In 28 years of recruitment, Matt Collingwood has witnessed some “very awkward” job interviews. Such as the candidate whose curriculum vitae (CV) falsely boasted of a second-dan black belt in taekwondo, only to discover his interviewer was an aficionado of the sport.
“An interview that should have been an hour lasted 15 minutes,” said Collingwood, the managing director of the information technology recruitment agency Viqu.
One candidate claimed he had attended a certain private school, which his interviewer had also attended and would have been in the year above.
Photo: AFP
When asked for teachers’ names, the school motto, even where the sports field was, “he was clueless. Didn’t get the job,” Collingwood said.
CV falsification, even on seemingly trivial points, can have serious consequences, yet Collingwood said it was “ridiculously common.”
Recruitment fraud is another term for it.
According to the UK fraud-prevention service Cifas, it is one of the most frequent “first-party frauds,” when an individual knowingly misrepresents their identity or provides false information for financial or material gain.
The recent travails of British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves — whose career history came under scrutiny again after a BBC investigation revealed her time working at the Bank of England was nine months shorter than she claimed — and British Secretary of State for Business and Trade Jonathan Reynolds — who is being reinvestigated by the UK’s Solicitors Regulation Authority over accusations he never qualified as solicitor, despite listing the job on a LinkedIn profile — have highlighted a growing problem for recruiters.
A Cifas survey earlier this month found that nearly one in five people in the UK (18 percent) had lied on their CVs and job applications to land a role, or knew someone who had, in the past 12 months. Meanwhile, one in seven (14 percent) said it was “reasonable” to say they had achieved an upper second class honors degree when they had failed their final year.
The most common falsehoods are reasons given for leaving a previous job and manipulating employment dates to cover gaps or to extend or completely erase previous jobs, research by the business credit card company Capital on Tap showed. Then, there are those inflated job titles — CVs liberally, and unjustifiably, seasoned with the words “senior” and “manager.”
Such is the problem that Reed, the UK’s biggest recruiter, has set up Reed Screening: a group devoted to screening hundreds of thousands of CVs each year and checking references for clients.
“This is a growing problem,” Reed CEO and chairman James Reed said. “Sixty percent of the CVs we look at have some form of error, and 20 percent of those are what you might call malicious error, when somebody is literally making something up to seek some form of gain.
“From the applicant’s point of view, why is this happening? It might be because people are using AI to help do their CVs, and AI can make stuff up,” he said. “It might be because the labor market has become more difficult, and it is tougher to get a job. Or it might be because they think they can get away with it and there’s some sort of change in the culture, but it’s a silly thing to do, because as some recent examples have made clear, this can bubble up sometime afterwards, to your detriment.”
“It ranges from someone who might have got a date wrong, or might have exaggerated a job title, to someone who is making up qualifications that they don’t have, or fabricating an entire career record,” he added.
Reed Screening uses specially designed software.
“You can forensically examine a CV. The AI technology that candidates might use to create CVs can also be used increasingly to check them,” Reed said. “Qualification databases, that’s another thing; if they say they got better grades than they did, that can be checked automatically.”
“You have these reference houses. They are illegal. They are scams where people pay so you ring them up, and someone answers the phone and says: ‘Yeah, I remember James.’ That’s all fake. So we have to check it, the company history, and whether the people giving the references are real,” he said.
Matt Gingell, an employment law specialist and managing partner at the legal firm Lombards, agrees.
“Honesty is fundamental to the employment relationship. There is also this implied obligation of trust and confidence between the employer and employee,” he said. “So if an employer later finds out that the employee has fabricated their CV, or not told the truth about why they left a previous employer, that could be grounds for dismissal, because it would be breach of the trust and confidence.”
Often people do not see such actions as potentially having criminal consequences, “when in fact they can have,” Cifas policy, strategy and communications director Simon Miller said.
A person who has displayed such dishonesty “might be vulnerable and susceptible to further dishonesty” once hired, he added.
“We know that people who are mostly younger and starting on their careers are more likely to falsify CV information,” he said.
When the job market is tight “there’s a catch-22 where you haven’t got the experience, but you can’t get the experience,” or they want to reach the next rung above entry level, Miller said.
Hayley Paterson, who co-commissioned the Cifas research, said the 800-member organization offered training on “insider threat” fraud, and advice on using vetting services and checking for the use of reference houses.”
Collingwood highlighted a basic error by would-be fraudsters who tweaked their LinkedIn profiles to change dates or inflate job titles: Many forgot their posts were in the public domain, and these might not tally with the dates on their private CVs.
“There are HR [human resources] people, and their job is just to do social media diligence, and they’ll look through an individual’s footprint,” he said.
“I’ve seen some horrendous examples of people losing their jobs, having job offers pulled when they have already resigned from their previous job, because the lies have come out,” he said.
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