Do not take risks with your resume, you must be sincere, honest and professional with the information you include in the document. The need to find a job can led you to oversize your skills or bizarrely title the positions you have previously held. In the interview they can discover these positions, work experiences or studies that you exaggerated with ‘subtlety’.
According to a study conducted in Latin America by DNA Human Capital, Colombian candidates are the ones who lead the list of those who lie the most on their resumes. Hiding job opportunities for negative reasons or looking more suitable for a position are some of the reasons why data is often made up in resumes.
“These aspects are usually modified in the resumes to be able to pass the first filters that are in companies, since candidates are usually afraid of being discarded without having had the opportunity for an interview”, explainsAna María Briceño, Executive CEO at Talent SAS.
On the one hand, there are those candidates who try to strengthen previous positions through much more striking names that may be interesting for the recruiter. A risky move. The verification process does not only last in the interview, as the process progresses the candidates are examined in depth.
The data you provide can be corroborated with references that ask you
A candidate who advertises “with a more senior professional level, with more experience or more knowledge” can ruin his selection process, “for the recruiter it is easy to detect this makeup in the resume and could rule him out for the position and even for future selection processes”, says Alejandro Arevalo, executive manager of DNA Human Capital.
Playing with academia is also serious. Choosing to name different degrees, studies not completed or never completed can generate a bad image to your professional profile. If you manage to pass these and filters, your subsequent development in the company can give you away. There are applicants who have come to “put labor practices in companies that do not exist, generating inconsistencies in the resumes that can be easily detected in an interview,” says Briceño.
Do you understand some movies in English?
That is not enough to say that you handle the language perfectly. Nowadays some companies require up to 90% of English, which is understood, spoken and written. “To validate the level of English, recruiters often ask the candidate to have a conversation in this language and it is at that moment where real levels of knowledge come to light, often contrary or lower than what is announced in the resume,” says Arévalo.
You can prepare very well the speech you plan to give when an interviewer questions you about certain information on your resume, but references and databases can betray you. With just one call, a recruiter can find your previous bosses or jobs.