Resume lies a major concern for employers

MSNBC reports:

As dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Marilee Jones was responsible for ensuring that applicants represented their academic backgrounds honestly. So it was more than a shock when the 55-year-old resigned Thursday, admitting that she had misled school officials over a 28-year period into believing that she held three degrees from New York institutions. In fact, she had never received even an undergraduate degree from any school.

While Jones's case is extreme, it points to a major concern for any corporation or institution that hires employees: embellishments and outright lies on résumés. Sue Murphy, association manager of the Human Resources Association, says... "We used to try to have the applicant provide two or three business references. But now … employers are being much more aggressive about checking applicants' backgrounds, and if they can afford it they are even hiring third parties to do background checks."

One of those third parties, ADP Screening and Selection Services, said it conducted 5.8 million background checks in 2006, a 20 percent increase from 2005. Out of nearly 500,000 reference verifications ADP did last year, 41 percent came back with some sort of discrepancy between the employment, education or credentials information provided by the applicant and what the source reported...

But if an employer doesn't catch the falsehoods, how does an employee live with such a big lie..?

...Psychologist Paul Ekman from the University of California Medical School in San Francisco (who has not spoken with Jones, and only knows of her situation from media reports) speculates that Jones's case is likely related to self-esteem...

Ekman says many people are tempted to exaggerate their credentials for the same reason a kid exaggerates his father's strength, but that most people resist. "They either know from past experience that they could never get away with it—perhaps because they are bad liars, they don't like taking risks—some people are risk takers so it attracts them to lying, or they are religiously observant," Ekman says...

But while Ekman says everyone tells little white lies, which don't have any serious repercussions, the potential damages caused by hiring a poorly qualified employee are serious for companies. In fact, citing an example where a man lied on an application for a job as a bridge engineer (his dishonesty was discovered before any bridges were built), Murphy says there is serious liability for employers. "We live in a much more litigious society, so employers are trying to protect themselves against liability," Murphy says. "In today's hiring process it is very rare that employers are not going above and beyond trying to verify people's backgrounds."

...With such diligence, it's much riskier for today's job hunters to lie than it was 30 years ago when Jones filled out her first application at MIT, Murphy says. "When she moved up, she may not have had the degrees but she had the work experience to be good at her job, so were we cheated?" Ekman asks. "The real issue here is what does she represent to young people. Clearly she's not a good role model on how to get ahead in the world, so at least you could say she is a good lesson."