Not all job candidates who lie on their resume are as infamous as Marilee Jones. Jones with former Dean of Admissions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT as most know it. At the time Jones claimed to have had three degrees. She just had one. Apparently, she had worked hard at MIT, and did a good job helping students with their admissions issues and trying to reduce their stress burdens. Nevertheless, she was discharged.
She had since put it all behind herself and in the American tradition of making lemonade out of a lemon, she opened her own consulting business, in New York City. For the three years since her dismissal, she has worked as a consultant and has been offered positions at a number of universities. But now she has opened her own consulting firm, assisting both admissions office and parents with admissions challenges.
Good for her. But most job applicants who lie on their resumes are not so lucky. Most who lie are rejected out of hand. Most employers have a policy where prevailing reason is if you lie on your resume then will lie about other things further on down the road. Once one employer discovers a candidate has lied on his resume, then it is likely any other employer who conducts background checks as part of their preemployment screening program will discover the same. So now the job candidate is faced with risking yet another lie and facing almost certain discovering or declaring his lack of education, which can mean he is unqualified for the employment at hand.
With the economic meltdown more of those who are unemployed or have been laid off have resorting to lying on their resumes. Nothing like desperation to cause a job candidate to stretch the truth. Human Resources Managers are complaining about it and not taking it lightly when they discover their job candidate did not tell the truth about their education. More than a few have wondered aloud, knowing the employer will run education verification searches, how do they think they can get away with it? Good question. the answer, I suppose, is desperation. Or the steadfast belief that their lies on their resumes will somehow fall between the cracks.
Not so. Education verifications, when thorough, will usually verify one of three things. That the person is qualified and did graduate on the appointed dates, that they were only enrolled for a certain time period but didn’t graduate, or that they never went ot the school at all. This happens. Believe me. Why they pick that school is always a bemusing questions.
Education verification is important as your job candidate may need the degree determine eligibility to fulfill the position. This is not in every case, of course. There are a good many positions where the degree, in the end, may not matter. With Marilee Jones, she did a fine job despite the lack of credentials. With others, it may or may not be the case. But at the end of the day, most candidates will not get the chance to prove their value one way or another. They will be rejected. Or fired.
And the lemons will rot, before they are turned into lemonade. Check them out before you hire.
