eeVoices Corporate Blog

This is Vincent So, Human Resources Intern at eeVoices.
I am speaking with Greg Basham, CEO of eeVoices about what eeVoices has learned about job candidates and resumes when completing pre-employment screening checks for organizations of all sizes.
Who is to blame for all this resume exaggeration and misrepresentation? Do employers share any blame?
We should be clear that when we are talking about exaggerated resumes that when we at eeVoices “red flag” a file we are referring to misstatements of facts and outright falsifications. We are not talking about differing perceptions of contribution to an organization, job, project or team. As people’s views will often differ. There is no immaculate perception when it comes to divvying up the accolades for work accomplishments in some organizations- especially those with lousy annual performance appraisal systems and unclear personal objectives. People are human and we all have our own perception of our relative contribution. The pre-employment screening process including reference and education checking and verifying job and work histories helps employers complete the picture they are painting of prospective new hires. We just help them to get it right.
This is not to offer any excuses for people who purposefully exaggerate their resumes with creative writing – it is unethical and speaks to a person’s character and the net effect on an organization who hires a bunch of cheaters and exaggerators can’t be a positive one. Employers must take some of responsibility for exaggerated resumes if they don’t use independent firms like eeVoices to verify and check work histories or employ sufficient staff to develop the expertise and do these checks themselves. Employers are particularly to blame for the rapid rise in the number of fake degrees out there. Employers got the fake degree industry started as they asked to see originals of degrees and then took a copy for the files. When it became clear this was fuelling that industry, they asked for transcripts and promptly put those in the files and helped these fraud artists broaden their product lines. More recently, we have seen fake fee payment receipts, fake student visas and all these can be obtained with watermarks for degrees and university seals on transcripts. Yes, employers must share some of the responsibility and blame when they find out that the person they hired is not the same one they saw on paper and at the interview.
One final point to keep in mind – Over 90% of fortune 500 companies use third party pre-employment screening firms such as ourselves and we are growing our client list with SMEs here in Hong Kong and the region. This means that the available pool of companies for people with exaggerated resumes continues to decrease. The bad news is that there are still many employers who don’t take the time to check references so even the worst of the worst find another employer to harm.

This is Vincent So, Human Resources Intern at eeVoices.
I am speaking with Greg Basham, CEO of eeVoices about what eeVoices has learned about job candidates and resumes when completing pre-employment screening checks for organizations of all sizes.
Greg, do you see any patterns or common resume exaggerations like a TOP 10 List?
That is another very good question. Yes. There is a clear and distinct pattern to exaggerated resumes
To answer your question, we can actually divide our top 10 resume exaggeration items into two main categories.
The first group are what some employers call resume inflation and these are what job applicants do to “level the playing field” and get to the job interview.
These 5 include exaggeration of: 1) job titles, 2) job duties and scope of responsibilities, 3) reporting level and working relationships in an organization and 4) accomplishments and achievements and 5) salaries and bonuses.
While some might argue that these are relatively minor what we see from our interviews with job referees is that they often form a pattern that suggests the candidate either has a very inflated sense of their contributions to their past employers or they are outright lacking in integrity.
The second group of exaggerations are more clearly integrity issues. Our top 5 in this group includes: 1) misstated employment periods to cover up gaps in employment 2) missing job histories used by frequent job changers to show they have some staying power – where they don’t 3) misstated reasons for leaving to cover up termination. Coming in at number 4 are a host of professional and academic misrepresentations from fake awards and honours to fake degrees, diplomas, program concentrations, program descriptions to currency of professional certifications or ever having them at all. 5) number 5 on our list is the use of fake referees.