How cyber-vetting catches job liars

‘Interests: travel, cinema, country walks, volleyball, volunteering at the pet-rescue centre…’ Why do CVs make job applicants sound like contestants in the Miss Cleethorpes beauty pageant, or desperate divorcees on dating websites? It’s possibly because job hunters now believe ‘personality’ is what wins over potential employers, and many applicants are prepared to lie about themselves to make the right impression.

A survey by Reed Recruitment a few years back claimed that what you say about your interests when applying for a job can determine whether or not you get an interview: it also found that mundane hobbies such as ‘reading’, ‘drinking’ and ‘socialising’ put off employers almost as much as more worrying pursuits such as ‘ferret-racing’ or ‘collecting Samurai swords’. But a more recent survey by the Risk Advisory Group reveals that over 50 per cent of applicants lie in their CVs anyway. It even found that 20 per cent lie about serious matters such as shoplifting convictions, county court judgments or even bankruptcy. Of course, that’s assuming they can spell ‘hobbies and interests’ in the first place, or are at least capable of using a spell-checker. Research by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation earlier this year found that 47 per cent of CVs now contain grammatical and spelling errors, the misspelling of ‘curriculum vitae’ being among the most common.

So today’s employers face a conundrum: how do they discern the true character of candidates? To solve the problem, they have turned to a favourite tool of the personal-computer generation: internet search engines. According to recruitment consultancy Poolia, employers now routinely ‘Google’ job applicants and search for their names on social networking websites such as MySpace, Facebook and bebo. This frequently brings up personal web pages on which applicants reveal their true interests, likes, dislikes, aspirations and love lives. In fact, Poolia claims, ‘by flicking between message boards …you can piece together titbits of gossip that you might not even hear at the Christmas party’.