Lying in Job Applications

Knowledge@Wharton has some very nice advice on the problem posed by exaggeration and embellishment of former accomplishments.

The core points the author makes are:

1. Everyone embellishes a little (and if you don’t, you’re at a disadvantage of those who do – the tyranny of asymmetric information!).
2. People don’t necessarily do it deliberately. Memory is unreliable, and there are different norms in different locations/industries/companies.
3. Employers really don’t like it.
4. It’s becoming a lot easier to both record and find (Google) transgressions.

The overall effect of the article is to discourage the embellishment of statements that are easy to check, and nudge people toward those which are “minor.” By minor, the author seems to mean “not binary;” that is, you either did or didn’t get a degree; you either did or didn’t hold such a position, etc.

The rest of the post is divided into two sections: they have nothing to do with each other. I just had two reactions to the piece.

Personal Reaction

My take is that asking people to accurately represent their experiences is like asking money to rain from the sky. Memory just doesn’t work that way, and cognitive errors (such as cognitive dissonance) ensure that people’s memories will always be self-serving.

Now, I don’t like to embellish, personally, because I fell like I’m lying. If anything, I tend to understate what I’ve done and expect the other person to know the unstated difficulties that needed to be overcome (an OK strategy when talking to experts in an area – I blame my years of academia, where people actually knew what I was leaving out).

But in general, and when looking for a job in particular, either understating one’s accomplishments or telling the absolute truth is more deceptive that embellishing a bit. If a hiring manager expects the interviewee to embellish, then they’ll discount all statements, since they have no idea which are embellished and which are not. (Also because a false negative is better than a false positive – better to drive away someone qualified than to hire someone incompetent).

As a result, considerate advice to the job-seeker must be to embellish a bit, but not too much… just around as much as everyone else is.

The Bigger Question

Now, there’s a bigger question the article raises. To what extent do these embellishments matter? Or, worse, qualifications at all?

Take Marilee Jones. The article says this:

…a former dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of a popular guide to the college admissions process. Although she encouraged college applicants not to overstate their accomplishments, Jones resigned from her position in 2007 after it was discovered that she had fabricated two academic degrees on her initial job application in 1979 and added a third later on.

Wikipedia reveals that (i) her book received terribly critical acclaim, being featured on the NYT, WSJ, etc, and (ii) in 2001 she received MIT’s Excellence Award for Leading Change.

In other words, Marilee Jones was a highly capable and highly effective employee.

Not having – and even lying about – her degrees did not detract from that.

Another example that springs to mind is former RadioShack CEO David Edmondson. Mr. Edmondson lied about his college degree, as well, but was also highly capable and added a tremendous amount of value to RadioShack (hired in 1994, won multiple industry awards, promoted internally to CEO). Apparently the trade rag Advertising Age recognized him as “one of 100 top marketers.”

These two examples have something in common:

They lied about their college degrees. Perhaps they lied about other things, but…

… that raises the question of whether or not college degrees made any different to one’s competence at work? Are those four years wasted?

It’s a scary question, as someone who’s just graduated (and currently unemployed!); and a serious issue for an industry whose pricetag has skyrocketed for decades.

(My answer deserves its own post, but: Sort-of. Employers use college as a way of filtering applications so they don’t have to determine the real qualifications… it’s a proxy for competence).