Nearly Half of Employers Have Caught a Lie on a Resume

Half of the employers in this survey have caught candidates lying on their resume, with some of the more outrageous lies being:

• Claimed to be a member of the Kennedy family
• Claimed to be a member of Mensa (duh!)
• Claimed to have worked for the hiring manager before, but never had
• Claimed to be the CEO of a company when the candidate was an hourly employee
• Listed military experience dating back to before he was born
• Included samples of work, which the interviewer actually did
• Claimed to be Hispanic when he was 100 percent Caucasian
• Claimed to have been a professional baseball player

Those beats the guy I interviewed two years ago who claimed to have developed with Spring 5 and Hibernate 6 :)

Just as interesting are the keywords that employers use to search for candidates (SDLC, e-commerce and n-tier are no longer in vogue!):

• problem-solving and decision-making skills (50 percent)
• oral and written communications (44 percent)
• customer service or retention (34 percent)
• performance and productivity improvement (32 percent)
• leadership (30 percent)
• technology (27 percent)
• team-building (26 percent)
• project management (20 percent)
• bilingual (14 percent)