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 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 people cannot lie on their LinkedIn profile – you absolutely can, and you will probably away with it.
If you are not sure about this check how CEOs have done it.
You are Not that Important
There are 850 million users active on LinkedIn, most of whom are either looking for a favorable and better job position or looking to hire a professional and skilled employee for their companies. Of course, the real issue is not whether 850 million people will notice your errant profile, but the 500 people in your connections. The biggest issue with this thinking, is the assumption that your peers and colleagues actually care about you. I’m sorry to write here, but you are not that important.
In psychology, there is a phenomenon called ‘the spotlight effect’. This is a phenomenon by which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are. The reason for the spotlight effect is the innate tendency to forget that although one is the center of one’s own world, one is not the center of everyone else’s. This tendency is especially prominent when one does something atypical – such as lying on your profile.
For more information on the spotlight effect, a research paper from Cornell does a great job of detailing just how much people overestimate their own importance for others.
Want to verify the spotlight effect for yourself? Follow the steps below to check your own views:
- Go to Your Profile: Click the “Me” icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage and select View Profile.
- Scroll down to the Analytics section and click on the number of profile views. This will take you to the Who’s viewed your profile page.
- View Details: On this page, you’ll see a list of people who have viewed your profile in the last 90 days. The details you see will depend on the viewers’ privacy settings.
- Note: If you have a LinkedIn Premium account, you can see more detailed insights and trends about your profile viewers.
Most of these views are going to be random recruiters or vendors who searched your profile, not actual people you know. Look at the names, and count the number of people who you truly care about their opinion of you. And how many of these would actually change their mind about you, if they noticed a discrepancy on your profile?
In my “real” career, I’m a 20-year tech executive in the AI space – a role that is highly visible among my peers. For research on this article, I looked at all profile views for myself over the past 90 days, and there were 69 visitors. It looks like everyone is watching me!
Unfortunately for my ego, when I dug into the numbers, a very different picture developed. Of those 69 visitors: 22 of them were recruiters that I did not know, 14 were outsourced services vendors that I do not want to talk to, and 32 were engineers or students looking for a job. These people are only viewing my profile because it’s their job, or they want something from me. Only 1 visitor was someone that was in my network and knew me personally, and that person is someone that I’ll likely never speak to again.
In other words, absolutely no one that I care about knows that my profile is a collection of fabricated lies.
The fact is that most people are too concerned about their own lives, to care about your LinkedIn. Let’s say a percentage of the people in your network actually do look at your profile, and realize a discrepancy. If they are good friends or people you will rely on for your network, does that actually change just because they see something on your profile that doesn’t match their recollection of events? And of those people, how many haven’t done this themselves, or even care?
You are not that important.
Do Not Create Fake Profiles
As part of our Professional Reference services, we’ve had to become experts in creating new LinkedIn profiles for the profiles of the executives who will provide reference services. I only mention this to dissuade anyone new to this process – LinkedIn is clamping down hard on alternate profiles, and you will get flagged and blocked – including your real profile.
Since 2023, they have implemented a number of tactics to catch anyone creating multiple profiles, including cookie analysis, behavioral analysis, checks on profile completeness, connection network activity, IP address detection, email and phone verification, reverse image searching, and profile verification via government identification. That’s right, if you create a fake profile, LinkedIn may force your fake and real accounts to produce government ID to continue using the service.
But the bigger issue is that you will still have your other profile shown in public. Which means that if a recruiter searches for your name, they will see both the real and the fake profile. Anyone doing investigating will immediately draw the conclusion that you’ve been lying, especially if the profile that you provided has zero or very few connections.
It just doesn’t make sense to have multiple profiles.
Making your Profile Private
One last option considered by people choosing to ‘adjust’ their LinkedIn, is to simply withdraw from the public. In other words, making your profile private and only accessible to your connections. This means that your profile will no longer appear in public searches, which will prevent recruiters from searching for you and finding you. And it does not help you with connections, which most recruiters will ask to be allowed in – so they’ll see your profile anyway.
We do not recommend this as a solution.