Just How Many People Lie On Their CV?
Unfortunately, omissions, tweaks, and occasionally outright and barefaced lies do turn up on CVs quite a lot.
As a company that provides employee background checks the question is of interest to us, and one of the surveys we commissioned recently estimated that British businesses were losing up to £2 billion every year by offering jobs to candidates who were later discovered to have lied on the CV. An average of around 5% of candidates for the positions included in the survey were caught out lying and rejected for that reason alone.
Think of it this way. There are 20 job applications in your inbox. Using the 5% figure, one of them is probably lying about something major. Because all the ‘tweaks’ made to a CV are intended to make it look good, the dishonest CV may well be one of the ones that looks most promising. They have the natural advantage, as long as the lies aren’t too obvious. Without education verification, career checks, and other pre employment screening, the costly truth is that clever liars are more likely to get hired. CV checks are paramount in avoiding a potential loss of valuable resources in your business.
More than 7 million jobseekers admit to lying or being deliberately misleading on their CV. To nip this problem in the bud, we not only recommend using pre employment screening but also making it very clear when you advertise the position. State up front that employee background checks are standard and that the permission of all candidates will be sought for it. That should save you time and money by discouraging dishonest behaviour from the start.
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