Good, Bad, and Lying Resumes

Studies show that nearly 70% of the candidates lie in their resumes. This makes resume screening a taxing task for the hiring team. I have nothing against lying in resumes and perfectly empathize with jobseeker’s anxiety about getting an interview call. Some exaggerating is only harmless overselling, but falsifying academic qualifications is closer to criminal disinformation and can have repercussions. The job of the recruiter or the interviewer is to find the true worth. The best way to choose candidates is to have a strong criteria document. Make sure you approach each candidate with a positive mindset let him speak without interruptions and let his/her cosmetic layers melt away. Then ask probing questions your chances of finding the best person will only improve with patience and good listening.

Recruiters by and large expect a bit of decoration laced with brazen lies. There is nothing one can do about it more than reject the candidate at the time of the interview or withdraw the offer if an offer is made.  The process of recruitment and resume screening is getting increasingly templated, and the resumes are also becoming just as templated to match them. Once my HR Manager was seemingly frustrated because the shortlisted candidates were failing at the technical interview. It then occurred to me that great resumes need deeper scrutiny with some suspicion. Some better resumes may not have been written by the candidates themselves, or written in pre-designed templates, or worse still ghostwritten by professional and paid resume writers. I remembered that a couple of candidates wrote the same paragraphs on their career objectives and could not elaborate on what they meant by it when asked. So, I imagined that some of the bad or discarded resumes might have honest resumes in the bunch. It is difficult to find an extremely honest one with no exaggerations.

One of the rejected resumes caught my eye. He randomly filled college marks as 99.7%. When I called him, it turned out that he was a university topper. He agreed to see us the same evening. Our Technical Head and I were bowled over by the kind of learning he was doing in whichever way he could afford. His work experience was of little consequence, and we ignored it. I offered to pay for some of the courses he wanted to do if he joined us. He later turned out to be our smartest hacker and problem solver. A catch we got by bending our hiring process.

Nowadays AI is bringing seismic changes in the hiring process with tracking systems of applicants. In some ways, AI reduces biases and makes hiring fair. But I fear a highly mechanized process reduces human judgment. I don’t have much experience in hiring but my odd ability to pierce through the smokescreen and pull out the best person has brought me good results many times. The ‘H’ in HR is there for a purpose.

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