How To Tell If Someone’s Lying On Their CV

Lying on CVs is more common than ever, with fraud prevention officers having to issue warnings to every university up and down the country saying students could find themselves in jail for lying on their CVs.

But when you’re assessing candidates’ CVs, how can you spot what’s true and what’s embellished? Well, it’s not that simple to say the least!

However, to give you a helping hand, we’ve put together a few things to look out for to help you sort through those CVs that are filled with rubbish so you can find the ones that are telling the truth.

1) No Written Evidence

This only really applies to their qualifications or education, but it’s definitely a good idea to ask a candidate for written evidence to back up their qualification claims, especially if you have some doubts about their credibility.

When a candidate passes any sort of exam or course, they’ll normally be presented with a certificate, and if that gets lost, they can request a replacement fairly easily from the examining body in charge of the qualification, so there’s no excuse for having no evidence.

So, if a candidate refuses to come up with the goods when you start requesting written evidence, this is when the warning bells should start to ring!

2) Can’t Back Up Claims

If, for example, a candidate has claimed to have increased sales in their previous job in their CV, but can’t back this up with numbers or an explanation of how they increased the sales, this should be a cause for concern.

A CV should be an introduction into a candidate’s work history and skill set, and they should definitely be able to back up any claims when prompted in an interview.

While the candidate is bound to be nervous and forget some things in the interview, if they can’t answer simple questions about their own work history – that’s when you need to start worrying.

3) Can’t Answer Competency Questions

If the candidate claims to have a particular skill set or a certain type of experience, put this to the test by asking a series of competency-based questions.

This will help you to really understand their skills and their ability to do what the job will potentially require of them if they’re successful.

But not just that, if they’re unable to give you examples of times where they’ve had to use the skills they listed on their CV, then it’s pretty clear that there’s been some slight embellishment on their part.

5) References Don’t Match Up

Finally, the most obvious and foolproof way of checking if someone has lied on their CV is to check their references.

If they said on their CV that they worked at a certain place for 12 months, but when you checked this with the company in question, it turns out they left after 3 months, it’s fair to say that their CV is pretty unreliable – which means that they’re probably not that reliable themselves!

So there we go, a few things that are worth looking out for if you think someone might have lied on their CV!

Do you think these tips are useful, or have you got any words of wisdom on this topic?

How To Tell If Someone’s Lying On Their CV