Do employers actually know or care about lying on resume?
The current system of job seeking often requires to lie on resume. It is even being highly recommended by people that coach people for job seeking, although with some moderation of course.
Do not lie on your resume. Especially if you are a software engineer! When I give interviews, I typically don’t ask random technical questions. They are catered to what’s on your resume and if you can’t explain it, that’s a huge red flag
I think OP may need to explain further. There’s embellishing your work history, or tailoring it to a particular position you’re after. That’s fine and part of the CV-fu. Then there’s outright lying about hard facts, which can be a huge problem if checked.
Hard facts are things like who you worked for and when and on what position, or where you got your degree and what it says on it. Provable skills and certifications also fall under this category.
Same. I have a list of questions on various topics, I’ll ask a basic one about most technologies listed on a resume, and follow up if the answer is good until I reach a question they can’t answer, or I’m satisfied that they know the subject matter well.
Because employers ask for years of experience and pay entry level wage, so if you’re entry level you don’t have access to the high paying jobs and only the lower paying job will keep you if they raise you don’t have that much experience because who else are they going to hire?
if you’re entry level you don’t have access to the high paying jobs
Uh … yeah? How does this equal the system forcing you to lie?
It’s like of I put out an ice cream sundae and say it’s only to be taken by someone who can bench 400 lbs, and you lie about how much you can bench to get the ice cream sundae.
Did I force you to lie? Not at all. You lied because you wanted the ice cream sundae, not because I had a gun to your head.
A system where you can lie and get a higher paying job than you’re qualified for, isn’t a system that’s forcing you to lie.
Did you read what I just wrote or you skipped right to that part?
Entry level paying jobs are a no go because they ask for years of experience, better paying jobs are also a no go for the same reason (but in their case it’s justified), what then? Well, you lie about your experience to land the option where they can’t afford to fire you, i.e. the option that doesn’t pay well so you don’t have any competition.
When your choice is lying or not paying rent you do what you have to do.
You studied IT and all jobs require 5 years of professional experience in network management, what does someone who just got out of school do to acquire that experience?
As written above: These are not the only two options so this is a false dilemma. Professional experience does not necessarily mean full-time job experience. You can work while studying, or have side projects in a professional environment while studying that you can showcase (i.e. contributions to open source projects or personal pet projects). That's especially true for IT. As another option, you could also do internships and have a good chance to get hired this way. If you didn't do any of that you can still state that you don't have the required experience yet and apply either way - maybe you have other positives to compensate your lack of experience. Lying is not a requirement, at least where I live.
Reading all the other comments, I have a strong feeling that there is quite some cultural differences between what I'm assuming is the USA and my personal experiences.
I’ve only ever even had one job call anyone I had on my resume.
I know this, because every contact info other than my own on my resume for the last 15 years has been fake and will forward to my own phone so I can pretend to be my own reference if I need to.
I could probably lie about being able to actually do the job and having past experience in it, too; but that would be a little silly since I wouldn’t be able to actually do the job and they would find that out pretty quick.
I'm just imagining you thinking up different characters for each job, Daniel from the supermarket, he's young, into fitness, goes to the gym daily, so you're putting on a tough muscle man voice, then it's Sheila from the library, quiet mousy lady, 65, maybe Scottish? Now you're doing a Mrs Doubtfire voice.
It really doesnt. Youre welcome to submit your resume into a place even if you dont meet all the qualifications(in fact, I’d recommend it) but lying comes off bad pretty much anywhere. If you cant show that your resume even kind of reflects your skillset any potential employer is gonna write you off
My place fired some guy when they found out he didn’t attend the college he claimed to have a degree from. Not sure why it took almost a month post-hire to figure it out, and wasn’t discovered during the initial background check.
Remember: It’s not just a fact of, what’s going to get me the result in this particular interaction. It’s a question of, what type of person do you want to be?
Lying on your resume, within reason, is probably a good strategy for getting the job. It’s not a good strategy for life.
padding the years of experience for a specific skill from 4 to 7.. not really a big deal in my opinion. someone's 4 years could be more valuable than another's 7
if you're making up whole degrees or careers.. then it becomes impractical because you'll have to walk the walk. if you're frank abagnale, maybe you can do it. for us regular folk it'd be hard to convince someone who knows what they're doing that you know what you're doing when you actually don't
If one person’s 4 years can be more valuable than another person’s 7, then considering the number of years is a waste of time anyway.
Like if you’re applying to a company with a hard limit of minimum 5 years’ experience, and you have 4 that you think qualifies you, and the company isnt willing to consider you because of it, that’s not a company you want to work for.
The current system of job seeking often requires to lie on resume.
This has not been my experience at all, but maybe it depends on what kinds of jobs you’re seeking.
In my line of work, detecting lies on resumes is one of the reasons we spend time interviewing candidates. If you are caught out in a lie, you can kiss any chance of an offer goodbye. As an interviewer I have never knowingly given a “hire” vote to a lying candidate and if I did, I wouldn’t have my job much longer.
I’d say it’s not okay to lie, but embellishment is encouraged.
For example, I hire programmers. If you put on your resume you know some language or framework, I’m probably going to test you on it. If you can’t code hello world, or something basic I’m going to pissed off.
Now, if your role was technically something like a jr java engineer but you put on there that you were a mid level, meh I’m not going to check. As long as your skills are roughly in line I’ll let you through to the next round.
I’m not sure if this is embellishment or not but I wrote some sales software for a moving company. Then they used it for 15 years, and my resume now says I wrote software that brought in like $30m to the company.
I’d call it a legit claim. I assume as well that over those 15 years you’ve had to debug it and update it along the way. So that’s completely fair to put on your resume.
Yes, I hire programmers. I need core competencies in areas I care about. If the job is Java but you’ve mostly been working in C# I’ll take it on faith that you can figure that part out yourself.
If you tell me you’ve worked on ecommerce sites but can’t tell me the steps of a credit card transaction, I’m concerned.
What I really care about is your ability to articulate your answers, clearly enumerate assumptions underlying your reasoning, and so on. If I have to pull teeth to get answers, I’m not hiring you. I’m an introvert, I used to love being left alone to write code in a dingy basement office, so I get that attitude but you need to be able to talk to people to get a job.
Part of that interaction is proving you have an understanding of the tools you will be using. If you lied about that knowledge and understanding, it will be painfully obvious very quickly.
Yeah that’s a better way to put it to me. I honestly don’t care what language most people code in, but I hope you can explain how you’re doing stuff. I interview with the expectation of “a lot of red squigglies” expecting it not to compile. I don’t care if you call .Sort instead of writing your own. Just show me you can code.
Sadly though, my latest question is for web developers and is mostly made up of calling a simple GET api. I have failed at least 80% of the engineers that take that test simply because they have no idea how to call an API in any language or framework, something I do I’d say on a daily basis. It’s basically “call a fake endpoint /foo and show the results” and that takes mid level engineers the entire hour to do.
We just overhauled a programming test we use of we aren’t certain a person can do what they say they can do (which is most of the time when you hire remote) and yeah the old one disqualified tons of people. It was very simple. I have had lots of people have someone else do it and then act very surprised when I wanted to discuss it with them.
Exact same problems, especially remote. I honestly don’t know what is happening with engineers coming out of school/bootcamps, they just legit cannot code but go for these coding jobs. who is hiring them? I remember making fun of “fizzbuzz” as an interview question because it’s too easy but I legit have had people fail fizzbuzz! In languages they chose!
I hate technical interviews, I’ve been given questions like “implement binary search”, like okay, I can do that, but this is an annoying question. So I try to keep mine very light, “let’s just chat about code, show me you can do basic stuff”, and I’m just constantly disappointed.
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