‘Horrendous’: the ‘ridiculously common’ lies people tell on CVs, and what happens when they are discovered | Employment law

In 28 years of recruitment, Matt Collingwood has witnessed some “very awkward” job interviews. Like the candidate whose CV falsely boasted of a second-dan black belt in taekwondo, only to discover his interviewer was an aficionado of the sport. “An interview that should have been an hour lasted 15 minutes,” said Collingwood, the managing director of the IT recruitment agency Viqu.

Or the candidate who claimed he had attended a certain private school, which his interviewer had also attended and would have been in the year above. But when asked for teachers’ names, the school motto, even where the sports field was, “he was clueless. Didn’t get the job.”

CV falsification, even on seemingly trivial points, can have serious consequences, yet Collingwood said it was “ridiculously common”.

Recruitment fraud is another term for it. According to the UK fraud prevention service Cifas, it is one of the most frequent “first-party frauds”, when an individual knowingly misrepresents their identity or provides false information for financial or material gain.

The recent travails of the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, whose career history came under scrutiny again after a BBC investigation revealed her time working at the Bank of England was nine months shorter than she claimed, and the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, who is being reinvestigated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority over accusations he never qualified as solicitor, despite listing job on LinkedIn profile, have highlighted a growing problem for recruiters.

A Cifas survey earlier this month found that nearly one in five UK individuals (18%) had lied on their CVs and job applications in order to land a role, or knew someone who had, in the past 12 months. Meanwhile, one in seven (14%) felt it was “reasonable” to say they had achieved a 2:1 degree when they had failed their final year.

The most common falsehoods are reasons given for leaving a previous job and manipulating employment dates to cover gaps or to extend or completely erase previous jobs, according to research by the business credit card company Capital on Tap. Then, there are those inflated job titles – CVs liberally, and unjustifiably, seasoned with the words “senior” and “manager”.

Such is the problem that Reed, Britain’s biggest recruiter, has set up Reed Screening: a 100-strong workforce devoted to screening hundreds of thousands of CVs each year and checking references for clients.

James Reed, the chair and CEO of Reed, said: “This is a growing problem. Sixty per cent of the CVs we look at have some form of error, and 20% of those are what you might call malicious error, when somebody is literally making something up to seek some form of gain.

“From the applicant’s point of view, why is this happening? It might be because people are using AI to help do their CVs. And AI can make stuff up. It might be because the labour market has become more difficult, and it is tougher to get a job. Or it might be because they think they can get away with it and there’s some sort of change in the culture. But it’s a silly thing to do, because as some recent examples have made clear, this can bubble up sometime afterwards, to your detriment.”

He added: “It ranges from someone who might have got a date wrong, or might have exaggerated a job title, to someone who is making up qualifications that they don’t have, or fabricating an entire career record.”

Reed Screening uses specially designed software. “You can forensically examine a CV. The AI technology that candidates might use to create CVs can also be used increasingly to check them. Qualification databases, that’s another thing; if they say they got better grades than they did, that can be checked automatically.

“You have these reference houses. They are illegal. They are scams where people pay so you ring them up, and someone answers the phone and says: ‘Yeah, I remember James.’ That’s all fake. So we have to check it, the company history, and whether the people giving the references are real.”

Matt Gingell, an employment law specialist and managing partner at the legal firm Lombards, said: “Honesty is fundamental to the employment relationship. There is also this implied obligation of trust and confidence between the employer and employee. So if an employer later finds out that the employee has fabricated their CV, or not told the truth about why they left a previous employer, that could be grounds for dismissal, because it would be breach of the trust and confidence.”

Often people don’t see such actions as potentially having criminal consequences, said Simon Miller, the director of policy, strategy and communications at Cifas, “when in fact they can have” and a person who has displayed such dishonesty “might be vulnerable and susceptible to further dishonesty” once hired.

He added: “We know that people who are mostly younger and starting on their careers are more likely to falsify CV information.” When the job market is tight “there’s a catch-22 where you haven’t got the experience but you can’t get the experience”. Or they want to reach the next rung above entry level.

Hayley Paterson, who co-commissioned the Cifas research, said the 800-strong membership organisation offered training on “insider threat” fraud, and advice on using vetting services and checking for the use of reference houses.

Collingwood highlighted a basic error by would-be fraudsters who tweaked their LinkedIn profiles to change dates or inflate job titles: many forgot their posts were in the public domain, and these might not tally with the dates on their private CVs. “There are HR people, and their job is just to do social media diligence, and they’ll look through an individual’s footprint,” he said.

“I’ve seen some horrendous examples of people losing their jobs, having job offers pulled when they have already resigned from their previous job, because the lies have come out.”