Thursday, June 9, 2011

Career Journal: When Job Applicants Lie

More job applicants are lately fudging details on their resumes, and they are more likely to get caught.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Even a small lie can be a major roadblock to a job applicant's career.

A study of pre-employment background checks conducted between January and March 2011 found that around 11% of candidates provided false data when applying for a job.

The percentage of discrepancies between what the candidate said and the truth has been rising every quarter, according to background screening firm First Advantage Pvt. which conducted the study and released it this week.

The study found some of the highest number of discrepancies in the education, travel, hospitality and real estate sectors. This could be because these industries have not historically been conducting background checks, said Wayne Tollemache, executive managing director at First Advantage in an email response. In comparison, financial services and information technology companies have been doing background checks for years and so don't get as many suspect resumes, said Mr. Tollemache.

While people at all experience levels are known to manipulate their resumes, the study found that the most manipulation was being done by individuals at the "associate level", which is typically a few years of experience.

These people tend to lie more particularly if they have changed a lot of jobs, said Abhay Rao, assistant vice president of human resources at AppLabs, a software company. "Freshers [...]



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