Many in the country are suffering the harsh realities of a flailing economy: budgets are tight, vacations are being put off until later, and some have either had their hours scaled back or have been laid off. Companies have to do what they can to make ends meet. Since “business is business”, the employees are being caught in the middle when it comes to companies cutting costs. For the employees who have been laid off, it may be the first time in years that they find themselves in this situation. Many recently unemployed had worked for their company for decades and were ready to retire in a few years, only to have retirement eligibility taken away. Still others are fresh out of school and looking for a foot in the door so they can begin working and pay off their student loans. These days, an employee can decide to go to the extreme end of the spectrum and decide to fabricate a resume that fits what each company is looking for. Please don’t be that person; here’s why…
One of my friends was looking for a job in 2000 when the Internet bubble was beginning to show its signs of bursting. There were those who had been on the Internet bandwagon since day 1 and had learned things like Java, HTML, and programming languages for web site design. Those folks were in high demand at one time, but when everything crumbled, there was an over-saturation of web designers in the market. No one could find work! I remember the “big thing” to know at that time was how to make a shopping cart to enable a company to buy and sell online. My friend had web design experience and decided that since she had not worked in 5 months and unemployment was running out, she would lie. A bold-faced bit of resume falsification in all its glory; she put on her resume that she helped design and program shopping cart applications. She said she was a “super-fast learner” and could easily do it if she could only have the chance to prove herself.
You can guess what happened next…yep, she got hired somewhere and then was promptly fired for not being able to perform her job duties. Embarrassed, she walked away from that experience a much wiser person who knew better than to lie like that. The sad thing is that lots of us are lying these days on our resumes. The top lies we tell include: dates of employment, what positions we’ve held, covering up crimes we’ve committed, lying about salary, our education level, our status as a licensed or credentialed professional, and whether we’ve actually owned a business. These days it’s much easier to find out the truth about a person. It doesn’t have to take an employer finding out you can’t do the job, as in the case of my friend. It’s as easy as a company hiring a professional employment screening firm to seek out the people using resume falsification as a “get hired” tactic and alert the employer with a report outlining their findings. Get hired for the skills you really do have; it pays to get the right job in the right way…even if it takes a little bit longer than it should.
