Career pro-tip: Lie on your resume!
It’s why I’m stuck in a factory. I just don’t have it in me to bullshit/lie. I have a friend who worked his way into his career by saying whatever he needed to say and he makes 3x my salary.
I wish I had no morals or anxiety…
The way I see it is that they’re looking to exploit me for as much as they can get, so I have no obligation to treat them with any more respect than that. I don’t lie, but I have no problem taking a single instance where I worked next to a couple newbies for an hour and gave them pointers and turning it into “trained and oversaw new hires to ensure proper workflow protocol” on my resume.
Maybe I should lie about being a sous chef so I can work at a Antarctica base as a chef…
Yeah. Embellishing the truth is a much better strategy for job seeking.
i hate working with people like this
you can fool HR but not your coworkers for long and I sure as fuck don’t want to carry the new guy moreso if he’s making more than me
Carry the new guy? If you’re lying on your resume to say you have skills that you don’t really have, then you’re not doing it right. You’re supposed to figure out what your skills actually are, then embellish your resume to make those skills shine on paper. I’ve never had anything but glowing reviews from my employers because I made sure to apply for jobs that suited my skills, and formatted my resume to help me get hired. I’m good at training newbies, but my first employer didn’t trust me with that responsibility, so I embellished a bit on my resume to make sure my second employer trusted me enough to let me make use of that skill, and pay me accordingly.
I make higher than the median salary working at a factory. I left a job that required a college degree and professional licence that payed less than what I do now. Higher education requirements doesn’t always mean higher pay. You might just need to find a unionized factory. The lowest wage at my workplace is $25/hr (CAD). Local minimum wage is $17.20/hr and median wage is $21.83/hr.
That’s kinda the spot I’m at now, just no union. I’m “stuck” in that the wage isn’t horrendous for my background, but the area I live in is so expensive that it kinda evens out. If I want any kind of savings I need to stay in this garage I rent.
I’ve wanted to make a move for the last 5 years, but COVID came along so i waited it out, then it was “omg recession is coming, recession is coming!” So I waited it out. Now we’re “blessed” with the Mango Mussolini who is hell bent on destroying the economy so again I feel like the only smart thing to do is wait it out…
unionize and try to switch workplaces every year to a higher paying one.
Um, if you switch workplaces you switch unions.
Depends if your union is regional or just your workplace.
Most of the manufacturing unions in my area are just that, the area. All the trade unions are as well, and probably the teachers union too.
I think the point is to unionize every company
Aww
Hey silver lining though?
You’re not gonna get fired and be embarrassed in ten years then go broke and lose your property and be unhireable etc etc etc
There was a US story or few too - someone goes back and checks ancient claims, then it’s all bad
I’ll be honest that’s what I’ve done. But they weren’t lies of stuff I can’t do. More like “oh I made this small coding project”, “I’ve replaced phone screens before”, “I know how to debug code”
Yeah; those are reasonable. Not overly-checkable stuff like the school you went to and degree you obtained.
Even if you don’t agree with this guy, you have to admit his credentials are impressive!
Please advise, my landlord won’t accept LinkedIn DMs as rent payment.
fire him; hire a new landlord
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We don’t check. I don’t really care as long as they can do the job. But believing they have a degree is useful for telling clients who specifically sometimes ask about the degrees of the people they’ll be working with.
We also don’t DM people trying to recruit people tho.
I swear being on linked in is like a dating app.
If you’re a male in IT, the recruiters that DM you are always hot but likely bots. When you interact with them, they always want to steer you toward jobs that have nothing to do with what you want.
They blue ball you until you get through the interview and then ghost you.
Dude in iT, never had that problem and even doubled my salary through linked in. Anytime I actually interact with a recruiter I lay down my bare minimums and won’t even bother responding further/block if they can’t hit that.
That said, LinkedIn is a shit hole not worth touching more than once every couple of years if you’re not looking for a gig. I don’t even really interact with people I actually know in there because the platform is terrible and 90% of public posts are from sociopaths who despise work life balance.
believing they have a degree is useful for telling clients who specifically sometimes ask about the degrees of the people they’ll be working with
I used to work for a company that provided programming consultants for the US military and for defense contractors. The hourly rate we could be billed out at was entirely dependent on highest degree attained, so PhDs could be billed out at the highest rate, followed by Masters, then Bachelors of Science and then Bachelors of Art. It didn’t even matter what field your PhD was in, so my company was chock-full of useless people with advanced degrees who got put onto every project and told to just stay home. The worst thing was when they insisted on showing up and doing something.
Are they hiring?
Desperately. And it’s a decent gig, or at least it will be until they decide AI can do it, at which point we’re going to get a bunch of flattened children.
I am a useless person with a PhD…
I’ve had a job sorta like that where I was paid more to do the job and given better hours than some people with more relevant coursework just because I have a degree and they didn’t quite have one. Like, I wasn’t gonna complain and I was actually quite good at my job, but it had nothing do with the “BS” in my resume. No one was totally incompetent at the job at least.
They eventually switched to paying primarily by relevant experience primarily rather than degree level, which seems like a better predictor of being good at the job from what I’ve seen.
This could never go wrong
We had a university hire a professor here that taught for a few years before they figured out they lied about credentials - only because they had no idea what they were doing, so it’s not an unreasonable strategy to throw as much shit against the wall as you can and see if any sticks.
My college had a professor of communications with a degree from a supposedly ancient (like, 13th century) Italian university. He only got exposed because we had a big ceremony for the newly-hired President of the college, with a procession that featured faculty and alumni walking in an order determined by the age of the oldest institution they were associated with. One of our alumni was a very famous author who was on the faculty at Harvard, and he was like “why am I not the first in line?” He looked up this comm prof’s “university” which turned out to be basically a prep school that wasn’t even close to being 700 years old. Comm prof was promptly fired, which was kind of a shame because he was actually a really good teacher.
Every element of this anecdote is awesome. It’s like a mix of a joke, a logic puzzle, a ragebait, and a true crime.
It might be even more entertaining if I said who this famous author was. But on the other hand, it might punctuate your equilibrium!
On my latest three jobs I’ve never been asked about proof for anything. But my CV is also not impressive at all. Harvard is sure to raise some questions, so be prepared to know every detail about this place and your story. Especially if you meet actual Harvard attendees at the company.
They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard.
I see what you did there
They have concepts of a theory.
- Concepts of a salary.
I have concepts of a plan
He’s talking about an MBA, not an actual degree.
I remember once borrowing a friend’s MBA textbook to see what it was all about. I opened to a random page which turned out to be in a chapter on negotiating strategies. There was an offset bit of text that read “your skill at negotiating will affect the outcome of the negotiations.”
I mean, the textbook wasn’t wrong…
It should be DUH rather than MBA. Maybe “Doctorate of Unabashed Hyperbole”.
Had to go find a Table of Contents for an MBA textbook
For this thread start at chapter 18
LOL “Leading from the Middle”. AKA “Sucking Up and Punching Down”.
Video game loading screen tips but textbook form.
“Shoot the bad guys before they shoot you.”
Things techbros imagine they’ve invented:
- Trains
- Friendship
- Fraud
What if I already have a master’s but still can’t find a job?
Just keep adding master’s degrees until you get an offer, I guess.
“Employers hate this one powerful trick!”
If you keep adding enough master degrees eventually the HR system of some company hiring you will overflow and you’ll be CISO in no time.
Good old Bobby Tables, the master in every field known to man.
overqualified
Add a PhD
Tried that, doesn’t work
Try adding an MBA. Money people and managers seem to think that makes you one of them.
i think you should x years of experience instead, 2 years minimum , thats wher ei noticed where people get hired the fastest.
Have you considered a doctorate?
Do you think there’s a correlation between those who process further up the academia tree; and those who enjoy masochism?
yea, i heard alot of pi in academia are spending 60-80+hrs in thier labs everyweek managing it. plus if they are in university they are also managing classes, TA, and student labs.
PHD doesnt equate to a easy job find either, its pretty difficult if not very hard to do. in my state school i had department head reviewing 30+ prof/adjunts candidates in that semester alone. when i was going to research talks, one of them said the DR(who had come to our uni to give research talk about a subject he was doing) had written 40+ PAPERS before a employer was interested in hiring them. then theres the issue with that too, the quality of papers are dismal and then the profession itself.
just add x amount of experience to your degree, they look more into the bullsshit experience you faked(but they also likely wont verify your experience, unless you are incompetent than they start to question your resume), and most of the time they dont question it. assuming your degree is one field they will scrutinize. had a friend with MS in the science gave up searching, i dint do it either with just a undergrad. just add like 1 year experience to see if anyone bites, if nobody bites in a month, add another year(i think 2 year is when you see offer starts to come in.
ALso some jobs may request LORs, fake them too.
they tend to stay away from cv/resume with 1 or less years of experience, also they use software to automatically screen out certain keywords.
Message people in your field on LinkedIn who may have a possibility of hiring you. Applying for job postings does approximately nothing.
JD!
This is the kind of out of the box thinking that the team needs right now. Unfortunately, you’re fired.
I’m pretty sure this is the opening plot to the TV show Community.
I thought you have a bachelor’s from Columbia?
And now I have to get one from America. And it can’t be an e-mail attachment.
I was a hiring manager in aerospace for decades. We for sure checked transcripts before a start date.
I also just don’t get people who lie on their resumes. That would cause me so much anxiety. Even for things I have training or experience with, I always worry people are going to expect me to be more proficient than I am. I had I guy put that he was fluent in a computer language that I’m not sure he’d ever seen, so everyone was always frustrated with him and he eventually got laid off.
I think it’s super dependent on the industry and you as a person.
I used to have a fake degree on my resume and I attribute a decent amount of my career success to that. But I am in IT where experience is a lot more important and there’s a lot less risk than engineering haha.
But it was just some random bachelors degree from a community college in my home town. I would explain it away as “just some online BS program so I would have a degree on my resume” and that was really all the background checking anyone did. I’m also very charismatic, had a bunch of professional references, and a couple certs so that helps a ton
I don’t have it on my resume anymore because I’m at a point in my career where it just frankly doesn’t matter, but back when I was just a baby help desk tech it genuinely got me a couple incredible opportunities. I didn’t feel bad because the hiring process is such nonsense and employers made candidates jump through so many hoops I just figured it was fair. They
liecreatively explain benefits and pay, so we canliecreatively explain our history.I had a 25-year career as a programmer. Not once did I ever have a company I worked for verify my academic or employment histories or even contact my references. I could have put down anything I wanted and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference - my continuing employment was based on my ability to actually do shit.
I’m now a school bus driver and they checked out everything. And of course threw in drug testing and a criminal background check for good measure.
The school bus thing makes sense.
My partner’s dad lied on his resume long ago and held that job for years before anyone checked.
The reason he lied was because he knew he could do the job because he had enormous experience (I’m not sure what it was something related to agriculture and he had grown up farming) but the job required a degree. He did the job well.
He is an argumentative person though and I guess he finally pissed off the wrong guy who finally looked into his background and got him fired.
I guess some businesses and industries check more than others. Where I worked, you had to submit your transcripts, plus they did background checks for criminal records.
Why the fuck would they fire somebody who did the job well for years?
You piss off the wrong person, it doesn’t matter how good you are at your job. I can also say from personal experience, he is not an easy person to get along with.
I’m pretty sure people lie on resumes because you’re more likely to actually get a response that way, rather than using whatever credentials you actually have.
Well sure, of course. I’m more likely to hire a painter to paint my house if he says he’s been in business 20 years, but I’m going to be pissed off it turns out in his first job and he’s bad at it.
That’s the whole thing about “fake it till you make it,” though. You fake it to get your foot in the door, pray like a mother fucker you can actually do the job, and pray like a mother fucker you keep the job. I don’t know how folks actually make it like that, but, hey… In the current dark times, gotta do what you gotta do.
Wouldn’t be worth the anxiety for me.
On the other hand, I’ve long been a proponent of the above board fake it till you make it approach. There were many, many times in my career that my boss needed something done and I told him I could probably figure it out if he keeps his expectations low. Got to do a lot of interesting things that way and learned some really cool stuff.
And every promotion was like that. They knew all of my experience, but were putting me in a new position. Managing people for the first time is always a fake it till you make it situation.
This, I was also a hiring manager in sciencey fields. We also verified education, even with a robust job history. I share the same sentiment and could not embellish on my resume because it’s pretty hard to lie about technical expertise in science and engineering. Also, the labs I’ve worked in have very expensive instruments, not a good idea to ‘wing it’ with those things.
Dunning-Kruger perhaps. You sound like me. I have a master in thermodynamics and 20 years in the field of energetic materials, but I know that there are lots of stuff I don’t know nearly enough about.
My unpopular opinion (and I’ll eat the downvotes) is that CV fraudsters don’t get prosecuted nearly enough.
It’s not just faceless billionaire companies you’re fucking over, it’s the other candidates who actually put in the effort to become competent at the job you lied to get.
I’ll never get my head around the popularity of the idea that lying on a CV doesn’t make you a liar.
Job candidates didn’t start this war. Companies want ever more ludicrous requirements (so they’d have to interview fewer people), so the average CV expands to match it.
And while you may get caught with claiming to have a degree, you can certainly embellish the rest of it. Used an Excel spreadsheet? You’re now a data analyst. Dabbled in Access? Congratulations, you’re now an experienced database administrator.
And if you get found out and fired, so what? So did hundreds of people who did have all the qualifications and experience. You now have a bit more, so you know what not to do next time.
Take what you can from corporations, because they’re certainly trying to take all they can from you.
Used an Excel spreadsheet? You’re now a data analyst. Dabbled in Access? Congratulations, you’re now an experienced database administrator.
I feel personally attacked and simultaneously validated by your analysis.
When you are starting out in an hiring environment like this, you pretty much have to do this, but you should also be prepared to back it up.
25 years ago during a major tech downturn I said I had experience with C for my first programming job (I didn’t, but I knew others). Before I started I studied my ass off and learned it so I wouldn’t look like a fool on the job.
End result was that when I started, I knew C.
Don’t lie about stuff that is easy to verify like a degree from Harvard. That is just asking to be blackballed.
Lorne Lanning, the creator of Oddworld, did something similar with 3D animation back when that required super fucking expensive computers. He “ilegally” photocopied the manual of the software he was expected to know about, spent the night reading it, then, during the interview, did some bit of animation that amazed the interviewers.
I don’t recall the exact details, but you can get his account from his Ars Technica interview. Almost 3 hours long, but it’s a great listen
That’s actually pretty crazy. I could read a manual front to back twice but still look like a bumbling moron the first time I touch a piece of software.
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What’s the consequences of not lying on your resume? you can’t get a good job.
What’s the consequences of being caught lying on your resume? you lose your good job.
What’s the consequences of not getting caught? You get paid to do the job that didn’t require the degree to begin iwth.
The consequences are the same whether or not you do it. The benefits greatly outweigh the risks.
What’s the consequences of being caught lying on your resume? you lose your good job.
I used to work as a trade union officer representing people at disciplinaries. I’ve represented several people over the years who were sacked for lying on their CVs.
Not only did they lose their job, but they’ll get a “sacked for gross misconduct” reference from that employer making it much more difficult to get another job. Those in regulated roles also ended up with gross misconduct records with the regulator, making it essentially impossible to work in that field again.
So no, it’s not a risk free game.
What’s the consequences of not lying on your resume?
You pass your background check.
Harvard and other major schools make it fairly easy to vet graduates with a call to the registrar’s office. Most schools have electronic portals to handle the requests in bulk.
This is an extremely low bar for an HR department to pass.
Sure those are all well and good ideas. My wife works in HR and she’s yet to work at a company that calls the registrars office. They do criminal background checks all over, but rarely do they go beyond that. We’re in mass, so we’re entitled to a copy of our background check performed by the business, if you’re in a similar situation i’d recommend checking it out.
That being said, if you’re applying for a job you’re never gonna get an interview for (Director or Manager roles without an MBA or BS) then you have quite literally nothing but your time to lose.
My wife works in HR and she’s yet to work at a company that calls the registrars office.
It’s SOP over here. I even got bothered about it when I was in the final stage of hiring, because I graduated in December and put graduated in 2005 on my application despite officially getting the diploma in 2006.
That being said, if you’re applying for a job you’re never gonna get an interview for (Director or Manager roles without an MBA or BS) then you have quite literally nothing but your time to lose.
Reputation matters and you won’t get love in your industry by lying like this.
If you do get fired, and your employer flags you as “not eligible for rehire” that’s a big chunk of your career you can’t reference anymore because its now a black mark.
This is a big risk for anyone who isn’t simply scamming as a career.
If you do get fired, and your employer flags you as “not eligible for rehire” that’s a big chunk of your career you can’t reference anymore because its now a black mark.
Legally the business cannot say anything whatsoever about job performance or any reason behind hiring in terms of employment verification, at least where I am in Massachusetts. Employment verification here can only say dates of employment, starting job title and ending job title. Nothing else. If they say more is a massive liability and absolutely anybody can call up asking for employment verification, there’s no vetting… so getting caught telling more information is very possible.
Being banned from employment from one employer doesn’t usually do anything, and again, if you didn’t have a job to begin with and needed that foot in the door, and old small-midsize company that has zero real power, influence or clout beyond their domain will have zero impact on your job prospects. If you never get past offer phase it’s unlikely.
If you’re in a highly specialized field where there’s only a handful of people who can do your job then yes, EVERYONE in that field probably knows just who you are! But you can’t fake it till you make it at that level. low level managers and early-mid career white collar roles? Yeah you can bullshit your way through a lot of those.
Legally the business cannot say anything whatsoever about job performance or any reason behind hiring in terms of employment verification
Saying “no eligible for rehire” is enough to poison your reference.
Saying “no eligible for rehire” is enough to poison your reference.
HR departments are routinely told not to disclose that information by legal because it can result in a defamation lawsuit.
it’s not illegal for a prospective employer to ask the employee or formal employer that question, sure. A former employer would be putting their neck on the line though, because anybody can call your employment verification line. Very, very often employment verification is outsourced to eliminate any possibility of this liability.
If the policy is to never provide that information and you never provide it, you never have to go to court to prove that they are not re-hirable for a legitimate reason as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit. Background checks are typically not performed until an offer is on the table with a contingency for the former. Again, in massachusetts, the outcome of a background check must be legally provided to the one under scrutiny. If the thing that doesn’t check out is that employer’s statements, the evidence is right there. Lawyers drool over this shit.
The most in-depth background check I’ve received was a bank which actually ran a credit report. I later overheard the HR ladies talking about “y’know, why do we do that? We don’t even make hiring decisions based on the results of the credit reports…”
I don’t know how they do it in the US, but in the UK most big companies outsource application checks to several big clearing houses. They handle the logistics of checking qualifications and obtaining references from previous employers, plus the optional enhanced checking that some companies need (such as DBS/criminal record checks).
In the UK there is a single official centralised system for checking degree qualifications which covers most major universities. It’s also only a 5 minute job to email a university registrar directly. I think most big companies would consider this a bare minimum task when recruiting for any role where a qualification is in any way important.
Most not have worked with hr much. Low bars are still way to high and AI is reading resumes that aren’t stuffed with keywords
And it shouldn’t be too difficult to avoid getting caught. Most won’t bother checking, but if they do, you can always pick some accredited university that went defunct some years ago. It might be impossible to check if even if they wanted to. Then avoid giving details about anything from your college days, and hope a coworker doesn’t show up who actually went there.
you can always pick some accredited university that went defunct some years ago
Harvard is not one such school.
You took a game theory course didn’t you? Cause yup!
I mean, honestly, this shit won’t let up until the companies that hire them are fined. Advertising for such a requirement should carry with it the obligation to check. Would also cut down on those companies that demand such but won’t pay accordingly.
You’re not wrong, but I’d want to see more prosecution of job posting lies at the same time. Employers frequently add impossible requirements so they can hire H1Bs instead.
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It’s not that unpopular of an opinion lol
Go take a look at the downvotes I got, versus the updoots that the people are getting by justifying it as “corporations bad, defrauding them good”
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It’s a shame you have any upvotes at all. It’s a moral and ethical imperative to lie on your resume. Evening the playing field is not fraud. Your cutesy dismissive retort is inappropriate because corporations have all of the power, turning job hunting into a totally atomized activity. The recruitment process is fraudulent, not the attempt to remedy it.
To be fair there’s a whole lot of wealthy people like Trump who bought their degree anyway
C’s get degrees
So do donors
Shi, I know many students that would just buy the work or answers.
し？
Donors get honors
I had poor grades in university. But they were leagues ahead of Trump’s failures.
The DMs have been flowing in … from scammers.
indian ones. im not asking for scientist level listings, but they kept sending it. i had to end up blocking the job sites after that.
Some companies do background checks.
some do, most don’t.
It’s true. I finished grad school well over a decade ago, not once has anyone verified my education. They haven’t even requested transcripts.
they wouldn’t ask you for your transcripts, they’d contact the university. If they think you faked your resume then it’d be silly to trust you to provide valid transcripts.
One place I interviewed for actually wanted to see my physical diploma. This was memorable bc it was the only time it ever happened and luckily I happened to know where it was. Usually yeah they just contact the university’s “registrar” or “academic records” office and as part of the application process you sign a form saying it’s OK to release your records to them.
As well as employers contacting the university for verification, graduates can request their university send certified copies of their transcripts and diplomas. It’s also possible for candidates to supply an unofficial transcript that can be later verified.
The context of the thread is few employers seem to question if educations are legitimate, not that they suspect they’re fake. The point I’m making is that not only are they not verifying information with my university, they’re not even asking me to substantiate anything, official or otherwise.
This is true but it also varies with industry. In defence and parts of the government, potential new hires are likely to receive a full and extensive background check, including academic records and past employment. It’s similar for certain areas such as finance and some executive positions, either because it’s considered fraud or dishonesty which is considered to make people unsuitable (e.g. in banking) or because the company is trying to manage risks and they want to be sure that they know what skeletons someone has in the closet.
This sort of thing wouldn’t get you very far in those industries, and it’s certainly not unheard of for people to be fired even after successfully getting the job. A surprisingly large number of people have been walked from high-paying finance jobs because they lied on their application, even months or years after being hired.
Yep and if they decide to go for you they’ll look through your application for lies. It’s a straight sack
I’m not sure if I want to work for a company that doesn’t. That seems incompetent.
Incompetent management is the worst to work for. I can handle people who make bad decisons or assholes, but I can’t stand assholes who make bad decisions. Which is probably why I hate myself.
Background checks can cover a variety of areas. The last 5 companies I’ve worked for have all done them. Education verification was not on any of them. They were mostly concerned about criminal records. A few of them did credit checks.