7 ms·

Lie on your résumé? One job-seeker's moment of truth

43 points by joeyespo 14y ago

pnachbaur 14y ago
Great comments from 52 days ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4312097 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4312097
- toyg 14y ago
  Yeah, I remember reading this possibly even earlier than that -- I am in the same position (sort of) so obviously it resonated with me. I can't understand why people would lie on their resume; but then again, I usually don't understand lying at all.
  - klibertp 14y ago
    Lying is good. You cannot live without lying. We all lie, everytime we open our mouths to say something. Whatever we say it's always biased, subjective, emotional (to varying degrees, ofc) - we, as humans, are simply incapable of comunicating the "truth", at least beyond very formal systems. The only thing for us to decide is how much to lie on any given topic. Or what story to tell - it's really the same thing worded differently. We do not value the truth. We value narrative, stories. Don't do yourself a disservice and don't make your story sound pathetic and uninteresting for the sake of the "truth". In my country not too long ago there was a public debate about some very famous journalist (after his death) who used to (as his biographer insisted) put factually incorrect sentences and paragraphs in his reportages. He lied! There is evidence of this, and much of it. But there's a catch here: fragments of his works were lies, yet read as a whole they conveyed the truth in a stunning, poetic way which many hoped to copy but failed. The debate I mentioned was something along the lines: do those lies invalidate the truth he told? I'm very, very strongly convinced that that's not the case. Through his lies he almost touched the truth. I'm talking about Ryszard Kapuścinski biography, if anyone is interested, BTW.
    - redspark 14y ago
      I upvote for your interesting perspective, but want to downvote for your conclusion. :D
      - klibertp 14y ago
        I know it's controversial - the debate I mentioned in my edit was really heated in my country :) To clarify: I don't think that lying for the sake of lying is any good, of course. It's just that we are incapable of not lying, so we can as well do it well and to achieve something good :)
        alttag 14y ago
        > It's just that we are incapable of not lying ... You seem to be removing our ability to choose from the equation. Clearly, perceived short-term self-interest has its lure, but please don't frame this as if we must lie, or that the ends justify the means.
        klibertp 14y ago
        Not at all, we can choose! It's just that we choose between different lies, that's all. I think we use different definitions of a 'lie'. I call everything that is not a truth, that is it's not 100% factually correct and 100% complete, a 'lie'. Are you confident that - outside of very narrow formalisms - you can describe anything 100% accurately? I'm quite sure it's just impossible. EDIT: it seems I can't reply to jd and davidhollander just yet; I'll do it later, when I get home. I just wanted to say that I upvoted you guys, because your criticism of my posts is very good :)
        davidhollander 14y ago
        > I call everything that is not a truth, that is it's not 100% factually correct and 100% complete, a 'lie'. Are you confident that - outside of very narrow formalisms - you can describe anything 100% accurately? This is an unworkable definition. A lie is defined as a 'deliberate untruth', not an 'incidental untruth'. To tell an untruth deliberately requires the preexistence of knowledge of what is true. If someone knows nothing, they are incapable of telling a lie.
  - greyman 14y ago
    My wife works for a recruitment agency and lying in the resume (especially about work experience) happens sometimes. Why people do it? Because if you are not an expert on anything and want to break into sales or lower management, for example, your CV might compete with another 100-150 CV's. So you need to have some good-looking work experience in there, otherwise you are not considered for interview. But it usually doesn't work, since she gives the interviewee very specific questions about his work experience, so the laying is quickly discovered.
kghose 14y ago
Was he actually a member of Mensa?
- klibertp 14y ago
  AFAIK yes
- phaus 14y ago
  I would guess that he is. Being a member of Mensa isn't really a big deal.
  - pc86 14y ago
    What about having an IQ in the top 2% isn't a big deal?
    - bdunbar 14y ago
      It's not _having_ a big brain that matters, it's what one does with it.
    - redspark 14y ago
      The fact that having a high IQ is not an accurate measurement of the impact you will have on the world. There are plenty of people with high IQ's who don't contribute anything meaningful and many more people with "normal" IQ's who are changing the world.
      - pruman 14y ago
        It's true. A high IQ is like having a car with a lot of horse power. Its effectiveness depends upon how and where you drive it, and even then it won't be enough to get you everywhere.
    - loganfrederick 14y ago
      Because it's a metric that doesn't wholly reflect what you have done or will be capable of doing in the future.
michaelochurch 14y ago
What I find amazing is how many just plain stupid resume lies people make. What does a 50-year old executive gain by listing a fake college degree? Nothing. (And it's not hard to unwind a lie, which you should do as time passes and the benefit of the lie approaches zero while the cost remains constant.) I think what happens is that we hear about the sensational and embarrassing lies. This stuff gets dug up when the decision to fire an executive is already made, in order to reduce severance. If the lie is small and reasonable (slight title inflation) it doesn't much matter because that's so common, but if it's something immensely embarrassing like faking a college degree when he actually flunked out, it gets broadcast. Most of those public humiliation stories are cases of failed severance negotiations in which the company decides to be a dick and play the nuclear option against his reputation to get out of a contractual severance agreement (e.g. extortion against the fired employee.) This is not to condone lying on a resume. I don't, but I think the public shaming that accompanies these digging expeditions is a bit much. When someone is shamed over an irrelevant resume lie, he's usually being shamed because someone (often the ex-employer) wants it that way.
gordonguthrie 14y ago
I got hit backwards. My CV had PhD (failed) on it. I had had a chunk of good jobs, tried to start a bank, got nowhere, went back contracting in a dept with a lot of academic firepower. After I had been there 8 weeks someone made a crack about 'all you doctors' including me in - and I said 'I'm not a doctor'. 'Your CV said you had a PhD' came the response. Luckily I had my laptop at work with the original copy of my CV on it. I went ballistic, phoned up the recruitment agency, and finally got them to send a formal letter to the people who had interviewed me. I never did find out who 'tidied up' my CV - but a dodgy CV is just a burning fuse on a bomb that could go off anytime.
- Evbn 14y ago
  If you called your resume a CV, you are have way to lying abounding an academic already.
  - gordonguthrie 14y ago
    In the UK we have Curriculum Vitae. The term resumé is not used.

43 points by joeyespo 14y ago

pnachbaur 14y ago

Great comments from 52 days ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4312097 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4312097

toyg 14y ago
Yeah, I remember reading this possibly even earlier than that -- I am in the same position (sort of) so obviously it resonated with me. I can't understand why people would lie on their resume; but then again, I usually don't understand lying at all.
- klibertp 14y ago
  Lying is good. You cannot live without lying. We all lie, everytime we open our mouths to say something. Whatever we say it's always biased, subjective, emotional (to varying degrees, ofc) - we, as humans, are simply incapable of comunicating the "truth", at least beyond very formal systems. The only thing for us to decide is how much to lie on any given topic. Or what story to tell - it's really the same thing worded differently. We do not value the truth. We value narrative, stories. Don't do yourself a disservice and don't make your story sound pathetic and uninteresting for the sake of the "truth". In my country not too long ago there was a public debate about some very famous journalist (after his death) who used to (as his biographer insisted) put factually incorrect sentences and paragraphs in his reportages. He lied! There is evidence of this, and much of it. But there's a catch here: fragments of his works were lies, yet read as a whole they conveyed the truth in a stunning, poetic way which many hoped to copy but failed. The debate I mentioned was something along the lines: do those lies invalidate the truth he told? I'm very, very strongly convinced that that's not the case. Through his lies he almost touched the truth. I'm talking about Ryszard Kapuścinski biography, if anyone is interested, BTW.
  - redspark 14y ago
    I upvote for your interesting perspective, but want to downvote for your conclusion. :D
    - klibertp 14y ago
      I know it's controversial - the debate I mentioned in my edit was really heated in my country :) To clarify: I don't think that lying for the sake of lying is any good, of course. It's just that we are incapable of not lying, so we can as well do it well and to achieve something good :)
      - alttag 14y ago
        > It's just that we are incapable of not lying ... You seem to be removing our ability to choose from the equation. Clearly, perceived short-term self-interest has its lure, but please don't frame this as if we must lie, or that the ends justify the means.
        klibertp 14y ago
        Not at all, we can choose! It's just that we choose between different lies, that's all. I think we use different definitions of a 'lie'. I call everything that is not a truth, that is it's not 100% factually correct and 100% complete, a 'lie'. Are you confident that - outside of very narrow formalisms - you can describe anything 100% accurately? I'm quite sure it's just impossible. EDIT: it seems I can't reply to jd and davidhollander just yet; I'll do it later, when I get home. I just wanted to say that I upvoted you guys, because your criticism of my posts is very good :)
        davidhollander 14y ago
        > I call everything that is not a truth, that is it's not 100% factually correct and 100% complete, a 'lie'. Are you confident that - outside of very narrow formalisms - you can describe anything 100% accurately? This is an unworkable definition. A lie is defined as a 'deliberate untruth', not an 'incidental untruth'. To tell an untruth deliberately requires the preexistence of knowledge of what is true. If someone knows nothing, they are incapable of telling a lie.
- greyman 14y ago
  My wife works for a recruitment agency and lying in the resume (especially about work experience) happens sometimes. Why people do it? Because if you are not an expert on anything and want to break into sales or lower management, for example, your CV might compete with another 100-150 CV's. So you need to have some good-looking work experience in there, otherwise you are not considered for interview. But it usually doesn't work, since she gives the interviewee very specific questions about his work experience, so the laying is quickly discovered.

kghose 14y ago

Was he actually a member of Mensa?

klibertp 14y ago
AFAIK yes
phaus 14y ago
I would guess that he is. Being a member of Mensa isn't really a big deal.
- pc86 14y ago
  What about having an IQ in the top 2% isn't a big deal?
  - bdunbar 14y ago
    It's not _having_ a big brain that matters, it's what one does with it.
  - redspark 14y ago
    The fact that having a high IQ is not an accurate measurement of the impact you will have on the world. There are plenty of people with high IQ's who don't contribute anything meaningful and many more people with "normal" IQ's who are changing the world.
    - pruman 14y ago
      It's true. A high IQ is like having a car with a lot of horse power. Its effectiveness depends upon how and where you drive it, and even then it won't be enough to get you everywhere.
  - loganfrederick 14y ago
    Because it's a metric that doesn't wholly reflect what you have done or will be capable of doing in the future.

michaelochurch 14y ago

What I find amazing is how many just plain stupid resume lies people make. What does a 50-year old executive gain by listing a fake college degree? Nothing. (And it's not hard to unwind a lie, which you should do as time passes and the benefit of the lie approaches zero while the cost remains constant.) I think what happens is that we hear about the sensational and embarrassing lies. This stuff gets dug up when the decision to fire an executive is already made, in order to reduce severance. If the lie is small and reasonable (slight title inflation) it doesn't much matter because that's so common, but if it's something immensely embarrassing like faking a college degree when he actually flunked out, it gets broadcast. Most of those public humiliation stories are cases of failed severance negotiations in which the company decides to be a dick and play the nuclear option against his reputation to get out of a contractual severance agreement (e.g. extortion against the fired employee.) This is not to condone lying on a resume. I don't, but I think the public shaming that accompanies these digging expeditions is a bit much. When someone is shamed over an irrelevant resume lie, he's usually being shamed because someone (often the ex-employer) wants it that way.

gordonguthrie 14y ago

I got hit backwards. My CV had PhD (failed) on it. I had had a chunk of good jobs, tried to start a bank, got nowhere, went back contracting in a dept with a lot of academic firepower. After I had been there 8 weeks someone made a crack about 'all you doctors' including me in - and I said 'I'm not a doctor'. 'Your CV said you had a PhD' came the response. Luckily I had my laptop at work with the original copy of my CV on it. I went ballistic, phoned up the recruitment agency, and finally got them to send a formal letter to the people who had interviewed me. I never did find out who 'tidied up' my CV - but a dodgy CV is just a burning fuse on a bomb that could go off anytime.

Evbn 14y ago
If you called your resume a CV, you are have way to lying abounding an academic already.
- gordonguthrie 14y ago
  In the UK we have Curriculum Vitae. The term resumé is not used.