Scams: The Resume

Remote work has opened up untapped global sources of talent and offered individuals greater flexibility in their work and lives. Unfortunately, it has also ushered in new ways for unscrupulous individuals or agencies to take advantage of the high demand for skilled workers by fraudulently placing unqualified contract workers. Remote work is often accompanied by online interviewing, where the candidates are never evaluated in person. This article is the first of several that examines some of the scams that we have encountered in the course of evaluating tens of thousands of job applicants. In 2020 reference-checking firm Checkster surveyed 400 hiring managers and 400 applicants, and found that 78% of applicants lie on resumes. The majority of applicants are straightforward and honest, but a significant minority or their agents have turned technical recruiting into a viper’s nest.

The motivation for this trickery are the lofty rates that can be charged to a duped company — from $10,000 to $20,000 or more per month for a contractor. Even if the contractor is incapable of performing the job, it may take months to discover this, especially in specialized technical roles or if there is a long ramp up time before the worker can be expected to produce measurable results (such as in business development or sales roles). During that time, the agency or contractor books billable time for no useful work. Once discovered, of course the contractor can be discharged promptly (though usually subject to an additional notice period) but the company is back where it started, now saddled with the loss of both money and time.

There can be a number of unwitting victims, starting with the company, but often intermediaries such as recruiters, recruiting firms, and even the contractors themselves, lose out:

• Recruiters spend valuable time playing cat-and-mouse games with unqualified candidates and their agents, who are embellishing or even making up experience and skills.
• Companies are taken for their money and time; company employees become frustrated, untrusting, cynical, and unmotivated to interview, seeing the process as unproductive and unpleasant.
• Contractors are sometimes pushed by their unscrupulous agents into interviews and jobs that they know they cannot succeed at; some are unethically promoted by front runners.

Let’s look at the scams and tricks perpetrated by candidates or their companies; it starts with resume inflation or fraud.

Embellished and Invented Experience

A candidate or an agent working on behalf of the candidate makes up experience, embellishing or expanding on it or even adding entirely novel roles and responsibilities. They do this because employers are often seeking specific skills in specialized areas, and such claims can be the difference between a resume getting passed over or considered. One candidate claimed that he “preserved access to data and improved integration quality with thousands of financial institutions using PLAID API”, but it turned out this impressive sounding text was copied from a Plaid job description for an Integrations Engineer position posted by the company! During a subsequent interview, when pressed to elaborate on this experience, he feigned ignorance and later tried to claim he didn’t hear the question.

At other times, entire jobs are added to a work history to fill in employment gaps that may be months long if the candidate has had difficulty finding employment. The made-up experience is crafted to be similar to other jobs, and only serves to demonstrate a continuous work history. If added to the beginning of a career, it could be useful to show a total number of years of professional experience.

In fact, for many roles, employers want candidates with relevant experience, which usually means more than five years in a profession and role in that profession, with demonstrated steady career progression. Seven years’ experience is often an ideal level of seniority sought by employers, so candidates are highly motivated to find those years by any available means!

A candidate may copy bullet points from other resumes or Websites. While there are some text that might be generic boilerplate, such as “seeking a challenging position with growth opportunities”, often the copying is far more obvious and egregious. Some will copy sections from other resumes; here’s an example, right down to the punctuation, capitalization, and exact phrasing, that we discovered in a candidate who had copied it from a resume on the Web:

• Preparation of the Test Strategy and guiding the team.

• Involvement in the System Test Plan Preparation and Requirements Streamlining.

• Involvement in Preparation of Test Procedures, Test Scenarios, Cases and Test Data.

• Responsible for GUI and Functional Testing, using Black box Testing Techniques.

• Involvement in Test Execution, Results Analyzing and Defect Reporting.

• Involvement in RTM Preparation.

• Involved in Automation Infrastructure Development using Selenium.

• Created Test cases Using Element locators and Selenium Webdriver methods.

• Enhanced Test cases using Java programming features and TestNG Annotations.

• Execution of Selenium Test cases and Reporting defects.

• Conducting Data driven testing, cross browser testing and parallel test execution.

• Enhancing the Test Scripts for Global Execution.

• Involvement in solving Environmental problems along with Technical Support People.

• Involved in Regression Testing using Selenium

• Preparation of weekly and monthly status reports.

Countering the Embellished Resume

We have developed the following countermeasures, that we subject all resumes to:

• Plagiarism check: we use tools to look for plagiarized text. We ignore innocent coincidences, such as resume boilerplate, or acceptable copying, for example a description of a company’s business. However, any plagiarism should be a warning that the candidate may lack originality or sufficient pride in their own work.
• Social proof: we look for social media sites that corroborate the candidate’s identity and experience, for example, a LinkedIn page, a GitHub account, and so on.
• Template and structural analysis: often resumes have a déjà vu feel. This sense could be engendered by the use of templates. While there is nothing wrong about using resume-generator services, of which there are many, or Microsoft Word templates, they could be indicative of an agency churning out resumes to meet the requirements of job descriptions. Again, there is nothing wrong with emphasizing experience that’s relevant to a job, unless it crosses the line into fiction. So, template and structural analysis is just an indicator that correlates with embellishment.
• Key phrase analysis: some resumes have a repetition of expressions or phrases that could be indicative of a common author or resume generator. We analyze the resumes for the reuse of problematic key phrases across many resumes, since they correlate with (though are not necessarily evidence of) resume falsification.
• Excessive length: resumes should be succinct yet sufficiently detailed to provide a reviewer an understanding of the candidate’s experience. Resumes that are too long (we have seen some that are 10 pages for people with not even that many years experience!) or have repetitious bullet points, could be indicative of embellishment. At the same time, we take note of a few bullet points as material to follow up on during the interview. Candidates often don’t realize that the larger and longer their resume, the greater the potential interrogation surface area, favoring the interviewer. We can use this fundamental asymmetry to flush out frauds.

These kinds of checks require specialized tools and human experts, who can follow up hunches and extensive experience evaluating tens of thousands of applicants.

Once a candidate’s resume passes these tests, we proceed to screening and qualification; these steps include:

• Questionnaires: for each position, we create customized questionnaires that require the applicant to reflect on an issue and relate it to their experience in a concrete way. For these, we stay away from questions where there is a clear-cut, objective answer which can be easily found by searching the Web. People who can’t or won’t answer, or answer poorly, or answer an unrelated question, are usually rejected out of hand.
• Skill quizzes: while these quizzes can be gamed in various ways, we require an applicant to perform a skills test in a subject that’s required for the job. These are usually online quizzes and are graded on a curve; the applicant needs to be in the top quartile of test takers, or better (depending on the difficulty of the assessment). We also prefer quizzes that are time-bound, and have coding elements, not just multiple choice questions that you can find answers by Googling. As an heuristic, we notice those candidates who have agents working on behalf of them, and have approximately 20–35% plagiarized content, do not proceed with the quiz.
• Attestations: we require that the candidate attest to the veracity of all claims in their application, including degrees, work experience, certifications, and so on. While these attestations do not prevent determined scammers, it does put them on notice and lays the groundwork for any punitive actions we might consider.

Resume Validation in the Interview

A candidate interview must cover much in a relatively short duration. Despite the many objectives, a key part of the interview is to validate the claimed experience. We expect that candidates should be conversant and intimately familiar with their most recent jobs; they will also be expected to review their resumes to refresh their memories about their experience. So, we look for any hesitation or vagueness in their answers and would spur our interviewers to ask follow-up questions.

We afford the candidate a few minutes to summarize their experience and to highlight whatever they wish. Then, our interviewers select some claimed experience (e.g., a bullet item in a job) and ask for elaboration. We are vigilant if they speak in generalities when they are asked to describe a specific job experience. We are even more wary if a follow-up question results in the same repeated generalities. Usually, we repeat this process a few times across different jobs, going back in time. If this process is followed through carefully, our interviewers can develop confidence that the claimed experience is genuine.

Our interviewers also try to validate claimed skills. We use some of the points we noted earlier during resume review to formulate discussions. We stay away from question formulations like “Do you know X”, in favor of “Tell me of a time when you used X”. We check that the response corresponds to applicant’s work history. We then use their answer as a starting point for follow-up questions to see if they can explain further. We ask them when they acquired the experience, at which company or project, and what they did. An applicant who’s making up experience often finds it difficult to keep their story straight when pressed. Finally, we ask them to make a qualitative assessment of X, like “What would you do differently with X if you knew then what you know now” or “What are the limitations of X”. We listen to the response to see if it makes sense in the context of their experience.

We also ask applicants technical questions unrelated to job experience to assess knowledge that they should have given their experience. We manage a large repository of questions on numerous subjects that we use during the interviews.

In online interviews, we have seen candidates search for answers online and read them out! Sometimes this is revealed because the responses miss the mark. We might try to ask the question a different way to see if it elicits a better response. A candidate who is making things up usually cannot recover quickly enough to formulate a proper reply. Any apparent inconsistencies we identify are followed up immediately.

Motivations

What motivates such skullduggery? The reasons vary and without purporting to be a comprehensive list, they include:

• Fake it till you make it: some applicants have some of the required experience and hope they can learn more as they go.
• Pressure to find a job, often before a visa runs out: other candidates have work visas that don’t allow them to stay unemployed for long; finding a job — any job — becomes an overriding priority, with any means justifying the ends.
• Take advantage of companies’ urgency: applicants understand what skills are sought after, so learn enough to appear knowledgeable in a particular skill during an interview to get their foot in the door.
• Exploit trust: candidates recognize that once they start a job, a mantle of trust descends upon them, since the hiring team has made a commitment about the candidate’s suitability. It can take weeks or months before other team members reconsider their hiring recommendation. In the meanwhile, the candidate can learn enough to stay on the job.

Fraud and misrepresentation starts with a candidate’s resume and failure to catch them at an early stage can lead to disastrous outcomes. Unfortunately, it takes considerable expertise and resources to identify and reject these candidates, without filtering out or offending qualified applicants. Performing these activities at scale is expensive and time consuming. Since the landscape always evolves, a constant investment to uncover scams and develop countermeasures is essential for a successful recruiter.

But, the skullduggery does not stop with resume fraud. Another hazard is what we call front running.

Notes

Marie Christine Umali and Roxanne Bornilla contributed to this article with research and other information.

Reference: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-checkster-research-shows-78-of-job-applicants-lie-and-66-of-hiring-managers-dont-care-301004406.html

Mark Looi, marklooi (at) looiconsulting.com, is President of Looi Consulting, a provider of technical consulting services. One of the firm’s capabilities is rapidly building technology teams to accelerate client software development projects.