CV lies and fakes - what ever it takes

Then why hire a recruitment company?

Yet one has to feel sorry for Hudson. They are a reputable agency. Recruitment agencies are caught in a bind, especially when it comes to verifying academic qualifications as they butt up against the Privacy Act.

Australian company due diligence legislation means that it is part of the employer’s role to rigorously screen applicants. So applicants can expect referees to be called and resumes more closely scrutinised.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald’s blog, demand for the services of First Advantage, which checks employee backgrounds, has boomed from 50 to 120 in less than two years. The company’s clients include CBA and National Australia Bank.

Last year First Advantage conducted 150,000 individual checks across Australia.

At the National Australia Bank background checks are now mandatory for all new employees, including permanent, temporary and contract staff.

Checks include verifying working relationships with nominated referees, salary confirmation, reasons for leaving a job, police records, bankruptcies and bans from company directorships are also noted.

Human resource departments are phoned to confirm that starting and leaving dates have not been tweaked to hide periods job applicants don’t want to talk about. There’s no messing about with the NAB and with good reason after employing three individuals who ripped the bank off for $300 million.

Can we assume that if a client does not want to release their academic results that they are lying? Certainly not, but in corporate Australia these days, if you don’t, you’re dead in the water.

Let me play the devil’s advocate? Who hasn’t tweaked their resume so that it reads better than it really is, falling just short of the “post facto reconstruction” - the bald face lie?

Maybe we’ve said our year on the dole surfing at Byron Bay was part of a “cultural exchange program” or that you managed 20 people in a corporate environment when you co-managed five people at an NGO.

There are lies and there are lies. I suggest that first and foremost, that a minority of people these days are unwilling, for a variety of reasons, to spend three of four years studying to gain the requisite qualification. Universities have commodified degrees thereby making them simply “objects” in the marketplace, which can be bought and sold.