If you’ve lied on your resume and are concerned about an upcoming employment verification check, you have options.
LinkedIn is a trusted resource for recruiters and hiring managers to peek into your past. And they absolutely catch “liars” who have resumes that are inconsistent with their profiles. Which is why all job seekers should make sure your LI profile exactly matches everything on your resume – especially if you are lying.
The problem of course is that people think that public profiles are higher risk when lying – but that is absolutely not true. We will walk you through how to think about lying in public, and some tips to avoid. To be clear, this is not an article about the ethics of lying, this is about encouraging you to lie in public!
If you want to see our take on Ethics during Interviewing, read here
Public Profiles are Not Sacred
People are far more likely to lie on their resume than their LinkedIn profile, because the profile is public. That’s completely understandable, since the resume is seen as lower risk due to the decreased visibility.
We see this in the stats, when researching the prevalence of lying. Per a recent survey conducted by LendEdu, 34% of respondents lie on their LinkedIn page, compared to more than 60% who report lying on their resume, and 81% of people lied about themselves during interviews. As the medium becomes less public, people become more likely to lie.
However, when you dig into the data, it becomes clear that lying in public is far more likely than people believe. While 34% of people claim to have lied on their LinkedIn page, 1 in 10 users on the platform self-reported that “My profile is almost entirely made up of things I have never done.” And of those lying, 25% lied about their dates of work experience, and 10% lied about the jobs that they held. Both of those are easily discoverable by anyone in their network, and yet people feel comfortable announcing publicly their alternate reality – because those people understand that there are no consequences of lying.
It’s strange that recruiters assume that everyone’s LinkedIn profiles are accurate, when only 64% of all users believe that the information is “Completely accurate, I only add things that I’ve actually done.” But what this article sets out to do is dispel the notion that
If you want examples of successful executives who lied, check how CEOs have done it.
