What’s behind resume fabrications?
Uncertainty about the future, hiring managers’ expectations may be a big part of it
Authenticity is more important in business than ever.
That’s because, setting aside the customer demand for good ethics for a moment, business leaders want a realistic picture of whether the people they hire are going to fit well into the company culture and vision.
But according to findings from the 2017 State of the Skills Gap Report from online learning center Udemy, a lot of job applicants are lying on their resumes, LinkedIn profiles or during interviews.
Who are the biggest liars? Udemy found that men are more likely to lie on resumes than women. And younger workers — millennials and Gen Zers — fudge the truth with higher frequency compared to other generations.
Lowered expectations
You can start to get a picture of why men and younger workers paint their own picture of reality when you look at their honesty rates in conjunction with other data in the report. People from within these groups are more likely to have lower expectations about their careers and being happy at work, see limitations about jobs based on geography and feel personally affected by the skills gap.
Men also are more likely than women to see the U.S. job market as competitive or highly competitive (71 percent versus 61 percent, respectively).
Darren Shimkus, the general manager of Udemy for Business, says some of the negativity among men might be tied to other workplace trends. Automation is affecting manufacturing jobs, for example, and these jobs traditionally have gone to men. And some industries that traditionally have favored women, such as nursing, are experiencing growth.
Younger workers, Shimkus says, are more worried about rapid changes in the workplace and what jobs of the future will require. Millennials face an unemployment rate three times as high as the national average (12.8 percent versus 4.2 percent).
“Younger generations are starting to realize a college degree won’t carry them as far as it used to,” he says, “and they’re less optimistic about their career prospects.”
Emphasis on elite schools
Employers might be making the problem worse.
Shelly Osborne, head of learning and development at Udemy, says business leaders are unnecessarily eliminating great candidates through their evaluation practices.
In particular, the focus on whether a candidate has graduated from an elite university or has very specific prior experience doing similar work in the same industry is problematic. She speculates that this focus might spur candidates to tweak the truth to try to fit the profile a company wants.
“We have countless stories at Udemy where students have learned programming or app development on their own,” Osborne says. “They may not have a computer science degree, but they’re capable, hard-working and, moreover, they’ve already shown they’re motivated to learn and grow their skills. When employers put more weight on qualifications like having a capacity for learning and strong soft skills, maybe applicants won’t feel tempted to lie just to get that first screening call.”
While the job market and employer behaviors likely are two big pieces of the puzzle, other factors might be contributing to some degree, too.
For example, men might be lying more in part because they traditionally have enjoyed power within businesses. They might feel as though the role of authority protects them to some degree if they’re not completely honest. In other words, they are certain they can get away with it.
Non-traditional learning
Echoing Osborne’s sentiments, Shimkus says that a key component for getting applicants to approach resumes with more honesty is to expand data to include nontraditional learning and volunteer work for non-profit organizations.
“List your online courses, boot camps, workshops, continuing ed programs and anything else you do to maintain your skill set. Then, put those skills to use in the real world so you can show what you know. If it’s not something that’s already part of your current job, create a project for yourself . ... I think it’s completely legitimate to explain how you’ve used your skills outside a strict work situation, but you can’t speak in generalities. You need to be very specific about how you solved a problem and produced a certain outcome.”
Regardless of what the root causes for resume fabrications are, it might be that candidates soon won’t be able to obfuscate even if they want to do so.
Companies such as Unilever and Frrole (DeepSense) are using artificial intelligence to screen not just application information, but also social and other online data. This allows hiring managers to get a more holistic view of what candidates are like and what they can do.
And the success of these techniques, combined with an emphasis on other, more modern hiring methods, has led some experts to declare that the resume is dying, if not already dead.