getting noticed which leads to more activity; like phone calls, emails and interviews.

We are not claiming this is the silver bullet or some great new idea. However, ResumeSpider is a common-sense approach to networking and targeted list building. Both activities are crucial to a well rounded job search and should be incorporated as soon as possible. For example, all you need to do is call into a company, find out if they hire your profile, get a contact name, phone number and email address. Now duplicate that task 250 or 500 or 1000 times.  Unfortunately this effort can take weeks or months with our own time and resources. ResumeSpider offers a proven time saving approach to this strategy. It is important to remember that your time is worth something!

Our matching technology closely resembles relationship matching websites; like Match.com and eHarmony.  You are matched to companies in our network based on your job function, industry experience and desired locations.  Then we email your profile to those select Member Companies. We have 1000s of companies in our network and add 400-500 new companies, on average, every month.  The Member Company network consists of employers and recruiting firms that have joined ResumeSpider to receive resumes.

To get more information on Resume Spider, read How it Works, Why Join, and some Resume Spider reviews and testimonials.

http://www.resumespider.com/