Job seekers: Get used to full disclosure
Nervous employers are digging deeper into your past, and it’s better to confess the facts than be fingered.
By Molly Selvin
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Fibbing on your resume is a really bad idea.
First, you will probably be found out by the army of commercial background screeners that employers deploy to scour resumes, check criminal records and pull credit histories.
Plus, you don’t need to. Most bosses are pretty forgiving if you come clean about a minor brush with the law or a supervisor so nutty he sent you running for the door.
Yet resume tinkering is practically an epidemic. Superheated competition for jobs, especially those with big paychecks, tempts many to pump air into their resumes. A gig as an administrative assistant expands into a management title. A mail-order MBA is passed off as the real deal.
“We tend to disproportionately reward individuals with extraordinary records,” observed Kirk Hanson, a business professor and executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “There’s a huge incentive that’s increased over the years in claiming that you’re a star, so individuals tend to knock pieces from their resume that are inconsistent with being a star and add things that are consistent with that image.”
But the precipitous tumble of high-profile managers in recent years should send up red flags for every job-seeker.
For the entire article go to LATimes.com
Corra believes this is a really good article, one that prospective job candidates should heed carefully. There are so many ways to get caught in a lie, chances are the people running your background check will have thought of at least three possibilities for the reasons you are being evasive.
The background check is increasingly a proven tool for the human resource manager. And most HR Managers are aware that when candidates lies do lie they will lie mostly about their criminal records and education.
Corra is one of the background checking services that will run education and employment verification both domestically and on an international basis. With most employers willing to overlook certain mishaps or a lack of education, few will overlook your lying. So fess up. It’s smarter.
Check them out before you hire.
