Last month I spent considerable time interviewing candidates for a few open positions in our team. It was not a pleasant experience.
Almost every candidate I met seemed to have lied on their CV. Not slight exaggerations. I am talking about absolute lies.
For instance, this one person claimed to have done an MBA in Digital Marketing. As far as I know, MBA still doesn’t offer such super specialization. Also, it’s only Universities that can offer the MBA degree. But he insisted it wasn’t a PG diploma or a certification but an MBA degree. Did he not know that we are a background verifications company? We catch such lies in our sleep.
For instance, this gentleman claimed to have played the Ranji Trophy. His CV had this in bold and ALL CAPS. When I asked him which team he played for, “Bhagat Singh College,” he replied.
Another candidate claimed to have run end-to-end email campaigns. Yet he knew nothing about subject line checks, email testing, and database segregation. All he knew was that emails go when you click ‘Send’.
This was disappointing for many reasons. Primarily, though, it seemed like such a waste of time. When I meet a candidate, I would like to spend my time evaluating competence, value systems, and culture fit. Not become a human version of a lie detector machine.
Let’s face it, though. There is no such thing as a totally honest CV. If I am writing about myself with the intention of getting a job, I will try to make myself look slightly better than I am. It’s natural.
My friend, for example. Back in the day he was looking for an entry-level job. Now, when you are just out of college, you really don’t have much to write on your CV. To compensate for the lack of any academic achievements, he decided to write ‘Graphology’ as his hobby on his CV.
Graphology, the method of analyzing handwriting, was his obscure way to get close to girls. It proved to be another doomed college-boy enterprise. But it could still land him his first job.
In the interview, as expected, the panel asked what ‘Graphology’ was. As expected, they all gave their handwriting samples to evaluate.
My friend peered into the handwriting samples like a quantum physicist observing an errant neutron. Then he waxed eloquently about all the godly virtues it revealed about the beholder of that handwriting. While he was no Sigmund Freud, he knew enough to know that people love hearing good things about themselves.
He got the job. He couldn’t believe how a group of experienced business executives had fallen for such a simple trick.
Six months later, at a company party, he came face to face with one of his interviewers. Being a few drinks down already, he was loose enough to ask how they did not spot his BS.
“Oh we did spot it,” the interviewer replied. “But we thought this is exactly the kind of smooth-talker we need in our sales team.”
Unfortunately, the lies I was catching were neither the harmless kind nor useful for the job required.
This makes me think, though. If lying on the CV is such an endemic problem now, the first round of interviews really needs to be reserved for lie detection. However, most of these lies can be caught only by experts in that particular field. Definitely not the best utilization of experts’ time.
So what is the solution?
Well, it’s 2023. AI should be able to help. Is there a ChatGPT plugin that’s already helping out with this?
Do you have any interesting experiences with CV lies? What’s your thought on how this can be tackled? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Passing phase or new status quo
By the way, I recently read an article on what seems to be a new concept.
“Unhireables”
Similar to over-valued startups, these “unhireables” are young professionals whose salaries are not in sync with their skill sets and employment experience. This makes it difficult for them to switch jobs and move to another company, because, well, they’re just overpaid.
What do you think? Is this a concept that’s here to stay, or is it a passing phase governed by the laws of demand and supply of labor?
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this so that we can write about it in our next issue! And trust me, this 2-and-a-half-question survey won’t take more than a minute of your time. I promise!
On a lighter note
