27 Apr 2023
I’m sure we’ve all, at some point, taken steps to embellish our CV so that it makes us sound at least a little bit more attractive to potential new employers.
Using words which might put us up a notch above other applicants, such as ‘leadership of a team’ instead of ‘informal supervision’, or ‘project management’ rather than ‘project planning and reporting’. These types of white lies might be manageable when it comes to making your way through an interview, but what about the totally fabricated statements some people try to get away with?
Colleagues here have seen some foolish examples of ‘achievements’ which sound great, but have absolutely no substance to them whatsoever, and for the most part, they’ve only been picked up at interviews.
It must be pretty humiliating for the candidates concerned: one horrendous example was where a candidate was applying for a project management job requiring financial management experience, and had confirmed in their CV that they had this experience from a previous project.
Yet, when asked, they had to admit they had never actually done it. The scary thing: if the question hadn’t been asked, they might have been given the job. Being given a job with that level of financial accountability, having never done it before would have potentially ended disastrously for both the employee and the company concerned. There are legal duties that companies must fulfill in terms of their finances (sometimes referred to as fiduciary duties) and having someone who had never done anything with these could have seen the company land in deep regulatory waters.
So, what’s the main issue for candidates willing to chance their arm?
Well, if they are in a relatively small professional community, and their peers find out, their career could be in tatters as they could be ruining their chances of ever getting an interview locally again.
But what about those people who are successful? Their great CV gets them an interview, they are given the job and then fall at the first hurdle when it turns out they cant use MS Excel, never mind devise complex spreadsheets?
In most cases, these scenarios end up with dismissal, and that’s what people really need to bear in mind when they embellish their CV a little too far. It is one thing to stretch the truth slightly and it is entirely another to outright lie about experience and abilities.
Some people think that in terms of job-related skills, they can jump off the cliff and assemble their parachute on the way down, but there are far more splat marks at the bottom of the cliff than there are successful parachutes made. If you don’t already have the skills for the job, never say that you do as it can backfire very badly.
Dismissal means a very limited chance of a decent reference, if any, which in turn means their career could potentially need to take a totally new direction – something they wouldn’t ever have wished for!
