Lee got away with it on The Apprentice, but lying to a potential employer won't work in the real world, says John MeagherJack Murray thought he had found the perfect candidate. The young man had delivered an exemplary CV and had impressed during the interview, and now all Murray needed to do was check out his references. And that's where it all came unstuck. Murray, publisher of the Irish Media Contacts Directory, quickly realised that the references were not what they appeared.
"One of his references was purported to be a sales manager in a major Dublin company," he says. "But when I rang this person up, he was very tetchy and wasn't able to answer even the most rudimentary of questions. It turned out he didn't work in that company at all. When I phoned the company and got speaking to the actual sales manager, it transpired that the reference name given to me didn't exist and that the candidate himself had been fired from his job."
The candidate's other reference wasn't much better. This "sales agent" turned out to be his wife. "People seem to think nothing about lying on their CVs," Murray says. "I interviewed one young woman for an administrative role and she claimed to have got an A2 in English in the Leaving Cert, but when I asked her to show me the results she disappeared.
"Any employer worth his salt is going to check out these sort of details. Surely honesty is the best policy?" Not always, it would appear. A barefaced lie on his CV didn't do Lee McQueen any harm at all. The winner of the just-finished fourth series of BBC's The Apprentice claimed to have spent two years in university when, in fact, he had dropped out after just four months.
"It puts out the clear message that it's okay to lie on a CV," says Rowan Manahan, one of the country's leading recruitment consultants. "It may be a TV programme, but it's hugely popular [9.5m watched the season finale] and impressionable people out there might think that lying actually works. "But the thing is, it's not okay to lie on a CV, not in the real world anyway. Anybody caught doing this will be immediately eliminated, especially if they aren't telling the truth about something as fundamental as their education. And if your CV proves to be defective, no amount of smooth talking will get you out of it. The message you're putting out is that if you're not trustworthy on your CV, you probably won't be trustworthy in the job either.
"It is very easy for a recruiter to verify most of the content of a CV. Either by background checking -- and remember, they may seek references from people other than the carefully-chosen few that you put forward -- or by really drilling down on you at interview to justify the accomplishments you take credit for on your CV."
Lying about references is an "eejit's game", he says.
"How stupid do you have to be? If you have to lie to get a job, just how suited are you for it in the first place and what are the chances of you succeeding if you actually get the job?" Manahan, whose book, Where's My Oasis?, looks at how to get the most from your CV, argues that it is always better to tell the truth. "If you don't have the necessary educational qualifications for a job that stipulates the requirements needed, then don't apply for that job." He also cautions against embellishing your extra curricular activities.
"You'd be surprised by the number of people who claim to be passionate about hobbies that they know nothing about simply to make themselves appear more interesting. A good recruitment consultant would be able to pierce through that in the interview straight away. I've had people who claimed to be into martial arts, an area I'm fascinated in, and when I probed them it turned out that they hadn't a clue."
Manahan believes "a significant majority" of prospective candidates lie to some extent on their CV. Even seasoned professionals, he says, are sometimes tempted to be liberal with the truth.
"I've looked over thousands of CVs as part of my job and it never ceases to amaze me how sloppy they can be. Not wishing to tar them all with the same brush, but people under 35 often have a really poor grasp of grammar and punctuation. I was on the selection committee for a blue chip company last year and we had to whittle down 500 CVs to a more manageable number. Any idea how many of those had no typos whatsoever? Zero. The standard is getting worse rather than better, although with the economy in a state of change for the worse the cockiness that many candidates have displayed over the past decade or so is likely to be knocked out of them. As a result, CVs -- and interviews -- will probably be taken more seriously."
Meanwhile, Lee McQueen -- who beat 15 other "apprentices" to win the €125,000-a-year job -- says he has learnt his lesson about lying. "I wish I'd never put it down in the first place. I'd never condone lying on a CV. It was all due to my insecurity about my education and not having a business degree; I wanted to show I'd at least attempted to go to university. But I've been reprimanded, I took it on the chin and because of that my insecurities have been exorcised and my confidence has been boosted."
