Hacker News Reader

Comment by A12-B | Hacker News Reader

I admire resume liars. The job market isn't fair and you should do anything you can to get ahead. (Employers are going to pull tricks like this, so why not? Just be smart about it)

View on HN

Tech recruiter here. Firms on average are more dishonest than jobseekers. The reason is simple: If you do something often enough, you get sloppy.

For instance, if you start going to the gym, at first, your exercise execution is perfect but after some weeks you get sloppier and sloppier.

Same here, firms that are hiring constantly tend to get fatigued. Jobseekers, however, are "active" for some weeks until they switch jobs; this is why you, as a jobseeker, need extra training during your jobhunt, to be on-par with them.

I don't recommend lying but I do recommend tailoring your resume such that it reflects actually what you did in an adequate level of detail. Most job seekers are too honest on the CV and during interviews.

Most job seekers are too honest on the CV and during interviews.

Interviews are structured as if candidates are doing fancy algorithms every day, whereas you’re probably actually writing glue code 99% of the time and crammed CtCI just before the interview. The whole thing is fake, but companies started it.

> Firms on average are more dishonest than jobseekers.

This. It happened to me to receive CVs for a position and the actual candidate was completely clueless. Yet the recruiting firm was really pushing that as "a very good candidate albeit a bit junior".

OTOH, it happened to me that I had an interview with a consulting firm. They would basically forward my CV to the actual client and only hire me if the client "accepted" to "hire me" through them. The thing is, this firm asked me for my cc in ms word format, so that they could add their own logos and stuff, make it appear like I was on their payroll and more importantly remove all the contacts (as if it was any meaningful in the age of LinkedIn). I have no way to tell if they inflated my CV in any way.

This is one of the standard practices at a lot of recruitment firms.

I had few contacts with consulting firms because I actively try to avoid them, in particular the big ones. But each one with which I had an interview was clear they were going to modify my cv for their client and they even asked me to lie in the future meetings with those so that I could confirm whatever they were gonna write in the cv.

While I respect the virtue of selling yourself, I think the logic of "everyone is doing it" has been used by many people to do many bad things. I for one hold myself to a far higher standard than this, and I think I'd be far less happy in general if I let my dignity slip like this.

Besides, it's a losing proposition: if you lie to get a job at a place that won't hire people with honest resumes, you end up working with a bunch of lying mercenaries for a company with unreasonable expectations. Even if you had no morals, it's against your interests.

I read something recently that said if you feel like you're "getting away with it" then you're probably doing something wrong.

While lying on your resume is often defended as: “Everyone does it, employers expects it”, I don’t think it’s nearly as common as people think. It may be market/country specific, but simply assuming that it’s something you do is idiotic.

That's a fantastic way to keep getting hired by the kinds of employers who will screw you over and keep your world view intact.

A relative works in a country where lying on CV and during interviews by hugely inflating one’s skills is the norm. It only fools European expatriate managers with no knowledge of the country. Local HR and experienced expatriates know about it and adjust their accordingly. When everyone is lying, it doesn’t make a difference anymore.

Please keep in mind that resume padding is often not done by the candidate but by headhunters who want to depict their square peg candidate as the most perfect round peg ever imagined.

While I see your point, resume liars is also the reason why we have such draconian interviewing processes at the moment.

You can go to pretty much any tech company in the world, and somewhere, someone is going to have some horror story about hiring a seemingly competent (even perfect) candidate on paper, that turned out to be woefully incompetent. The types that are supposed to have a Masters degree + 5 years of industry experience, but can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag.

I guess you wouldn’t be upset if a business lied to you about compensation, since you have no problem with a prospective employee lying about what they bring to the table.

if a business lied to you about compensation

Exaggerating the possibility of a bonus or of the value of stock options is completely normal for employers.

Well people are saying its ok to lie to get the job too. Either both are wrong or both are ok.

While both are "wrong" in a more absolute sense, they are both so common and accepted that you really should assume it is happening and act accordingly.

I agree. Assuming it is happening is different than approving of it or agreeing that it is ‘ok’ when the subject comes up.

Well, being labeled a liar means that one is bad at it.

> Employers are going to pull tricks like this, so why not?

Not every employer pulls tricks. Also, the employer is not the only one that gets affected by sending fabricated resumes; this makes the job search process more difficult for e.g. other applicants too.

I think there's merit to this... within reason. Stretching a couple years of Java experience into a decade? Meh. Claiming you know Perl, because you're super familiar with other scripting languages and can learn quickly? Meh, probably.

But since MOVA is, definitionally, fake, it's not like you have any idea * what * you're claiming to know. There's a level of BS here that isn't calculated, and I think that makes for a truly dishonest employee (aka bad hire).

> Meh. Claiming you know Perl, because you're super familiar with other scripting languages and can learn quickly?

I've seen that backfires with people I interview. I have a limited time with each person. If you're saying you have experience but obviously don't, it means everything on your resume has to be considered as "possibly false". It brings a much more critical eye to that type of candidate, with lots of discussion and questioning that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Yeah, I wouldn't personally do it, and I'd expect the candidate to crash-study before the interview enough to make it a plausible story. I just wouldn't consider it a * hard * disqualifier, if the truth came out.

I had a situation like this recently at a smaller company. Candidate claims years of expertise in X and Y. We have great X people, but would like to hire someone with deep Y knowledge. So we (more out of routine than any particular strategy) probe X in the interview. Turns out the candidate is beginner level at best, and also a bit arrogant about it. Would you in that situation believe the Y claims, that you can’t evaluate as deeply to begin with?

Unfortunately it often takes quite a bit of experience in a skill to truly assess your own skill level. Many programming courses teach just the basics of coding in a language, without making it clear that it's not really enough to professionally start working on production code. It also requires more knowledge of a language, to work with other people's code than your own - and there really isn't enough recognition of that fact (at least in people I've come across)

As long as you remember which lies you told. I remember one interview where I asked "So, how much X do you know" and the guy I was interviewing honestly answered "Sorry, I've never used X". At which point I had to point out that he'd claimed to know X on his resume.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com