Rafet Kaplan, the northeast bureau chief for the Fox News Channel, who has been responsible for hiring at several companies, said: "I think it's a baseline insecurity. They want to look and feel better about themselves."
He said his company conducted extensive background checks to root out resume prevaricators.
Steven Miranda, the chief human resource and strategic planning officer for the Society for Human Resource Management, says a skilled interviewer who digs deep enough will be able to identify job candidates who have misrepresented themselves on their resumes. But he acknowledges that some candidates fall through the cracks.
Miranda points to a number of recent resume-padders, like David Edmondson, the former chief executive of RadioShack, who claimed college degrees he did not have, and Bausch & Lomb's chairman and chief executive, Ronald Zarrella, who falsely claimed to have an MBA.
But many ordinary workers say they believe some exaggerations are necessary to survive in a brutally competitive job market. A 36-year-old office manager from Brooklyn, who insisted on anonymity, justified her own resume misrepresentations as a form of self-preservation.
"I have some misleading things on my resume," she acknowledged. "I didn't graduate from college; I'm nine credits short of a degree. In my mind, I have a college education, just not a degree, and I shouldn't be penalized for that."
On her resume she lists the college she attended without dates of attendance or graduation. She said that if asked, she would admit that she did not have her degree but added that so far she had not been asked.
Few human resource employees or hiring professionals would sympathize with her or anyone else with a misleading resume.
"It speaks to issues of integrity and credibility," Kaplan said.
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