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Comment by bewocwnavy | Hacker News Reader

I know one Indian friend in a renowned company who came in Canada as an International student. He completed his 2 year diploma course in IT/Technical support. After the course, he did not get the interviews due to lack of Canadian experience. To counter that, he modified his resume and added 2 fake experiences from top companies as Network Engineer. Within a week with new resume, he gathered 3 top offers in Ontario, negotiated and signed $70K per year with XYZ company as Lead Operations Specialist.

Not just in India, even in Canada, to make the top dollar and join upper middle class league, new breed of cons always game the system and use shortcuts. Once they join the class, they game the real estate market. Cycle goes on and on. They always win, rest of innocent ones who comply with rules and system are stuck behind with minimum wage job and renting single rooms, never get to ever see a dream house of their own.

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> To counter that, he modified his resume and added 2 fake experiences from top companies as Network Engineer. Within a week with new resume, he gathered 3 top offers in Ontario, negotiated and signed $70K per year with XYZ company as Lead Operations Specialist.

That sounds like a failure of the companies to do a proper background check and follow up for proof of employment.

I ordered a copy of my background record and holy shit was it missing a lot of information. High schools jobs were listed, college work study jobs were listed, 15 years of employment was missing, followed by small patches of employment here and there. My credit record was only marginally better, it didn't have any employers listed of my 14 years working abroad. If it wasn't on my CV no one would know. And since some of these companies were merged, acquired, or out of business it's very hard to track down.

HR can realistically only check your last employer because anything older than a few years may as well be made up.

Well... yes and no. If it is indeed a "top company" that's still recognizable as such today, then I'd expect it to be around in some form.

I imagine HR could ask you for a proof-of-employment letter if you said you worked at Microsoft and Facebook* for a couple of years but neither showed up on a background check. I imagine they'd be even more suspicious if you additionally didn't have any references from either company.

* Feel free to replace with any other "top companies" of your choosing

No doubt you're right. I assume larger companies have a HR department that manage these things, have a formal process, and report this to the Number Line and other background services. But there are lots of boutique companies <25 employees where HR is the owner and they most likely don't subscribe to those services nor do they report into them.

I’m also an immigrant (white British!) and this resonates with me too.

Without a network you’re screwed and it is probably much easier for me than for eg a fresh Indian person.

I also definitely thought of just lying and scamming to escape the min wage trap, but I was never confident in my ability to be duplicitous.

> He completed his 2 year diploma course in IT/Technical support. After the course, he did not get the interviews due to lack of Canadian experience.

That's one explanation.

Truth is a degree or a visa doesn't check for employability (unlike in America where someone has to be able to secure employment to come or stay in the country).

> To counter that, he modified his resume and added 2 fake experiences from top companies as Network Engineer.

So he lied about being an engineer after doing a two year tech support degree? That would be a pretty big red flag to me (and by claiming he's a real engineer, he might get afoul of the law).

Did he turned out to be good for the job/faked it ´til he made it or did it all come crushing down?

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