Monday, May 14, 2012

Lying on Your Resume – Perfect Example courtesy of Yahoo


Good Morning!  I hope that all of you are having a great start to the week!  I was watching the news this morning and caught the story about Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo former CEO of Yahoo, was fired for lying about his credentials.  For those of you that follow my blog this is something that I’m pretty passionate about it and have written about it extensively.  You can find some of my other thoughts on the issue below:





To clarify, I’m not passionate about this because it is so wrong – the act of lying is wrong but its not an issue that gets me on the pulpit.  Instead, I’m passionate about it because in most cases it really gains you nothing.  Let’s look at the case of Pinocchio (I’d prefer to call him Pinocchio from now on to differentiate him from other more ethical Scott Thompsons like yours truly) from Yahoo.  Pinocchio lied on his resume by stating that he had an additional computer science degree from his college.  Really..  Really?  This is what he thought would put him ahead?  Steve Jobs didn’t even go to college!

Making your nose grow will have severe negative repercussions.  Listen to your  cricket...


I’d love to go into the psychology behind why people lie on resumes and since I’m not a PHD (nor would I put it on my resume) I’ll just tell you what I imagine people are thinking.  I assume that these people are desperate to move forward to in their career – it could be for a variety of reasons including drive, hatred for their current job, personal goals, ego, etc.  This desperation leads them to take chances like padding their resume to make them more attractive.  This does you no good and heres why:

Resumes Don’t Get you the Job!!!!!!!!!

In my eight odd years working in this industry, I’ve never seen anyone hired based solely on their resume.  In fact, I’ve helped many people get a job without a resume.  So, what’s the purpose of a resume?  It is a one sheet advertisement intended to make people want to talk to you. It’s sole goal is to get you an interview so you can wow the company with your awesomeness!

Furthermore I contend that any little white lie that adds a little sparkle to your resume doesn’t matter.  Did Yahoo care that Pinocchio had a double degree? – No – they were probably more interested in the fact that he had been the CEO of another tech company.  For the non-CEO crowd the same is true.  Most people that look at resumes aren’t looking at the fine details of your advertisement.  They are focused on three things:

  1. Job History and stability
  2. Where you worked
  3.  What you accomplished

I’m sure that you could lie about these things but this gets into the big lie category that almost always gets caught. 

So, that’s my diatribe on lying on your resume.  Please learn from Scott “Pinocchio” Thompson’s mistake.  It may help you in the short term but in many cases the long term consequences are pretty rough.  What do you think about the issue?  Feel free to leave comments or email me at sthompson@insurance-csg.com  


Check out all of our postings here:


Check out some of my recent articles on the blog here:

























No comments:

Post a Comment