Resume Lies - The 5 Most Outrageous Resume Lies Ever Told

It’s one thing to market yourself in order to put your best foot forward to a potential employer. It’s another thing entirely to tell a bold-faced lie about employment history, job titles held, salary history, criminal record, and life experience. In some of the funniest, most-outrageous resume lies ever told, we can see the humorous side to someone’s tall tales. However, if looked at in a professional sense, it is quite the slap in the face to the Hiring Manager if the person is hired and cannot function in the role for which they were hired. This is one of many reasons why it is so important for companies to use employment background screening services to pre-screen and pre-qualify potential employees before hiring them. As one can imagine, disasters of mass proportion can occur in a financial and moral sense if proper employment background screening is not performed on each employee.

Applicant claimed to:

1. Be a part of England’s Royal Family. When asked to elaborate, said person told more lies about having stayed overnight with her “Aunt Diana” and babysitting her younger cousins, the young Princes of Wales. The HR Manager knew from her ridiculous answers that she was lying and promptly ended the interview.
2. Have been so stressed over her recent job loss as a means for explaining why her resume photo did not resemble her in any way. After a puzzling expression on the interviewer’s face and numerous questions about how a “recent” situation could have made such a vast difference in her appearance, the applicant admitted to using a much younger picture of herself on her resume to hide her actual age.
3. Have worked for the person they were interviewing with at a prior date, many years ago. After vehemently defending her memory of knowing the interviewer, the candidate was yet unable to name the company for which they both had worked. The Hiring Manager resolved to suffer through asking the last few questions of the interview and solidly decided not to call the applicant back for a second interview. Honesty is the best policy!
4. Own a popular chain of restaurants in the area and was looking for employment because he “needed something to do during the day.” After asking a few questions about how he got started in the restaurant business and which location was the first one, it became painfully obvious that the man had never been in the food industry and that he could not have possibly been the owner of the restaurant chain.
5. Have been a doctor in another country, but had been unable to pass the state board exam in New Jersey, so she was applying for the lead nurse’s position in the meantime. After calling the overseas University to check on her credentials, the University confirmed that the applicant had never attended the school!

All of these examples illustrate the importance of performing employment background screening before hiring anyone. There are many other embellishments that are sometimes found on people’s resumes that would seem to be “white lies” and would not make much of a difference in the end. However, for the 1 time you can catch the big liars, you’re saving your company, your customers, and, in some cases, your patients, from potential harm!