E-Mail This Article

Crossing honesty line in job search
can have dire consequences

It's tempting to many, but recent events point to peril in shading résumé

By Joyce Crane, Globe Correspondent, 6/8/03

When Jayson Blair, William J. Bennett, and George O'Leary painted their professional self-portraits, the brush strokes burned a hole in the canvas of authenticity. Still, they framed the images and hung them on their office walls.

The former news reporter, former education secretary and drug czar, and former head coach of the University of Notre Dame have all paid a price for disingenuousness. Blair was exposed for fabricating portions of his news stories; Bennett, who preaches virtues, admitted this month that he is a high stakes gambler; and O'Leary spent two decades allowing a misstatement about his college athletic achievements to endure.

But who among us has never embellished a résumé, an anecdote, or the level of success achieved?

According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 88 percent of respondents to a 1998 reference checking survey said candidates occasionally falsified past titles. Ninety percent of those who verify lengths of employment and past salaries said they had uncovered shades of false information during a reference check. Nearly all of the respondents acknowledged that their job applications included a warning that false information during the hiring process would probably curtail consideration for the position. The largest percentage of the respondents (24 percent) were from organizations of 250 or more employees.

Professional résumé writers and career counselors encourage job seekers to put their best foot forward, often teasing out all of the accomplishments and skills a client has to offer. But in the process, some people cross the line.

''The most common thing is putting down a degree they don't have,'' said George Zeller of Boston-based Jewish Vocational Service. The senior employment specialist said another common fabrication is to cover up gaps in employment by ''finding a friendly employer who will vouch that they're working there,'' even though they may have been laid off from that company months earlier.

Zeller said he tells his clients to be truthful because a seasoned screener can sniff a lie from miles away.

Take David Javitch's experience with a dishonest job seeker. The organizational psychologist had been hired in 1996 by a Boston technology firm to interview candidates for the chief operating officer's position. Javitch was scheduled to meet with a candidate in New York City, who failed to show up at the appointed time. About a week or two later, Javitch recalled, the candidate called the head of the firm to explain why he'd missed the interview. He said his wife had died aboard TWA Flight 800, which had crashed off the coast of Long Island a couple of weeks before.

''We all felt sorry for him,'' said Javitch, who returned to New York to interview the candidate. But during the interview, the candidate mentioned the flight and the airline - the wrong flight and the wrong airline. Javitch suspected that a man who had lost his wife in the crash would not forget this vital information. His suspicions were confirmed when he learned that the supposed widower had fabricated sources for his references.

Anyone caught in a lie on a résumé, said interim consulting manager Johanna Rothman, should not get the job.

''Right now there are so many people with so much good experience around,'' she said, ''that any red flag on your résumé would be grounds for putting the résumé in the 'never-hire' file.''

As a temporary upper level executive who is frequently hired by companies to help them through a rough spot, Rothman, of Arlington, often hires a replacement for herself. She also hires middle managers. She recalled interviewing a senior developer during the boom of the late 1990s. ''He said he had had five years' job experience writing Java code,'' she recalled. ''But the commercial compilers (produced by Sun Microsystems) had been available for only one year. When I said to him 'you've been working in Java a lot longer than I realized it was available,' he leaned in, gave that little wink thing, and said, 'Well you know, I had to get past the HR [human resources] people.'''

To Rothman's surprise, the company hired the candidate. ''He seemed to be the best technically qualified, but I had this huge red flag about him,'' she said.

Since the hiring boom is long over and out-of-work developers are easy to come by, employers have the time to conduct thorough and legal background checks. For a fee, companies like EBI Inc., of Dawsonville, Ga., will look into educational and job histories.

Still, the most thorough employment background check would not have detected the made-up and plagiarized quotes that Jayson Blair delivered in his work at the New York Times.

''I can only check patterns,'' said EBI vice president Todd Anderson. ''That's [Blair's lapses] something you couldn't detect unless he had done it before on a previous job and someone had released that information.''

When someone gets caught in a lie, trust can be shattered and many company officials say it's grounds for dismissal.

In Bennett's case, however, spokespeople at his conservative Washington think tank, Empower America, have had to respond to a whirlwind of media inquiries about his moral leadership. The former Reagan administration education secretary is the author of ''The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories,'' and ''Moral Compass: Stories for a Life's Journey.'' His gambling exploits were the subject of a Newsweek article last month and a Washington Monthly story on his gambling losses, believed to total about $8 million over the past decade.

Bennett did not quantify his gambling losses, but he admitted he set a bad example. 'A number of stories in the media have reported that I have engaged in high stakes gambling over the past decade. It is true that I have gambled large sums of money. I have also complied with all laws on reporting wins and losses. Nevertheless, I have done too much gambling, and this is not an example I wish to set. Therefore, my gambling days are over. . .''

O'Leary said he had fulfilled a lifelong dream in December 2001 when he became head coach of Notre Dame.

''Growing up in New York City as an Irish-Catholic, that was the job that everybody considered the best you could have,'' said O'Leary in a phone interview. ''Even though I had a great job, you'd keep it in the back of your mind that that would be the ultimate you could have in your career.''

But no sooner had O'Leary achieved the dream than five days later he stood before sports fans, embarrassed by a dishonest entry in a media guide he'd filled out 20 years earlier while working as a defensive line coach at Syracuse University. In addition, his résumé falsely stated he'd earned a master's degree. O'Leary had claimed he'd earned three letters while playing football at the University of New Hampshire, when, in fact, illness and a knee injury kept him from playing the entire two years he was there, according to press reports. O'Leary, who had transferred to UNH from another college, completed his degree there. The résumé that surfaced said he'd earned a master's degree from New York University. O'Leary acknowledged he did not attain a master's, but said he had taken almost 30 hours of continuing education courses toward a permanent teaching certificate. The coach had begun his career in 1969 as a high school physical education teacher.

O'Leary said he doesn't know why he did it, but that he's since recovered from the mistake. His former student and close friend, Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Tice overlooked the Notre Dame episode. He apparently knew enough about his football coach from Central Islip High School to hire him as the team's assistant head coach in early 2002. Today O'Leary remains with the Vikings as the team's defensive coordinator.

''The toughest thing to do was to just move on and to realize you had to pay a price for a mistake,'' said O'Leary. ''For a while when I woke up, it was a like a bad dream that just wouldn't go away. But then you realize you just have to move on.''

Bill Griffin of Hartford, vice president of Connohio Inc., headquartered in Buffalo, sees O'Leary's plight as ironic.

''Based on his coaching performance, he probably would have gotten the job anyway,'' said Griffin, ''so why put something on your résumé that will hurt you later?''

''Achievement is the number one motivator in just about everybody, in every society around the world,'' said Javitch of Newton. ''Especially in the US, status and recognition are really high-powered motivators.''

''Achievement is great,'' continued Javitch, ''but what if you have high-standard achievement needs, and can't achieve what you want? For whatever reason, people are willing to bend their rules because they feel they don't have what it takes to be successful.''

Javitch said that through rationalization and disassociation, embellishers are often able to distance themselves from their acts.

''Part of my job as an organizational psychologist is to hire people for higher level positions,'' Javitch said. ''When people are embellishing, sometimes they go overboard. The people who are problematic don't know where to stop. That's where I catch them. I ask them about their experiences and they get caught up in their own lies.''

E-Mail This Article