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Don't be a loser by lying on your CV
Written by Sanderson Recruitment | Blog | Candidates | Posted 18/05/2012
Once you have spent as long as I have in recruitment, it would be fair to say you develop a gut instinct about people that tends to come down on the side of being 'right' more times than wrong. However, even after the decades of scouring and scoring job applications, it is hard to find the falsities on a CV.
As the jobs market becomes more unpredictable and the competition for each role increases, it may be that people feel they have to polish themselves up a little, enhance their achievements and sell themselves harder, no matter what the consequences.
Unfortunately, as in the recently reported case of Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson, too much enhancement can cause embarrassment and, ultimately, cost you your job. However, the practice is becoming so commonplace that within the last decade whole new businesses have emerged employing thousands of people whose sole purpose is to check the information that we once took for granted.
Tighter control required for pre-employment checks
For my own recruitment business, our compliance function has expanded from a team of two to a team of 10, as changes in employment regulations have led to the need for much tighter control over pre-employment checks.
I would also like to think that there is an alternative to the way in which we go about checking everyone in the future. It is possible that this will happen naturally now with the rise of the 'transparent' online CV, where friends and colleagues can openly see if something is not ringing true.
The bottom line is that there are much smarter ways to go about getting the job you want. I’m a great believer in having more than one CV and ensuring that you highlight skills specific to the role that you are applying for. By all means personalise it or write it in a way that matches the position. Make the most of your assets, sell yourself and promote your best bits to the right audience.
The benefit is that by doing this you are demonstrating much more common sense and commerciality than by saying you studied Latin at Oxford when you only just scraped through an A-Level. The truth will out. Always.