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ebbv

Dude, no. Someone who would lie this much to get what he wants will lie when you're working with him.

If he makes a big mistake he will lie about it to avoid getting fired just as surely as he lied to get the job.

Citing Neil Gaiman -- or some other celebrity -- doesn't do anything to make this less true.

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He was applying to a sales position. Sales is fundamentally about lying to potential customers to sell them stuff.

It's very sad that you believe that. It doesn't have to be, and shouldn't be in my opinion. That's a tactic immoral people resort to and make excuses like "Everybody does it." for their behavior.

You don't think it has to be? Honestly, I don't know; I'm not in sales at all so this is my off-the-cuff opinion from outside, but it sure seems to me that the entire profession of sales is all about dishonesty. Whether it has to be or not, I don't know: how successful would honest salespeople be really? If the dishonest ones are more successful long-term, then that means that companies that use dishonest salespeople will outcompete companies that don't. I don't know if it's really like this (a scientific study would be difficult, plus it could vary a lot by industry; what works for Best Buy or used car salespeople might not be the case for enterprise software or medical device sales), but I do suspect that, thanks to human nature and short-sightedness, dishonesty in sales probably does correlate with long-term success. Maybe the internet with all the online reviews will change this, as it gives people more information in evaluating merchants ("John at this store totally lied to me when he sold me Widget X!! Don't shop here!").

To get what he wants? Would that be a job?

So are you saying that in all your interviews you've had in the past you've been absolutely, positively 100% truthful about your experience and knowledge? That you've never inflated your abilities whatsoever?

Yes, absolutely. If anything I err on the side of playing things down. I never want to promise something I can't deliver or tell someone I'm more than I am.

Besides, that's not even the issue. This guy just flat out lied. Not exaggerated, he told lies and built upon them. There's no excuse for that.

Yes. Exaggeration and puffing yourself up, while tacky, is par for the course, and to be honest, it's likely to get good candidates closer to an accurate representation than not, since better people tend to underplay their abilities, often subconsciously (cf. Dunning-Kruger Effect). But falsifying references with fake phone numbers and email addresses, and then actually operating those numbers and emails and impersonating someone else, that's a whole 'nother ballpark and it likely crosses into fraud.

While one can sympathize if they choose to work from the presupposition that our candidate is in the unlikely-but-not-totally-unrealistic circumstance of being capable but "steal bread to eat" desperate, it's a pretty hard sell to expect someone without a pre-existing relationship to excuse that type of behavior when it gets caught out like this.

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