Should You Lie on Your Resume?

Is it worth your pants catching fire?

Applying to job after job and getting rejected over and over is awful. It stinks to go through all the trouble of submitting countless applications and then not even getting a single interview. And if you aren’t getting interviews, it’s easy to blame your resume. There must be something wrong with your experience or your educational background. Otherwise, they’d at least let you come in for an interview. It would be so easy to just change a few numbers around or add a position that didn’t exactly exist. They’d never know, right?

Wrong. As noted by Dave Davis, CEO and hiring manager at digital analytics agency Redfly in an article put out by Monster.com, “Hiring managers were not born yesterday. A single question is enough to catch you out on a lie. It causes an embarrassment and an awkward situation for everyone in the room.” Interviewing is all about making a good impression, and getting an interview isn’t worth it if a lie ends up ruining your reputation. Here are a few other reasons lying isn’t worth it.

Big lies are just too easy to catch.

A hiring manager could figure out if you worked at a company by searching your name online. If you say you worked for four years at a certain company and none of that info shows up online, you look suspicious. If you include anything on your resume that isn’t also on your publicly available LinkedIn profile, that might cause your potential employer to think something is off (which is why it’s also important to keep your LinkedIn updated).

And lying about your education is a surefire way to lose a job opportunity. All a hiring manager has to do is make a quick call to the school to discover you made up your degree.

Small lies hurt you in the long run.

And the lies a hiring manager doesn’t pick up on? Those can hurt you, too. Say you put down on your resume you’re a master of a certain program you need to do your job. You might think you can learn the ins and outs of the program on the job, but if an urgent project pops up, you might not have time. Now your lie will be exposed, and you’ll probably be out of a job.

You can fix your resume in other ways.

If you aren’t getting interviews, you’re right in suspecting there could be something wrong with your resume. But that doesn’t mean the issue is a lack of experience or education. It could be bad formatting, ambiguous accomplishments, or just not customizing your resume for each opportunity you’re applying for.

If you need help with your resume, check out our Resume Tips series. We’ve covered everything you could need help with, so you won’t need to even think of lying on your resume.

Have you ever heard of someone lying on their resume? How did things turn out? Let us know in the comments section below!

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