Last week I wrote about the importance of telling the truth in resumes, in a post called "The Power of the Truth." Since then, I found an interesting nugget of data in the December issue of T&D, published by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).
T&D published brief results of a survey of 2200 workers and more than 1000 hiring managers, completed by CareerBuilder.com. The survey, Resume Lies, found that although just 5 percent of workers admit to lying on their resumes, 57 percent of hiring managers say they have caught candidates in a lie. Of those who caught applicants in a lie, 93 percent did not hire the candidate.
Let's see . . . 5 percent lied, but 57 percent caught someone in a lie. Is someone in this survey not telling the truth?
Lynn
Maybe those 57% keep catching the 5% who lie. It's a sport of some kind.
Posted by: Cynthia Clay | January 30, 2007 at 04:37 PM
It depends on what constitutes a lie in the mind of the survey respondent.
Exaggerating the positives in ones resume may not be considered a lie by the applicant, but the recruiter who discovers it may well consider it so.
I once interviewed someone whose resume stated that he had been a team leader. When questioned about the size of his team, he replied that there was just one other person on the task.
I declined to hire him.
Posted by: Chris | February 12, 2007 at 04:50 AM
Chris, thanks for this comment, which inspired my February 12 post.
Lynn
Posted by: Lynn | February 12, 2007 at 11:14 PM