The Guardian Says it all - Lies in CVs

An article in The Guardian caught our eye today (‘Horrendous’: the ‘ridiculously common’ lies people tell on CVs, and what happens when they are discovered | Employment law | The Guardian)

Lies on CVs are never the way to go.

At Candidates Matter, we have been highlighting the need for a new relationship between employers and candidates. But the power balance clearly lies on the side of the hirer (for the foreseeable future I suspect) and this is causing ever increasing tensions in the process.

While lying in a CV (whether trivial or not) is a terrible idea, one needs to look at why this may be. The current recruitment process looks something like this for a candidate.

1. Read a vague job advert for a new role. Often, no salary published.

2. Press the apply button to be transferred to a web page.

3. Enter your personal data.

4. Attach your CV.

5. Automation attempts to automatically read your CV and often makes a complete hash of it. Often, people just give up at this stage (knowing what happens next). If you do want to continue, rewrite the content of your CV into the web site boxes.

6. Write a bespoke cover letter as to why you want to work there.

7. Submit application.

8. Then get asked a whole long list of personal demographic information (sex, age, religion etc..) which one hopes is not used to discriminate against you.

9. Get a generic email response saying they are overwhelmed by applications, and it will take some time.

10. Wait.

11. Sifting occurs, often now in an automated way.

12. Rejection by generic email. No feedback of any real use.

At no point do you get to speak to anyone, let alone make it to interview.

When this has happened 10, 20, 50... times to a candidate, the odds are they will learn to game the system. Learn what to put into a CV that will make it through the automation. Learn to apply for ever wider roles in ever higher quantities in the hope that something will stick. This leads simply to further inundation of CVs for the recruiters who then apply more brutal processes to manage the load.

Clearly, there are no real winners to this process. At Candidates Matter, we are trying to put the humanity back into the process through the use of an ethical framework. That way, candidates do not lie on their CVs because they do not need to in order to get a chance. The employers get less CVs which are better quality and better aligned to their role descriptions. It will take time to make this change, but all change starts with the first step and this week Candidates Matter launches. Find out more at www.candidatesmatter.com