Ethics on Your Resume

Robbie Miller Kaplan, who writes the Ask The Expert column on JobsintheMoney, sent this:

For those of us who are honest and meticulous in presenting our resume credentials, it’s surprising to learn that approximately 50 percent of all applicants have faked resumes. Maybe you’ve been a little creative with a job title so it’s easier to understand, or smoothed out your dates to eliminate a gap. In over 20 years of resume consulting, I’ve always cautioned accuracy - and warned people to never claim education, work experience, or activities that they don’t have. Inaccuracies and lies have a way of catching up with you.

And so it seems that a faked resume finally caught up with Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
co-author of Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond. Recently, she had to resign from MIT after admitting she misrepresented her education - she claimed degrees she never
earned from three universities - when she was hired 28 years ago.

Then there's David Edmondson, the former CEO of RadioShack. He lied about his educational credentials and was asked to resign.

While these cases are high-profile, faked credentials are nothing new. In fact, their very existence has spawned a whole new industry that fact checks resumes for client organizations to ensure credential integrity.

But what about you? When you prepare and send out your resume, should you assume that employers will evaluate your credentials but not your integrity? Or,
should you hire a company to check and certify your resume credentials before you send it out, so an employer knows immediately that you haven’t lied? Amazingly, there are firms out there that will do just that.

I don’t have an answer, just a wish: That applicants scrupulously prepare and check their credentials - even pull out their degree, license, or certification to ensure it’s accurately detailed. If you check and re-check, maybe you won’t have to pay someone else to do it for you.