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What our resumes lie about, and why |
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Written by Sheila Norman-Culp
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Wednesday, 04 April 2007 |
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Is there no end to the amount of lying that we do?
A recent British study found that at least one-third of all work interactions involve some sort of deception. Still, the University of Central Lancashire researchers found some good news amidst the horror: Apparently, workers don’t like lying to a colleague’s face — they prefer to do their lying over the phone or in an e-mail.
Hmmm. Next time the phone rings, brace yourself.
But today I’m not really concerned about the thousands of little white lies that smooth out the everyday interactions of office life — “Oh, your suit looks great,” “That presentation was a hit,” “Of course I will call.” I want to talk about the “inaccuracies” that we put down in black and white — the boldface falsehoods that can come back to haunt us bigtime.
The Resume Lies.
George O’Leary could tell us something about that, now, couldn’t he?
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OLD LIES CAN SNEAK UP
O’Leary was hired in 2001 as Notre Dame’s football coach, a post many consider one of the premiere jobs in college football. He lasted five days, undone by lies he had put on his resume decades earlier.
There was that master’s degree from New York University that O’Leary never earned, those three varsity football letters that the University of New Hampshire says couldn’t exist because he didn’t play one game for them.
Notre Dame loves its football, but it loves its reputation even more. There was no way it could stomach a liar when its own students are bound by an honor code.
Moral of the story — perhaps someone could get away with resume lies years ago. But today, it’s too easy to check things via computers and the Internet. And the longer a lie festers, the harder the fall when it becomes unmasked. Chances are darn good that you will be fired, and the lying will overshadow any real accomplishments.
And we’re not just talking about football coaches. The chief executive of RadioShack, David Edmondson, was one of several notable businessmen who lost his job last year for claiming a college degree he never had.
Problem is, none of these people understood how seriously their lying affected their company’s reputation. But those companies knew.
“One of the most important things we have as a corporation is integrity and trust,” Leonard Robert, the RadioShack chairman at the time, noted at the firing.
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NEW LIES ARE JUST PLAIN SILLY
Okay, but those were (relatively) old guys. You would think that a generation that has grown up on the Internet would be more aware how easily their lies and plagiarism can be discovered.
You would think.
Yet according to The Sunday Times of London, a survey of 50,000 British university applications last year found that 234 of them started with the exact same anecdote. And what a stupid anecdote it was: “Ever since I accidently burnt holes in my pyjamas after experimenting with a chemistry set on my eighth birthday, I have always had a passion for science.”
Many of these students were aiming for science degrees from Oxford or Cambridge — the Harvard and Yale of Britain. Which just goes to show: Even rocket-scientists-to-be can be idiots about the consequences of lying and plagiarism.
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WHY WHY WHY DO WE LIE?
We lie most about our educational achievements, according to a Chicago recruiting firm. That’s ironic, because education is one of the easiest facts to check.
We also lie about job titles, job duties, salaries, why we left — and pretty much anything else that could be on a resume.
It might be that we use so many white lies at work so often that our senses have been dulled to things like Resume Lies — the whoppers that could really sink our career.
Dr. David Shulman of Lafayette College, the author of “From Hire to Liar: The Role of Deception in the Workplace,” says his research has found that “everyday work is replete with deceptions.” Some professions even depend on people lying — think spies, undercover cops, private investigators, public relations people. Even workers in less extreme jobs “often lie as a team” — you wouldn’t want a competitor to know what you are doing, right?
“I definitely do not argue in favor of lying on resumes,” Shulman said in an email interview. But he noted that the most interesting thing he found was that “most people do not consider embellishing their qualifications to be deceptive.”
“For many people, putting our best feet forward, even if we lie and exaggerate a bit to do so, is almost an expected part of the game,” Shulman said. “But there is a line for most people, which emerges in veering away from absolutely clear lies on a resume while steering themselves into embellishing more than is warranted.”
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RELAX, TELL THE TRUTH
Your brain actually has to work harder when you are lying than when you are telling the truth, according to brain scan studies done at Temple University. That’s because it takes extra effort to correctly remember a false story.
Just think how productive you could be if you could harvest that extra brainpower for tasks other than lying. In any case, you would be less worn out.
Dr. Feroze Mohamed, associate director of Temple’s Functional Brain Imaging Center, says brain scans in the future will be able to pick out liars, thanks to chemical changes in the brain the machines can track.
We all need to prepare for that day — and start editing out those Resume Lies now.
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asap columnist Sheila Norman-Culp is on leave from her job as an AP supervisory editor. | Only registered users can write comments.
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