So I’m sure this has been commented on before, but I am truly stunned at the level of resume inflation going on out there.
I’ve been around long enough now to go through a dozen or so hiring cycles and every single time, in boom time and bust, I’ve seen piles of inflated resumes come through the door. Usually there’s a strong correlation between people who suck and people who have the most inflated resumes. In fact, there’s almost a linear relationship between suckiness and inflatedness.
Consequently, I’ve learned to spot inflated resumes fairly quickly in a phone screen and I make an inflated resume an automatic “pass”, even if the candidate might have been otherwise qualified if they’d told the truth. Unfortunately, that means I have to pass on quite a few people before I can find someone to bring in for an interview. But I’m going to have to rely on the person I hire to give me the full story on projects, some of which might be going badly and might be just as high-pressure as trying to find a job. If they can’t tell the truth on a resume, how will they tell the truth reporting progress on a project that’s fallen way behind?
So given my approach, an approach I’m sure I share with many hiring managers the world over, I’ve been stunned recently to come across some resumes of people I’ve worked with closely in the past and who have completely mis-represented their roles back then. Some of them were indeed people who weren’t very good, but some of them are people I thought were very good and highly recommend.
What does that mean? Does it mean there’s such an automatic expectation for inflatedness built into the general hiring atmosphere that you can’t get an interview unless your resume says you walk on water and have served as a technical architect on 4 different billion-dollar projects at the same time? Am I an anachronism?
