The current system of job seeking often requires to lie on resume. It is even being highly recommended by people that coach people for job seeking, although with some moderation of course.
Companies lie on their job ads so I think its perfectly fair. I wouldn’t go and say I can do a skill that I can’t but I don’t think it’s wrong to say I can do x even though i have no qualifications or professional experience in it.
Speaking strictly of software industry
There are two kinds of lying.
- Lie about language/framework you don’t know
- Lying about qualification, company you worked with, title held, etc.
The first kind of lying is fine as long as you’re confident you can crack the interview. Your knowledge is needed and these days, since companies anyway want everything, lying about some language may get you an interview call.
Do not evet lie about second type. Most companies conduct a background check on you to verify about your details. They even sometimes connect with your previous employer to verify the details.
If you’re lying here you can land in a big trouble
Does the NDA trick work for the second kind?
“I worked for 2-3 years part time and remote to a company, but I was forced to sign an NDA about it.”
Nope, don’t even try it.
They generally hire external agency who has their ways to verify every possible details.
I’ve never been coached to lie on my resume.
I’ve never put anything false on my resume.
I’m glad to have not worked for a company where that’s cool, or knowingly worked with scumbags who lie about their qualifications.
Sure, my resume sucks, but it’s at least accurate.
Totally depends on the employer. Some are hardcore, many aren’t. I used to be in the IT field, one of the companies I worked for hired a guy who claimed he had 10 years of IT experience. He got fired after 3 days because apparently he couldn’t even install a printer on people’s computers.
If he was able to get past the interview, then anybody can lol. Better not to outright lie, but embellish for sure, just be ready to try to sound like you know the basics at least. Often, calling things fancy names is enough to get by, here’s some examples:
- Set up a Minecraft server for you and you friends? Try <Experience with server setup & management>
- Added RAM to your grandma’s 10 year old computer once? Try <Computer hardware upgrade and repair experience>
Seems stupid, but trust me, it works with HR all the time. And once you get into the interview, you can add details to flesh out your experience better. A lot of it is how you say something, not what you say.
Don’t say, “I set up a Minecraft server once for my friends to play.” Say something like, “I spun up a Minecraft server instance for my friends and I to utilize. I managed scheduled software updates and patches for the server, verified the disk health and hardware usage, and set up regular backups for the world files and resources.” Doesn’t matter that your hardware monitoring was just Windows Task Manager and your scheduled backups and updates were just Windows Restore point and Microsoft updates, most staff will just hear that description and move on, especially if you add a little banter, they will normally just go, “ah cool” and keep going down the list.
Obviously this varies based on the job experience level, but for entry level jobs to get your foot in the door, it works very well.
I have an interview coming up. Can I get you to dress up as me and go to the interview?
Lol I would if I could.
To be fair, printers are ass
True, but I don’t mean he couldn’t get a printer to work. I mean apparently he didn’t even know how to add one to an employees computer.
Printers are the devil’s imps though lol.
Yeah, I figured that’s what you meant. Hardest part of connecting a printer these days is just fighting with the four-dimensional nature of USB ports
I’d say forget usb on printers but networked printers are the devil’s child. Some of the things I’ve seen from these printer manufacturers are absolutely insane.
Who the fuck wants a coversheet printed before the page they asked for? Nobody, so let’s default it and bury it behind a million advanced settings. Xerox wankers.
HP: Goes to sleep, never automatically wakes up properly. Enterprise grade £500+ POS Ohh and Airprint, Good fucking luck.
Oki: Might as well buy 2 as that’s cheaper than replacing the drums after a few months.
Brother is the only brand I’ll buy that’s not MFD under maintenance contract now.
Do not lie on your resume. Especially if you are a software engineer! When I give interviews, I typically don’t ask random technical questions. They are catered to what’s on your resume and if you can’t explain it, that’s a huge red flag
Same. I have a list of questions on various topics, I’ll ask a basic one about most technologies listed on a resume, and follow up if the answer is good until I reach a question they can’t answer, or I’m satisfied that they know the subject matter well.
I think OP may need to explain further. There’s embellishing your work history, or tailoring it to a particular position you’re after. That’s fine and part of the CV-fu. Then there’s outright lying about hard facts, which can be a huge problem if checked.
Hard facts are things like who you worked for and when and on what position, or where you got your degree and what it says on it. Provable skills and certifications also fall under this category.
Employers love it because it gives them plausible legal cover for two essential freedoms:
If they like you anyway, they can hire you and defend any discrimination claims with the fact that you had the strongest resume.
Whenever they stop liking you, they can expose the lie and fire you on the spot for good cause.
So really, it’s a win-win situation for both you and your prospective employer.
It’s all relative, depending on the place your applying at, the lie in the resume, the hiring manager…
But the biggest reason is because the resume is usually used as a filter to filter out people who definitely won’t be hired. And in job postings companies usually ask for more than what they need.
Once you have the first real interview (i.e. not the phone screen) they’ll be able to tell if you don’t have enough knowledge for the position. And then you’re no worse off than prior to the interview.
But if they think you do have enough knowledge than who cares about the lie…
At some point, the question becomes: was the candidate too unqualified to understand what they were applying for?
I don’t mind training someone if they’re not 100% up to speed but they also need to be capable of learning and retaining things. A lot of that means that you need a foundation based on education and on the job learning. In other words, I’m not going to teach foundational shit that you should have picked up in high school.
One memorable example: we had one applicant who claimed a high degree of competence and related experience - and although I had some doubts during the interview I was realistic about the job market and our chances of finding someone who was a perfect match. She was personable, seemed smart, and had worked in the industry. How hard would it be to train her? If she could manage to pick up even the most basic parts of the workload it would be win to hire her.
A short list of what we learned
- no bachelor’s degree (our manager was livid when she found out about that one)
- no understanding of basic science (like, “temperature is not measured as a percentage” basic science)
- a week into the job, asked when she was going to “start doing X,” even though the job description was “you’re going to be doing Y and Z.” To be fair (?), the words describing X and Y were fairly similar and you might mistake one for the other if you had a poor grasp on either of them.
I’m going to gloss over a lot of irrelevant (but horrifying) detail here. We did have one memorable conversation where she said, “I’m so glad I applied for this job even though I wasn’t qualified. You never know where you can get by trying!”
Where she eventually got was fired, but that took some time and the damage she did is still legendary. Part of that legacy of raging incompetence is that we fact-check resumes in ways that we previously did not. But the great irony is that she probably had no idea of just how unqualified she actually was. Again, the question becomes: is the candidate too unqualified to understand what they were applying for?
Depends on the place, but most don’t seem to care if you embellish your credentials as long as you’re able to do the job. A lot of job postings overstate what the job requires anyway.
If they ask for 10 years experience in a technology only released 5 years ago you could claim spending the last 40 years of your free time on the analysis of early 21st century literature if you are only 30 years old but they would probably be upset that you pointed out their stupidity.
Jesus, all the people here saying never to lie on your resume must live pretty privileged lives.
Yes, its okay to lie, if you can back it up.
For example, I know just about everything there is about computers/sysadmin there is under the sun (im a born computer geek) but I never had any official degrees for it. I lied and said I had most of the CompTIA certifications and not a single person ever asked to actually see it. I already know everything that’s in those books so it’s not like I didn’t have the knowledge, I just didn’t have the stupid piece of paper, that, again, no one ever asked for.
Most employers are going to be exploiting your labor anyways so if you can take advantage of them you should, because they certainly going to be taken advantage of you, and you shouldn’t feel bad for them.
As others have said, just keep it reasonable and don’t lie yourself into a corner. If you don’t know rocket science don’t say you do and obvious things like that.
Only if it’s gonna cost them money.
Depends on the place.
They know, that’s why there’s verification of stuff that’s critical to them. Most company don’t care if u know ur job
I’d say it’s not okay to lie, but embellishment is encouraged.
For example, I hire programmers. If you put on your resume you know some language or framework, I’m probably going to test you on it. If you can’t code hello world, or something basic I’m going to pissed off.
Now, if your role was technically something like a jr java engineer but you put on there that you were a mid level, meh I’m not going to check. As long as your skills are roughly in line I’ll let you through to the next round.
I’m not sure if this is embellishment or not but I wrote some sales software for a moving company. Then they used it for 15 years, and my resume now says I wrote software that brought in like $30m to the company.
I’d call it a legit claim. I assume as well that over those 15 years you’ve had to debug it and update it along the way. So that’s completely fair to put on your resume.
Lies? Excuse me?? That 30 mil bit is absolutely (technically) true!!!
Yes, I hire programmers. I need core competencies in areas I care about. If the job is Java but you’ve mostly been working in C# I’ll take it on faith that you can figure that part out yourself.
If you tell me you’ve worked on ecommerce sites but can’t tell me the steps of a credit card transaction, I’m concerned.
What I really care about is your ability to articulate your answers, clearly enumerate assumptions underlying your reasoning, and so on. If I have to pull teeth to get answers, I’m not hiring you. I’m an introvert, I used to love being left alone to write code in a dingy basement office, so I get that attitude but you need to be able to talk to people to get a job.
Part of that interaction is proving you have an understanding of the tools you will be using. If you lied about that knowledge and understanding, it will be painfully obvious very quickly.
Yeah that’s a better way to put it to me. I honestly don’t care what language most people code in, but I hope you can explain how you’re doing stuff. I interview with the expectation of “a lot of red squigglies” expecting it not to compile. I don’t care if you call .Sort instead of writing your own. Just show me you can code.
Sadly though, my latest question is for web developers and is mostly made up of calling a simple GET api. I have failed at least 80% of the engineers that take that test simply because they have no idea how to call an API in any language or framework, something I do I’d say on a daily basis. It’s basically “call a fake endpoint /foo and show the results” and that takes mid level engineers the entire hour to do.
People are taking an hour for
import requests res = requests.get("https://your-domain.com/foo") print(res.json())or javascript’s fetch that I don’t want to type on my phone any more code for? Maybe I should think higher of my skills.
There’s a bit more to it, my question I mean, but I shit you not more interviewees I’ve had have failed what you just wrote than succeeded.
We just overhauled a programming test we use of we aren’t certain a person can do what they say they can do (which is most of the time when you hire remote) and yeah the old one disqualified tons of people. It was very simple. I have had lots of people have someone else do it and then act very surprised when I wanted to discuss it with them.
Exact same problems, especially remote. I honestly don’t know what is happening with engineers coming out of school/bootcamps, they just legit cannot code but go for these coding jobs. who is hiring them? I remember making fun of “fizzbuzz” as an interview question because it’s too easy but I legit have had people fail fizzbuzz! In languages they chose!
I hate technical interviews, I’ve been given questions like “implement binary search”, like okay, I can do that, but this is an annoying question. So I try to keep mine very light, “let’s just chat about code, show me you can do basic stuff”, and I’m just constantly disappointed.
It’s rough out there and when you finally find them you they use your offer to get more money from their current job or another offer. Sigh. :)
I interviewed a guy who claimed on his resume that he ported a Blizzard game from PC to mobile. The way it was worded heavily implied that he worked for a company that was contracted by Blizzard to port the game, or at least that this was an official project in some sense, like maybe he worked with a group on the internet to do as a passion project, like how people reverse engineer and make open source versions of games.
Not only was it a school thing, it wasn’t even like a project that he did. It was an example that his teacher went over in class.
He didn’t know a single thing that was on his own resume. But he got the job anyway, even though we never did a technical interview for him. Guess whose daughter was his girlfriend? Yup, the VP of software.
