For those who think there’s a lot of fraud in resumes today… you\’re right! We\’ve seen thousands of resumes over the years and, undoubtedly, we’ve seen a lot of fraudulent ones. With resume fraud being so rampant, separating out fraudulent submissions is a critical piece of what we offer our staffing and recruiting customers.
Spotting Resume Fraud
However, resume fraud is not always easy to spot. It\’s rare that a resume writer will add a note to their resume indicating that it contains false information. So, it takes a bit of detective work and it always feels like an accomplishment when we do spot it. Sometimes, the problems are so egregious as to be funny.
I\’ve always wondered if there was anything we could do to capitalize on the fraud we spot and finally we\’ve hit on an idea: publish it! So, that\’s exactly what we\’re doing. This post is the first of a series that we\’ll publish from time to time. As we encounter interesting instances of what we think are fraud, we\’ll publish them here. We\’d also love to hear from you if you have instances you\’d like to share.
Our Goals
We have three, simple goals for this initiative:
To Educate: Hopefully, readers of these posts will learn from our experience and improve their screening abilities.
To Put Candidates on Notice: If these posts gain traction, hopefully candidates and the firms they work for will get the message – it is absolutely unacceptable to submit false information on a resume! If you didn\’t actually do the work, don\’t say that you did!
To Entertain: Some of these are just damned funny!
Ground Rules
Before we get started, there are a few things I need to make clear…
We Could Be Wrong: The information in these posts represents our best guess – we could be wrong. Perhaps, as will be documented in a future post, the data engineer at a major insurance company was actually working on the Large Hadron Collider as part of their assignment. We didn\’t think so but… maybe?
We Do Not Inform the Offenders: If a candidate has actually submitted a fraudulent resume, and we let them know, what will they do? Change it to remove or reframe the fraudulent element. While they\’ll be blacklisted in our system, they will use the \’corrected\’ resume to apply elsewhere. Letting the offender know will just perpetuate the problem.
An Example
So, example number one. I just came across this one today. Here is a clip from the resume. Can you tell what caught my eye?
Here’s a hint, I spent a few years in Massachusetts in the late 70’s (yes, 1970s) and during my time there I enjoyed, probably too much, chocolate milk from the Hood dairies. With that knowledge the second bullet point here caught my eye
“Worked on the backend Databases of health Care applications such as QNXT“
A little research showed that QNXT is
“TriZetto Health Claims Processing Product: QNXT™”
Is it possible that a dairy is using health claims processing software? I guess so. Is it likely? Well, what do you think?
In my mind, if you’re going to put something so incongruous into your resume, you might want to give it a little bit of context. Without that context I’m going to assume that the context is a dairy and you either didn’t know what you were doing OR you copied this line from some other resume. Either way, I’m pretty sure you’re not a good fit for one of my clients.