If you think that more people are lying on their resumes and employment applications you’ve got support from an expert.
Jude M. Werra runs an executive search firm based in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Business Week reports that for a quarter century, Mr. Werra has been tracking the “executive résumé fraud, credentials inflation, and the misrepresentation of executive educational credentials” on the resumes that he receives.
The result is Werra’s “Liar’s Index.” The latest version covers resumes received in the first half of 2007 and, guess what? It’s up a full five percentage points from the index for the last half of 2006. Sixteen percent of the resumes Werra received had a falsehood of some kind.
Personally, I’ve never understood why someone would risk an entire relationship by lying about something as easy to check as an educational record. But they do, and so you should check the facts on resumes and applications.
Don’t count on your background checks doing the work for you, either. A background check is great for turning up a criminal past that an applicant has “forgotten” to tell you about. You can use a pre-employment credit check, though, to compare the employment dates there with the employment dates given on the resume.
A criminal background check and, if appropriate, a driving records check, can tell you about important things your applicant may have left out of the information he or she gave you. But you will have to verify claims on a resume, starting with the educational credentials which are easiest to check. Use a pre-employment credit check to scan for character issues and to match up with resume employment dates.
Your best results come from using the tools together.