How to handle people who lie on their resume [closed]
- by Juliet
Moderator comment
Please note that this is a two year old question that has just been migrated from Stack Overflow. Please take your time to read all the answers and ask yourself "would my answer add anything to this?".
I'm conducting technical interviews to fill a few .NET positions. Many of the people I interview really do know .NET pretty well, but I find at least 90% embellish their skillset anywhere between "a little" to "quite drastically". Sometimes they fabricate skills relevant to the position they're applying for, sometimes they don't.
Most of the people I interview, even the most egregious liars, are not scam artists. They just want to stand out among the crowd, so they drop a few buzzwords on their resume like "JBoss", "LINQ", "web services", "Django" or whatever just to pad their skillset and stay competitive.
(You might wonder if a person that lies about those skills is just bluffing their way through a technical interview. My interviews involve a lot of hands-on coding and problem-solving – people who attempt to bluff will bomb the hands-on coding portion in the first 3 minutes.)
These are two open-ended questions, but it would really help me out when I make my recommendations to the hiring managers:
Regarding interviewing etiquette, should I attempt to determine whether a person really possesses all of the skills they claim to have? Can I do this without making the candidate feel uncomfortable?
Regarding the final decision, should I recommend candidates who are genuinely qualified for the positions they're applying for, even if they've fabricated portions of their skillset?
