Why do people lie on their résumé?

A survey of 1,818 companies; conducted by the employee screening firm HireRight,[1] showed that 69% of hiring managers cite overt resume inflation and irrelevant content as an issue. This challenge stems from the common belief that the first step to getting hired is impressing the hiring manager through their résumé. Attempting to meet this requirement, often job seekers integrate elements of the job post as experience in their résumé and claim skills from limited training or exposure.

The utility of the résumé is further diminished by its structure. For 100 years, the résumé has focused on titles and responsibilities. Determining a job seeker’s ability to contribute from the content of their résumé is hard! For example, developers include a bevy of programming languages on their résumé, when their experience with many of these languages is limited to a book or introductory course. Further reducing the utility of the résumé is a lack of visibility into the job seeker’s professional characteristics including communication style, ability to collaborate, and problem-solving approach. It is these shortcomings of the résumé that make predicting an individual’s success at your firm difficult.

Solving this problem is the reason we started TOD Pro® and why we invested the past five years in getting it right. The profile feature in TOD Pro® uniquely captures a candidate’s actual experience and the value-added on the projects they worked on. In TOD Pro®, experience and past performance are tied directly to the role, eliminating peanut-butter spreading the skills across job positions. TOD Pro® also captures 32 attributes of the candidate’s professional characteristics, giving the hiring manager visibility into what team dynamics the candidate will best fit. TOD Pro® ensures that you not only get candidates who have the experience and ability you need but also a candidate that fits!

TOD Pro®: Creating a simple way to evaluate talent, click here to ask for a demo!

[1] HireRight Announces Availability of 2010 Employment Screening Benchmarking Report. Retrieved from ir.hireright.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/137/hireright-announces-availability-of-2010-employment.