How
accurate are CVs/Resumés?
Once, a long time ago, I knew a young man
who had come to South Africa from England.
He was a television technician who landed up sharing a house with two
draughtsmen. They were earning better
salaries than he was, so he decided that it was an excellent career
choice.
They taught him the basics and
off he went and got a job as a draughtsman.
He was fired at the end of the first week! Undaunted, he tried again. Six months, and 5 jobs later, he was a
draughtsman and still is today.
I am not sure if this would still be
possible, nor if there is a moral to this story, maybe amoral is more like
it. He did work extremely hard to
improve his skills, though, and shared his questionable career path with the
final company. They decided to take a
chance, and the rest is history.
The value of secure employment within
challenging economic conditions creates an environment where people resort to
any number of tactics to gain an advantage – including seriously embellishing
the truth on the Curriculum Vitae (CV)/Resumé.
At Accsys, we recruit both for ourselves
and our clients through our Recruitment Division, PeoplePlace. Fari Chibgwe, who heads up the division, says
that they have noticed at least 1 in 5 CVs misrepresent the truth. She says “It is clear to us that candidates
understand that the document is a way to market themselves effectively and try to make them as
attractive as possible.”
In broader discussions with people in the
Recruitment and HR space, it seems that practitioners are concerned about the
level to which some candidates exaggerate their credentials, particularly with
reference to work experience, qualifications and salary.
Among the more common problems are:
·
the use of friends or peers as
references
·
significant exaggeration about
designations and responsibilities
·
inaccurate dates
·
over-emphasis or misleading
details about strengths, achievements and successful projects.
It is difficult to quantify the situation
and there is no real way of measuring the precise degree to which people are padding
their CVs.
While companies do run expensive and time
consuming background checks, sometimes the truth only comes out after
commencement of employment. This incurs
additional costs for companies.
The best advice she offers to candidates to
truly stand out amongst competitors, in the right way, is to tell the truth and
highlight the positive, whilst not attempting to hide the negative.
When sharing situations that may be seen as
negative, it is difficult not to try and put a positive and possibly inaccurate
spin on what happened. Simply saying
that you made a mistake and learned from the experience might serve better in
the long term.
A resumé should put your skills,
qualifications and experience in an attractive light, emphasising the areas
which are most relevant for the applied position. Once inaccuracies filter in, it becomes
difficult to remove them later.
Links,
References and Notes
Accsys provides people management solutions ie Payroll, Human Resources (HR), Time and Attendance as well as Access Control/Visitor Management.
The company develops, implements,
trains and services our solutions. We
provide readers, turnstiles, booms and CCTV.
We run both on premise and in the
cloud, as well as mobile options for ESS.
Recruitment, online education and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) are
part of our offering, too.
http://www.accsys.co.za/accsys-peopleplace-talent-management
email:
tschroenn@accsys.co.za
twitter:
@TerylSchroenn
https://lnkd.in/g9N8nua via @YouTube
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Thank you for reading Teryl@Work.
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