Criminal checks

Your mother may have told you not to lie, but evidently some of the people sending out resumes never got that good advice. Several surveys indicate that lots of people lie when they apply for a job.

One screening service used by employers reports that in 2006, 41 percent of their background checks turned up a discrepancy between what the applicant provided and what the reference reported. Another report, by a different company, found “major misstatements” on 42 percent of the resumes.

More than half the hiring managers polled by CareerBuilder said they found a lie on an application. Of course, only 5 percent of the applicants admitted to falsifying information, though, in another survey, about half admitted to “resume padding.”

If those figures are accurate, then almost half the resumes you receive will have factual errors on them. That’s reason enough to check references and backgrounds.

Applicants lie about a lot of things. According to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the most common “fibs” were the following.

• Inflated titles
• Inaccurate dates to cover up job hopping or gaps in employment
• Partially finished degrees presented as completed
• Inflated education or “purchased” degrees that do not mean anything
• Inflated salaries
• Inflated accomplishments
• Out and out […]