The dangers of telling lies on your CV

The dangers of telling lies on your CV

Here are three tales of 'little white lies' on CVs that turned into 'dirty little secrets'!

Recently, I heard a cautionary tale from a young job-hunter. Keen to improve his lot in life, he had applied for a position with one of the biggest employers in our area - a household name and member of the elite FTSE 100 index of British companies.

During the interview, when asked about his qualifications, this lad confessed that he had "made some of them up". When questioned further, he admitted that he did not have the professional diploma needed to take this role, nor did he have some of the A-levels he'd listed on his CV.

He then went on to explain to the interviewer that "he didn't really need those qualifications, as he knew he could do the job as well as anyone else". His prospective boss disagreed, immediately terminated the interview and asked him to leave. When our young jobseeker protested, he was escorted from the building by security personnel.

One lie kills trust

What most amazed me about this true tale is this young man's response and those of his friends. His buddies universally agreed that he had been cruelly mistreated and should have had a 'fair crack of the whip' to win this job.

On the other hand, I was in complete agreement with his potential employer. By admitting to lying on his CV, this young man had been dishonest and, therefore, his boss-to-be would have immediately lost all faith in him. After all, anyone willing to tell one big lie may well produce many more, making him a liability to any firm.

What's more, the position up for grabs required a particular safety qualification. Without this certificate, it is a criminal offence to work in this field. Thus, in these circumstances, the interviewer had no choice but to send the cheat packing.

Lying on your CV

While all of us have 'tweaked' our CVs at some point to make use of persuasive language, some jobseekers choose to cross the line between self-marketing and lying.

Indeed, according to a 2006 survey from jobs website CareerBuilder.com, more than half (57%) of employers admit to finding lies on candidates' applications. In almost every single case (93% of the time), these applicants were rejected.

A more recent survey by Callcredit Direct found that, of the people who admitted to lying on their CVs, a third said they had fabricated qualifications.

Although 'CV fibs' can be missed at the interview stage, they are most often discovered when employers check references after making provisional job offers.

At this stage, so-called 'little white lies' -- such as bogus qualifications or changed dates to hide career gaps -- sometimes come to light. Also, this is usually the point at which over-inflated salaries are exposed (the temptation to add, say, £5,000 to one's existing salary is too much for some to resist).

Alas, when references fail to check out, or CVs simply don't add up, then this almost always leads to job offers being withdrawn. These days, with many employers conducting CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) checks, unmentioned criminal convictions are easily exposed.

So, with perhaps hundreds of honest candidates to choose from, why would any boss take the risk of employing someone who seems to be dishonest?

You might get away with it

Although the vast majority of CV fraud goes undetected, it could come back to haunt you one day. In these circumstances, the best thing to do is to admit your mistake, face up to any disciplinary action and, with a bit of luck, you may still hang onto your job.

The worst thing to do when lies are exposed is to keep up the pretence by building a bigger lie. When faced with exposure, some desperate employees break the law.

For example, forging a bogus diploma to cover your tracks is a criminal offence similar to forgery, known as 'making a false instrument'. Likewise, faking a reference could be classed as fraud through 'false representation'. In both cases, the penalties can be severe and can include up to 10 years in prison.

Two more CV cheats

In the worst-case scenarios, conjuring up false references and qualifications can lead to you being banged up behind bars for deception and fraud.

For instance, Neil Taylor landed a top public sector job in October 2003, earning £115,000 a year as chief executive of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals NHS Trust. However, Taylor won this job after falsely claiming to be a graduate with a first-class degree from the University of Nottingham.

When his deception came to light, Taylor resigned from his position and later pleaded guilty to 'obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception'. At Shrewsbury Crown Court in September 2005, he was sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment, suspended for two years, fined £5,000 and ordered to pay £2,000 costs.

In March 2010, Rhiannon Mackay became the first woman in the UK to be jailed for lying on her CV.

Ex-Royal Navy sailor Mackay falsely claimed that she had A-levels to take a £23,000 a year admin job at Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust in May 2008. After admitting to inventing two B-grade A-levels and faking professional references, Mackay was jailed for six months by Plymouth magistrates under the Fraud Act 2006.

Don't be a 'CV chancer'!

In summary, employers are getting increasingly skilled at separating fact from fiction and falsehood on CVs.

By all means, 'big yourself up' by loudly singing your praises on your CV, but don't be tempted to drift into downright deception. While this might just land you a prize job, your 'dirty little secrets' could cost you your career and even your liberty one day!

Finally, for top tips on writing a great CV, read How to write the perfect CV.

More: How young people can find a job | The worst place to find a job in the UK

McClellan’s Mini Mea Culpa

Betrayal by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, Scott McClellan viewed as ultimate betrayal. Yes, Bush and Cheney had prevaricated their way into a war with Iraq, which upset him, but not to the extent of the treasonous behavior by his bosom buddies. Former Bushies, McClellan had observed, can achieve revenge and atonement by writing a book. (What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception).

McClellan, the innocuous former Bush Press Secretary — July 2003 to April 2006 — joins a growing group of deserters cum authors who felt disillusioned or betrayed by Bush and Cheney. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill shook his head in amazement – in print – at Bush’s astonishing ignorance about the economy and hubris on Iraq. Richard Clarke angrily denounced the Bushies – and particularly Condi Rice when she served as National Security Adviser – for their complacency and downright inaction on terrorism before 9/11.

Each of them emerge as modern versions of Tom Lehrer’s Irish girl who slew the rest of her family members. But “when at last the police came by,  Her little pranks she did not deny, To do so she would have had to lie,  And lying she knew was a sin.”

For the Bushies, lying constituted the principle method of communicating with the public, the press and Congress. But when Rove and Libby lied to Scotty about their roles in leaking former CIA official Valerie Plame’s name to the media, they committed the unpardonable sin. Not lying to start an illegal war in Iraq, or institutionalize torture. “We do not torture,” Bush said after he had approved torture.

McClellen knew that Bush had promised to fire anyone who leaked a classified name. Didn’t Scotty understand that when Bush made such promises he didn’t include Rove and Libby? Indeed, their jobs were leakers, not plumbers. Imagine, poor Scotty, the frat boys deceived him, he reported their deceptions as facts to the press and then he finds out that Bush himself authorized leaks that could help him politically – such as the name of Valerie Plame, wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who exposed the Bush-Cheney lies about Saddam Hussein trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

The wrath of the disillusioned pours forth in a book, from which McClellan not only gets even but makes a pile of money and will get high paid speaking gigs for several years. He warns of the “culture of deception,” the only means of operating that the Bushies have used to pollute the already deeply contaminated environment in which US politics operates

He tells us the obvious: “Washington has become the home of the permanent campaign.” He described what we read and see daily on “news” shows as “a game of endless politicking based on the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth, and spin.” Real hot stuff, Scotty, even if it’s been said and written hundreds of times before!

The Bushies now feign surprise over McClellan’s revelations as if the deceivers have been deceived, a level of treason higher than that practiced by the gang who deceived their way into war. Fraternity, loyalty and trust became insider values on the road to imperial power. But once achieved, power dictates devotion, never to principal or to “we the people,” but to keeping power, increasing and consolidating power.

Some academics and ideologues still cling to phrases like “spreading democracy,” as a historic mission of the American nation. What McClellan’s book shows, once again, is that Bush spreads words like excess mayonnaise on his sandwich.  He swore we had to invade Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from sharing his WMD with Al Qaeda – a lie. Then he claimed that the WMD were not relevant, but the world was better off without the despot. And don’t forget democracy – as he began to systematically destroy its meaning at home with warrantless wiretaps and institutionalizing torture.

Bush, like his aspiring follower, John McCain, insists that an immediate or even short range US departure from Iraq would hand victory to Al Qaeda even as his intelligence reports that Al Qaeda has been deeply weakened in Iraq and never really represented the great challenge to US occupiers. Like Henry Kisssinger, Bush will say anything. Unlike Kissinger, who fabricated in order to manipulate, Bush apparently does not allow truth to enter his mind when he speaks. That would be too difficult a multitasking job for him.

Poor McClellan realized that Bush and the other bros in the power frat had toyed with him, probably giggled as they watched him repeat their fibs to the press and public.

Scotty had no reason to believe Bush except his gut, which clearly ruled his intellect. He attributes Bush’s gut use to his policy mistakes, rather than attributing any base motives to the worst president in American history, a man who took office with the shadow of fraud cast over him, who led the nation into two stupid and bloody wars that will prove difficult to end, not matter who wins in November, directed the economy into debt, deficit and chaos and failed to respond to the most obvious challenge any leader would have to face: when Katrina hit New Orleans it took him five days to fly over it.

McClellan claims Bush’s big mistake was not firing the treacherous Karl Rove for leaking Plame’s name – not for orchestrating the public deception campaign Bush and Cheney used to steer the nation to war.

Neither McClellan nor most of the major press celebrities pose the larger questions – ones that might bring doubt onto the maxims that guide US politics. The obscene size of the defense budget, meaning the priorities of the nation, passes without careful scrutiny by the press secretary and the press. The assumption we all learn in grade school and high school – “we are a government of law, not of men” – begets little scrutiny from the media or the White House’s liaison to the media who is supposed to tell the truth.

The Defense Department and its inflated budget have not defended us since World War II, the last time a nation attacked the United States. The major media have not educated the citizens since – well, you all can figure that out.

When Bush claims to spread democracy few in the media scoff. Democracy means respect for the will of the people — including those of Gaza when they elect Hamas, Iran and Venezuela when they choose Ahmadinejad and Chavez.

The remnants of Bush’s old guard now call McClellan names. This “sore loser” is confused. True. In his book, poor Scotty whines about being deceived, instead of mourning for the dead and wounded in Iraq and  the millions of Americans who will pay for generations for the deceit and folly of an Administration for whom he was official mouthpiece.

SAUL LANDAU received the Bernardo O’Higgins award from Chile. He is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and author of A Bush and Botox World (AK/CounterPunch).

White House Lies: A History

This column from The American Prospect was written by Paul Waldman.

In October of 1962, upon being caught in a direct and unambiguous lie -- that the Pentagon knew of no offensive weapons in Cuba, when in fact Defense Department officials were debating whether to invade the island in order to remove those very weapons -- Arthur Sylvester, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, made the audacious claim, "It's inherent in [the] government's right, if necessary, to lie to save itself."

Begging the question of just whom the enemy was, Sylvester added, "News generated by the actions of the government … [are] part of the arsenal of weaponry that a president has." Like so many before and since, the Kennedy administration seemed to conflate its own political advantage and the public good.

Those of us who have written polemics against one president or another are prone to believe that our target is the worst liar to have ever sat in the Oval Office. This conclusion may come from a detailed examination of a particular president's record, but as often as not it springs from the usually unstated premise that lies in the service of goals with which we disagree are inherently worse than lies told to advance more worthy ends. (Of course, one may also be correct; after all, some president has to be the worst.)

Though he is no stranger to the polemic, Eric Alterman -- a Nation columnist and author of What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News and The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America(with Mark Green) -- attempts to sidestep partisan questions in his most recent book, When Presidents Lie: A History of Deception and its Consequences, not only by going after Democratic presidents but by stating outright that his goal is not to "take the president or his advisers to task for the morality or even the hypocrisy of their lies," but to "focus exclusively on the real-life consequences of the lies, in terms of both the policies the presidents pursued and the debased discourse they inspired."

Alterman narrows his focus to four cases where the president lied to the country about matters of war and peace: Franklin Delano Roosevelt misrepresenting the Yalta Agreement to hide the fact that he had essentially consented to postwar Soviet domination of Eastern Europe; John F. Kennedy concealing the fact that he had ended the Cuban missile crisis by making a deal with Nikita Khrushchev to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba; Lyndon Johnson using the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which by the most credible accounts never really occurred, to begin the Vietnam War in earnest; and Ronald Reagan misleading the country about the substance of the Iran-Contra affair and his involvement in it.

All lies are, of course, not created equal. Some, like Reagan's, are told to cover up criminal activity that is utterly indefensible once brought to light. Others, like Kennedy's concealment of the deal on the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, hide actions that are eminently reasonable but carry political risks. But Alterman's point is that lies almost inevitably lead to more lies -- "The more a leader lies to his people, the more he must lie to his people" -- and that the consequences for policy prove disastrous. This may be a tad too deterministic; after all, for all we know there may be still-hidden cases in which a president lied, the lie was contained, and everything turned out splendidly. Alterman cites plenty of deceptions that were either strategically unnecessary or simply a function of one or another individual's own personal feelings, such as Kennedy's efforts to discredit Adlai Stevenson after the Cuban missile crisis, seemingly born more of personal antipathy than anything else.

But perhaps the most troubling thing that emerges from the stories Alterman tells is the degree to which lying infects large parts of the executive branch. Once the president lies, those around him begin to lie as well, and dishonesty spreads like a cancer. Ironically, the case of Johnson and Vietnam, in which the official lies were most abundant, may be the one in which the original lie mattered least. When Alterman details just how dishonest the Johnson administration was about nearly every detail of the burgeoning war, the reader ends up questioning how much the Tonkin Gulf incident really mattered in the end. Were it not for the Tonkin Gulf, Johnson could easily have found another excuse to proclaim the villainy of the Vietnamese communists, and Congress would almost surely have gone along as it did. The cascade of deception that followed was not, as is so often the case, in the service of preventing the original lie from being discovered.

Many of the lies Alterman documents seem to come in the form of assuring the public that a disastrous policy was not only a good idea in the first place but is going well at the moment -- we're making progress in Vietnam, our allies in Central America aren't really massacring civilians, etc. The exception is the Cuban missile crisis, which, particularly compared with the other events Alterman discusses, turned out pretty well in the end. While it may be true that the crisis established a standard of manly toughness vis-à-vis communism that the tormented Johnson wasted thousands of lives trying to live up to, Vietnam might just as well have occurred as it did regardless.

But the central deception of the Cuban missile crisis -- that it was resolved not through a clever and wise negotiation but by showing the Soviets that we were tough and strong until they limped back home in defeat -- had ramifications that were mostly symbolic. Alterman argues that the "lessons" of Munich, Yalta, and Cuba -- respectively, that our enemies cannot be "appeased," that communists cannot be trusted, and that our enemies will back down if we show sufficient backbone -- "formed the intellectual DNA of U.S. foreign policy and the American people's understanding of the world." Indeed, in the months preceding the Iraq War, one finds references to Munich turning up in American media at a rate of well over 10 per day.

Alterman concludes the book with a chapter on George W. Bush and the "post-truth presidency," an apt assessment of where we have come to. Seeing as Alterman began the book many years ago as a graduate dissertation, it is not too surprising that Bush's presidency provides only a brief coda. But Bush's relationship to the truth and its consequences for our politics are worthy of lengthier contemplation.

Two things distinguish Bush from his predecessors on the subject of lying. First, Bush's grandest lies have not been about covering up what has already happened but about persuading the public to go along with what he has decided to do but has yet to implement. Tax cuts, Iraq, now Social Security -- each major policy move has been accompanied by a campaign of deception. Lying is not a defensive reaction to a crisis but a carefully crafted strategy. Second, and perhaps most troubling, is that Bush seems unconcerned about getting caught. Indeed, the administration's damn-the-torpedoes fearlessness is the source of much of its political success. That it would actually hire, along with a series of other Iran-Contra figures, a perjurer like Elliot Abrams -- who has recently been promoted to deputy national-security adviser in charge of democracy promotion, of all things -- is testimony to its utter audacity. Go ahead, these officials seem to be saying, call us a bunch of liars -- we really don't care.

One of the common threads running through this history is that in case after case, the press went along with whatever the administration told it. Watergate may have temporarily cured reporters of this credulousness, but the remission lasted only so long. When the history of the Bush administration is written, the abject cowardice of the press in confronting an administration that held it in undisguised contempt and lied in its face will be one of the most depressing chapters. As citizens, we have no defense from official deception but the reporters who are tasked with discovering the truth and holding presidents to account on our behalf. As Alterman writes, if public officials "feel free to lie to the press -- and, by extension, the nation -- with impunity, then democracy becomes pseudo-democracy, as the illusion of accountability replaces the real thing." Even when they have mustered the courage to point out fabrications in a story buried on page A19, the media's mighty arrows of truth telling have bounced off this White House like a child's toy with defective suction cups.

"In each case," Alterman says about Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, and Reagan, "the president or his party was made to pay for his deceptions along with the country they so cavalierly misled." As of yet, not only has neither Bush nor his party paid a price for the lies about Iraq but there is little reason to think they will anytime soon. In no small part, the administration is able to evade consequence for its mendacity because its supporters have adopted a siege mentality, hunkered behind the castle walls of their loyalty to the president. Presented with irrefutable evidence that the war in Iraq was sold on a series of deceptions, many of them simply stick their fingers in their ears and chant, "La la la, I can't hear you."

According to the University of Maryland's Project on International Policy Attitudes, just before the 2004 election, 47 percent of Bush supporters believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and another 26 percent thought it had a major weapons program. Three out of four Bush supporters also thought Iraq was providing substantial support to al-Qaeda. These people seem to have resolved the cognitive dissonance created by the collision of the truth with their support of Bush by adopting a new set of "facts" more in line with what their leader had told them.

One trembles to contemplate the lesson of the Bush administration's deceptions: Admit nothing, even when caught; continue to lie, even after the lie has been exposed; define anyone who questions the lie as an enemy of the nation or, failing that, of "the troops." If your partisans stand firm (and particularly if your party controls Congress, so no pesky oversight hearings will take place), you can get away with just about anything. As Alterman makes clear, lies have consequences, often in blood. As we hear that forces within the Pentagon are seriously contemplating military action against Iran and Syria, one wonders just what they will tell us to justify the next military adventure. Will we believe them? And will it make a difference?

Paul Waldman is editor-in-chief of The Gadflyer (www.gadflyer.com). His latest book is Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You.

By Paul WaldmanReprinted with permission from The American Prospect, 5 Broad Street, Boston, MA 02109. All rights reserved