Press & Media

Have you ever told a lie?

If your answer is a no, well, you might be lying already. A study found that people do lie at least once in their entire life. Even in a 10-minutes conversation, a person can tell a lie 3 to 5 times. In the workplace, probably the most common lie you will hear from employees is when you ask them regarding the tasks assigned to them. They might say that they have already finished their assignments but when you ask them to prove it, they suddenly change the topics.

Lies are apparently common in job interview, too. According to Business Insider, nearly 1 in 3 candidates (31 percent) tell lies in their resume and 80 percent of them do it intentionally. As the old adage says, ‘One bad apple spoils the barrel’. If you let your guards down and end up hiring a liar, this can put your company at risk as they could have a negative impact on other employees and the working environment when this behaviour is perpetuated.

Then the question remains, why are candidates lying?

The answer is one but obvious: they simply want to get hired. By enhancing their skills or sugar-coating their experiences, they expect to catch the hiring manager’s attention during the screening process. Among the most common forgeries candidates tell on their resumes include employment gaps, college degrees, experience embellishment, claiming higher salary from previous jobs, raised grade point average, and language proficiency.

Rather than wasting your time by inviting bad candidates for interview, it will be better if you can do preventive measures and spot ones when sorting out resumes. While this could be hard to spot a lie just through a piece of paper, you still can do it by implementing a strategy. Here are some tips to find out if candidates lie in their resumes.

• Use online background check

Nowadays, you can find almost everything online, including records of candidate’s online footprints. Recruiters can do a background check using online platform. This will be really helpful as you can spot candidate’s past experience, degrees acquired, wages earned, criminal records, and much more. By doing some research regarding potential candidates’ track records, it can save your company from bringing in bad hires.

• Backdoor reference

In order to check the authenticity of information given to you, you can ask someone who is close to the candidate but is not included in his referral list, since referrals are mostly trained to only speak good things about candidates. Instead, you can call a backdoor reference colleague and those who can provide you valid information. However, you should be careful to choose who you want to call and confirm with as there might be foes who want him to completely fail the job.

• Observe candidates behaviour

Candidates who lie usually behave strangely during job interview. They usually roll their eyes or simply avoid eye contact. To tell if they really lie, you can ask detailed questions to candidates and see whether they can answer accordingly or not. For example, if candidate says he has 10 years’ experience in creating professional lesson plan, you can add question such as criteria of good lesson plan, what professional lesson plan should be, or the latest lesson plan update. The quality of his answer will show if the experience is real.

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