How to handle people who lie on their resume
- by Juliet
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% of embellish their skillset anywhere between "a little" and "quite drastically". Sometimes they fabricate skills relevant to the position they're applying for, sometimes they not.
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 lies about those skills, whether they are 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:
1) 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?
2) 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?
